Casting Shadows

PRESS RELEASE

TO ALL MEDIA

2018 DIANA JONES AWARD GOES TO

ACTUAL PLAY

Global community wins award

for ‘Excellence in Gaming’

Wednesday 1st August 2018, Indianapolis

The winner of the 2018 Diana Jones Award for Excellence in Gaming is Actual Play.

Actual Play is a movement within hobby games in which people record and broadcast their game sessions — particularly campaigns of tabletop roleplaying games — over the internet. Primary examples include Critical Role (a weekly show for Geek & Sundry), The Adventure Zone (a biweekly show for Maximum Fun), Maze Arcana (a biweekly D&D show featuring Satine Phoenix and Ruty Rutenberg), Acquisitions, Inc. (an irregular D&D show by Penny Arcade), the One Shot and Campaigns Podcasts on the One Shot Network (by James D’Amato and Kat Kuhl), and a variety of shows produced by Geek & Sundry.

This list could go on for pages. There are hundreds of these shows, each with a dedicated audience. Some are arguably more popular than the games their members play within them.

Actual Play shows — whether broadcast via audio, video or both — have done more to popularize roleplaying games than anything since the Satanic Panic of the 1980s, and in a far more positive way. They take RPGs out of the basement and put them on the world stage, showing a global audience exactly how much fun roleplaying games can be when played by talented people who are fully invested in their shared stories.

More than that, Actual Play can help gamers become better gamers. Game designers have long bemoaned the fact that it’s impossible to put themselves into the box to show people how to have the most fun while playing their games. Actual Play gives players of all skill levels full-bore examples of how to get the most out of their own games, presented in a format that’s easy to share and enjoy.

Actual Play puts the focus on the fun. It inspires gamers new and old to start up games of their own, or to improve the games they’re already running. Roleplaying game sessions have been described as twenty minutes of fun packed into four hours, but Actual Play demonstrates how players and game masters can become amazing and fine practitioners of this challenging and ephemeral art. They take what many of us have known in our private lives for years and make it obvious for everyone to see: gaming is perhaps the best kind of fun.

The Diana Jones Award Committee is proud to declare that Actual Play exemplifies excellence in gaming, and to award it our trophy this year.

* * *

THE AWARD PRESENTATION

The 2018 Award was presented at the annual Diana Jones Party, an industry-only event held at the Tin Roof in Indianapolis the night before the Gen Con games convention opens to the public. Representing the Actual Play community, Satine Phoenix, Ruty Rutenberg, James D’Amato, and Ivan Van Norman accepted the Diana Jones trophy from Adrian Swartout, who had accepted the trophy on behalf of Gen Con last year.

• Points in favor of Star Trek Adventures are initial graphic design, paper, art, and binding.
• Points against Star Trek Adventures are the implementation of the graphic design, editing, proofing, and quality control. There are missing sentences. There are cut&paste errors, the usual errata, and there are organizational issues which conspire with the inconsistent use of terms for concepts (things which an editor and/or proofer should note in just reading the text, and playtesters should note in using the text) that make it frustrating to use the book to learn the game.

• this suggest itself as evidence that the games do not get read or played by the ENNIES people, or their voters, but winning entries include nice and plentiful art.

• As the ENNIES need games to be submitted in order for their process to function, and they need to give an award in each category in order to be of use to gamers, and as the publishers of those games need the recognition of the award to sell their games to gamers who…. will en masse not read or play them, the process is broken as it lends itself to becoming the choice of a popular and attractive book off of the pile of submissions.

• Modiphius, even if it were a case of having better ‘production values’ than any other game in its category, did not deserve this award. While I can get behind the ‘best rules’ win, and will again in the future if each iteration of 2D20 can be taken on its own merits and is distinct enough in each game to merit having their own merits, this ‘production values’ win flies squarely in the face of reason, customer service, literacy, and those companies who have and care about editors and professional (rather than solely artistic) graphic designers.

• This award did not need to be given out if no one met the qualifications, if no one bothered to fill the category with suitable entries, or if no one actually investigated if standards were met and exceeded. Picking the best from a pile serves a very different function and requires very different things than picking the best.

1. I am going to remember to continue to congratulate publishers who are happy to have won an ENNIE. While I have lost the little respect I had for the award, those who try to win it in good faith deserve better, and they rightly should enjoy the flush of excitement that comes from receiving an award like the one the ENNIES seem to represent. They toil in obscurity most of the time and recognition is limited. I think they deserve to be proud even though the award organization itself is letting them down.
2. I am going to continue to ignore the ENNIES, not check if a game has won an ENNIE, forgo participating in the ENNIES, and avoid suggesting people should involve themselves in any aspect of the ENNIES.