In Hollywood, film folks are fighting (even suing) to get on the credit list for an Oscar award. An outside observer to the games industry must think that games are made by robots, as rarely do you see any names attached to games. Much less so in connection to game awards.

In an industry where consolidation is taking place and more studios are approaching development on a per project/contract basis, credits will become ever more important. It is pretty interesting to hear Alex Seropian (of Bungie/Halo fame) say something like “…by the time we make the calls to put the production staff together…”. One day, it will make sense of each of us to have our own personal agent to take these calls and get us the best gigs…

This all brings up several challenges. One is that there is no formal/standard way to assign credits. Not that Hollywood has it fully figured out, but they are way ahead of us in terms of having a formal approach to assigning credit on a project. In the game industry, it usually comes down to politics and how well you know the producer. With a lack of standards, comes a lack of faith in any/all credits… (FYI, the IGDA is hosting a set of roundtables on credit standardization at GDC.)

Related, if developers are not being given credit — accurate or otherwise — then how do we know who did what, and who’s desirable for which types of projects, etc, etc? Enter the Game Developers Choice Awards. Since the first year, we’ve always put a focus on naming/recognizing the talent behind each nominated game. As you can see from this year’s list of nominees, every single nomination is attributed with the names of those responsible for the work.

Not surprisingly, we had to “fight” to get some of those names. Go figure. To say the least, some companies are less than forthcoming with the names of their most prized assets. In fact, one nominee had to forfeit their nomination as they were unwilling so provide names!

Anyway, I’m not suggesting that we devised the Choice Awards as a means to boost our egos and attract agents. Rather, it was built on the fundamental premise that talent deserves to be recognized.