IndieCade, the International Festival of Independent Games has announced the upcoming festival dates and new awards to the lineup.
The festival will be held in Santa Monica, California from October 10-12 according to a press release.
Additionally, IndieCade will include several new award categories.
The new awards include several honors in game design and a new Social Impact award, which will honor games addressing social and political issues.
Also announced are the return of the IndieCade Jury Prix award for a game the festival’s jury decides need special distinction and the IndieCade Grand Jury award for the best game in the festival.
The deadline for submissions to the festival has also been extended to April 25.
Here is a full list of the new Spotlight Awards for IndieCade 2019:
Social Impact
The Social Impact Award honors a game which explores social, cultural, and/or political issues in a whole new way. It may take us out of our comfort zones, and confront us directly on social progress yet to be done, or mark a real change in the industry. Social Impact for games encompasses creating new access points for unlikely players engaging with unlikely topics, new points of connection for people across the globe, or new shared experiences that resonate in our modern culture.
Performance
The Performance Award honors a game with a unique or particularly sublime performance: voice, motion capture, video, live and more. As games grow in cultural weight and professional development, the field of independent development has involved a larger variety of artists from all disciplines. The brilliant pacing, empathy, and understanding of the best actors have been harnessed this decade to make some of the most arresting play experiences we have ever seen. This award celebrates the performers doing the amazing work in the field of play.
Location Based Design
The oncoming frontier of play and experience design includes the amazing worlds of immersive theater, themed experience, virtual and augmented reality spaces, escape rooms and more exploration of bespoke, physical experiences often designed for groups of people and social engagement. The Location Based Design award rewards experiences innovating in these spaces and creating magical new spaces for play.
Competitive Design
Athletic and Mental Competition are amongst the oldest pastimes in the world. Experiences designed to create inventive and unique fields for competition, that drive their players to perfect skill and strategy, that breed active and mobile metagames all play to this ancient practice. The Competitive Design award rewards experience innovating in these spaces and creating magical new spaces for play competition and making us itch to create new organizations of play.
Cooperative Design
Playing with others, driving with friends and allies toward a shared experience is at the heart of many of the experiences we have engaged with over the course of human history. Experiences designed to create inventive and unique interactions that bring us together, working towards a shared goal. The Cooperative Design award rewards experiences innovating in how we play together.
Tabletop Design
Staring across a board, a hand of cards or even a chaotic pile of detailed paper notes, games played at the table, often with friends, leveraging the imagination of players to create unique and companionable experiences is the heart of games for many of us. The Tabletop Design Award celebrates an indie tabletop game of the year that innovates, surprises, and delights the heart.
Procedural Design
The Procedural Design Award honors a game that leverages randomness and algorithmic content or behavior to create unique and innovative interactions. Procedural Design is a growing skill with new discoveries made in many fields related to game development – graphics, narrative, level design, meaningful randomness, artificial behavior, and more. This award celebrates the amazing design of procedural and random chance that drives amazing discovery in the field of play.
Adaptation
The inspiration for games comes from wildly different sources and places, and games that interpret the world of another piece of media, reflect a documentary of real-world systems or adapt the experience of other places and stories explore the innovative edge of why we play. The Adaptation Award celebrates a game that examines and interprets using the logic of play and the power of interaction.
Steven Large studied journalism at the University of King's College in Halifax, Nova Scotia. He learned to read and write using video games and has been playing them ever since. He loves visual storytelling and talking to people about themselves. Contact him on twitter @steverlarge.
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