Some BAFTA winners baffle; GRAW is game of the year
Last week the British Academy of Film and Television Arts (that's BAFTA) awarded the British Academy Video Games Awards in seventeen categories. While we're all about mainstream acknowledgment of our favorite entertainment medium, from a respectable organization like BAFTA no less, you know we're never ones to leave well enough alone. Reading through the list of winners is difficult to reconcile with the industry we read and write about everyday. Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter was a pretty good game, but game of the year? At least it beat out game of the year competitor Black!
While there are plenty of dubious winners, and even more dubious nominees, there are still plenty of welcome winners on the list, like Electroplankton, Guitar Hero, Shadow of the Colossus, and Psychonauts.
While the US has separate academies for movies (The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences), television (The Academy of Television Arts and Sciences), and video games (The Academy of Interactive Arts and Sciences), BAFTA treats video games comparably with film and television. This is vastly different from many of the other video games awards ceremonies handed out by organizations tasked solely with judging the merits of interactive entertainment ... like, say, the Spike VGA awards. Sure, mainstream awards ceremonies may go a long way towards encouraging mainstream acceptance of video games, but we're pretty sure Joystiq readers aren't looking to awards shows to let them know what the best game of the year was. So 'stiq, was it GRAW?
