Many gamers who take the hobby seriously scoff at each year’s Spike TV Video Game Awards. There are numerous reasons for this, the most prominent being that the show is often filled with gags, skits, and seemingly anything that does not consist of awards being handed out and accepted. You need only look at the show this past December where certain awards were given out beforehand and others were announced so rapidly they were gone in the blink of an eye. But about what the awards themselves — are the selections, too, put to shame by other award shows?
Last night, in the midst of the 2012 DICE Summit in Las Vegas, the 15th Annual Interactive Achievement Awards (the IAAs) took place and were hosted by who else but comedian and BlizzCon frequent Jay Mohr. DICE (which stands for Design, Innovate, Communicate, Entertain) is an event geared towards those within the industry and thus has a much different focus than a trade show like E3. Whereas the nominees and winners of the VGAs are chosen by a select group of those in the videogame press, the IAAs are “decided by a peer-based voting system,” as the organizers, the Academy of Interactive Arts & Sciences, put it. One might therefore expect the awards to end up in the hands of different nominees than the VGAs.
