The Nuovo Award or Innovation Award is an award given at the

Independent Games Festival The Independent Games Festival (IGF) is an annual festival at the Game Developers Conference (GDC), the largest annual gathering of the independent video game industry. Originally founded in 1998 to promote independent video game developers, ...

(IGF), an annual event that takes place during the

Game Developers Conference The Game Developers Conference (GDC) is an annual conference for video game developers. The event includes an expo, networking events, and awards shows like the Game Developers Choice Awards and Independent Games Festival, and a variety of tutori ...

, one of the largest gatherings of the

indie video game An indie game, short for independent video game, is a video game typically created by individuals or smaller development teams without the financial and technical support of a large game publisher, in contrast to most "AAA" (triple-A) games. ...

industry. The award is given to honor "abstract, shortform, and unconventional game development which advances the medium and the way we think about games". The award was designed as a way for

art games An art game (or arthouse game) is a work of interactive new media digital software art as well as a member of the "art game" subgenre of the serious video game. The term "art game" was first used academically in 2002 and it has come to be un ...

to compete with traditional indie games, and the winner was originally selected from a group of finalists and given a prize of

US$ The United States dollar (symbol: $; code: USD; also abbreviated US$ or U.S. Dollar, to distinguish it from other dollar-denominated currencies; referred to as the dollar, U.S. dollar, American dollar, or colloquially buck) is the official ...

2,500. In 2011, the IGF increased the prize money to US$5,000 due to the increased quality of the entries. The former IGF chairman

Brandon Boyer Brandon Boyer (born 1977) is a contributing editor to collaborative weblog Boing Boing. Boyer was born in 1977 in Sioux City, Iowa. From 1993–1996, Boyer wrote and performed songs on a Casio keyboard under the name Boy Genius. Tracks were featur ...

described the Nuovo finalists as experimental games that attempted to distinguish themselves from established conventions, and would not fit in any of the other IGF award categories. Nominations for the award are made by the IGF's judges. Eight finalists are chosen by an elected jury from among the nominees and a few others are given honorable mentions if they receive insufficient votes to become finalists. The winner is decided from among the finalists by jury voting. Jury members include notable game developers and previous winners and finalists, including individuals such as

Jason Rohrer Jason Rohrer (born November 14, 1977) is an American computer programmer, writer, musician, and game designer. He publishes most of his software into the public domain (Public domain software) and charges for commercial platform distributed ve ...

, Paolo Pedercini,

Ian Bogost Ian Bogost is an American academic and video game designer, most known for the game ''Cow Clicker''. He holds a joint professorship at Washington University as director and professor of the Film and Media Studies program in Arts & Sciences and ...

, and

Daniel Benmergui Daniel Benmergui is an independent game designer from Buenos Aires, Argentina known for the creation of art games such as ''Today I Die'', '' I Wish I Were the Moon'', and the upcoming '' Storyteller''. Life and career Benmergui grew up at ...

. In the thirteen years since the award's debut, 99 games have been nominated as finalists, while 79 games have been chosen as honorable mentions. Fifteen games have won the award, the first being the

platformer A platform game (often simplified as platformer and sometimes called a jump 'n' run game) is a sub-genre of action video games in which the core objective is to move the player character between points in an environment. Platform games are charac ...

'' Between'' (2009), while the latest to be awarded is the

role-playing video game A role-playing video game (commonly referred to as simply a role-playing game or RPG, as well as a computer role-playing game or CRPG) is a video game genre where the player controls the actions of a character (or several party members) immers ...

Recipients

Notes

References