The winner of the 2018 Diana Jones Award for Excellence in Gaming is Actual Play.
ACTUAL PLAY
A movement within hobby games
Actual Play is a concept or movement within hobby games in which people record and broadcast their game sessions — particularly campaigns of tabletop roleplaying games — over the internet. Exceptional examples include Critical Role (a weekly show for Geek & Sundry), The Adventure Zone (a biweekly show for Maximum Fun), Maze Arcana (a biweekly D&D show featuring Satine Phoenix and Ruty Rutenberg), Acquisitions, Inc. (an irregular D&D show by Penny Arcade), the One Shot podcast and Campaigns podcast (by James D’Amato and Kat Murphy on One Shot Network), and a variety of shows produced by Hyper RPG.
The Diana Jones Award committee recognizes all of these exemplars of Actual Play as honorees, and notes that this list could go on for pages. There are hundreds of Actual Play shows, each with a dedicated audience. Some are arguably more popular than the games their members play within them.
Actual Play shows — whether broadcast via audio, video or both — have done more to popularize roleplaying games than anything since the Satanic Panic of the 1980s, and in a far more positive way. They take RPGs out of the basement and put them on the world stage, showing a global audience exactly how much fun roleplaying games can be when played by talented people who are fully invested in their shared stories.
More than that, Actual Play can help gamers become better gamers. Game designers have long bemoaned the fact that it’s impossible to put themselves into the box to show people how to have the most fun while playing their games. Actual Play gives players of all skill levels full-bore examples of how to get the most out of their own games, presented in a format that’s easy to share and enjoy.
Actual Play puts the focus on the fun. It inspires gamers new and old to start up games of their own, or to improve the games they’re already running. Roleplaying game sessions have been described as twenty minutes of fun packed into four hours, but Actual Play demonstrates how players and game masters can become amazing and fine practitioners of this challenging and ephemeral art. They take what many of us have known in our private lives for years and make it obvious for everyone to see: gaming is perhaps the best kind of fun.
The Diana Jones Award committee is proud to declare that Actual Play exemplifies excellence in gaming, and to award it our trophy this year.
From another long and eclectic collection of nominees, the committee of the Diana Jones Award for Excellence in Gaming has chosen five finalists that it believes best exemplified “excellence” in the field of gaming in 2017. The Diana Jones Award committee is proud to announce that the five finalists for its 2018 award for Excellence in Gaming are:
THE 200 WORD RPG CHALLENGE
A competition organized by David Schirduan and Marshall Miller
Started by accident in 2015, the annual 200 Word RPG Challenge attracts entries from all over the world — almost seven hundred in 2017, a quarter of them from people who had never designed an RPG before. Despite the tight constraint, the variety and quality of entries are extraordinary, from OSR micro-rewrites to games that are political, satirical, surreal and avant-garde. All entries are posted on the Challenge’s website and released under a Creative Commons license, allowing other designers to work with them. It’s an outpouring of creativity, a melting-pot of influences, a foundry of new design talent, and the three winners showcase the possibilities of what an RPG can do.
ACTUAL PLAY
A movement within hobby games
Actual Play is a concept or movement within hobby-games in which people record and broadcast their games — usually campaigns of roleplaying games — on the internet. Primary examples include Critical Role (a weekly show for Geek & Sundry), The Adventure Zone (a biweekly show for Maximum Fun), Maze Arcana (a biweekly D&D show featuring Satine Phoenix and Ruty Rutenberg), Acquisitions, Inc. (an irregular D&D show by Penny Arcade), the One Shot podcast and Campaigns podcast (by James D’Amato and Kat Murphy on One Shot Network), and a variety of shows produced by Hyper RPG. Such shows have done more to popularize roleplaying games than anything since the Satanic Panic of the 1980s — and in a far more positive way. They take RPGs out of the basement and put them on the world stage, showing a global audience exactly how much fun roleplaying games can be when played by talented people who are fully invested in their shared stories.
ANALOG GAME STUDIES
A journal edited by Aaron Trammell, Evan Torner, Shelly Jones and Emma Leigh Waldron
Analog Game Studies is a “journal dedicated to the academic and popular study of games containing a substantial analog component.” Over the last four years the journal has established itself as a place where scholars of non-digital games discuss their research in an accessible manner. Furthermore, Analog Game Studies has a wide readership, comes out reliably, the editorial process is fast, and the editors capable. It is an important scholarly voice in the analytical tradition discussing hobby games that has, in the past, included sites such as Interactive Fantasy, The Forge, and the Knutepunkt books. The journal is freely available online, but it also produces annual printed books of the year’s content.
CHARTERSTONE
A board game designed by Jamey Stegmaier
Published by Stonemaier Games
In Charterstone the players play charters hired to create a village for the Forever King, competing for the king’s favour by being the best at developing the village and dealing with curveballs the king throws their way. Charterstone is simultaneously a worker-placement game and a legacy game, and demonstrates state-of-the-art design and rich, enjoyable playability in both. Significantly, when the legacy campaign is finished you’re left with a one-of-a-kind worker-placement game that is now stable for infinite replay as a normal board game. Or, as the village board is printed identically on both sides, when you’ve finished the legacy campaign you can buy a “recharge pack” and play it again on the other side. This clear-sighted approach to games design lifts Charterstone to the top of its league.
HARLEM UNBOUND
A roleplaying game sourcebook by Chris Spivey
Published by Darker Hue Studios
In Harlem Unbound, Chris Spivey and his collaborators (Bob Geist, Ruth Tillman, Alex Mayo, Sarah Hood, and Neall Raemonn Price) bring Call of Cthulhu/Trail of Cthulhu out of Innsmouth and set it squarely in 1920s Harlem, turning the racism endemic in H. P. Lovecraft’s writings squarely on its head. While most games dodge the issues of racism, often claiming it not suitable for gaming, Harlem Unbound places them front and center and focuses the spotlight on them until they begin to smoke and burn. It’s an important book in that it takes games as a serious art form in which such matters can be explored, plumbed, and — if we’re lucky — understood.
The winner of the 2018 Diana Jones Award for Excellence in Gaming was announced to a packed house on the evening of Wednesday 1st August, at the annual gathering of hobby games industry professionals in Indianapolis, the unofficial start of the Gen Con games convention.
Courtesy of attendee Wayne Humfleet, you can watch the rather loud ceremony below, but be aware that some of the language is NSWF. Matt Forbeck served as master of ceremonies again, thanking our sponsors and describing the excellence of all our finalists. Then he gave the award to this year’s winner, Actual Play. Several representatives of the movement stood up to accept the trophy.
Special thanks to all the sponsors of this year’s Diana Jones Award ceremony.