The winner of the 2020 Diana Jones Award for Excellence in Gaming is Black Excellence in Gaming.
The year 2020 is a special one for the Diana Jones Award in many ways. It’s the 20th year the illustrious award “for excellence in gaming” has been presented, and it happens at a historic time of global pandemic and civil protest.
With that in mind, the Diana Jones Award committee has decided to do something different this year. For our community to continue to grow and improve, we must do better to mend the rifts that pull us apart in our industry and the world at large. Thus, rather than announce a shortlist and a winner, we choose to award the concept of Black Excellence in Gaming. We want to recognize the often-overlooked Black professionals throughout tabletop gaming’s history, up to and including the present day. This is overdue, deserving of the spotlight, and is but one small step.
We have given the award to broad concepts in the past in much this same way. This year, to recognize specific people and highlight their achievements, the committee has selected over two dozen professionals in the games industry as honorees who are exemplars of Black Excellence in Gaming. Each of these deserving individuals has space held for them here (on the “Honorees” tab), if they wish to be listed. The committee congratulates them all, and thanks each of them for their contributions to the industry in the face of systemic racism.
The committee would also like to announce the Diana Jones Emerging Designer Award for next year. The new award is intended to amplify the voices of up-and-coming designers. As part of the process, we pledge to make a special effort to seek out qualified and deserving members of marginalized groups as a component of each cohort of candidates.
The Emerging Designer Award includes a free badge and hotel room at Gen Con, and the opportunity to be showcased as a promising designer at the event. This new program will begin with the resumption of Gen Con’s normal schedule, and we’ll release more details as that time draws closer.
We hope this year’s Diana Jones Award and the new Emerging Designer Award will help move our community toward becoming more diverse and inclusive. At the same time, we know this is just the start. Fortunately, our action is part of a wave of such efforts, including those by the Babble-On Equity Project, the Bundle for Racial Justice and Equality, and Dissident Whispers, among others. We applaud them all.
Black lives have always mattered, and we pledge to be a better ally going forward.
Q: Were any BIPOC people consulted about this year’s award?
A: The Diana Jones Award committee is made up of over 40 respected professionals in the games industry, who remain anonymous — or not — by their own choice. We’re lucky to have BIPOC committee members who offered their perspectives, as well as women and non-binary professionals and people from several different nations. We worked with a respected sensitivity reader to help us navigate what we know is an important issue. We’ve also incorporated suggestions from our honorees.
Q: Isn’t it strange to give the award to a concept rather than a person or a game?
A: For most awards, that’s probably true, but several concepts have been Diana Jones Award finalists in the past. Two years ago, the concept Actual Play even won the award, with seven honorees officially recognized. Before that, the concept of Irish Game Convention Charity Auctions won in 2006, with two honorees spotlighted. While considering concepts for the award has not been without controversy—even inside our committee—we often celebrate it as one of the Diana Jones Award’s strengths.
Q: What were your criteria for selecting any particular person to be an honoree as part of this year’s award?
A: Each honoree was personally nominated by a committee member. We looked back to the early days of gaming and forward to today, seeking out Black professionals of note in the tabletop games industry. In this sense, our selection process this year has been similar to how it has been in prior years, but directed toward recognizing an accomplished cohort of Black professionals in gaming. We reached out to each person to ask if they were interested in accepting the honor publicly. If they declined, we respected their wishes.
Q: What about people you may have missed?
A: First off, we apologize. Our knowledge of the industry is extensive but not infallible. It’s inevitable that we overlooked someone worthy, despite our efforts. If you would like to suggest other honorees, you can email names to committee@dianajonesaward.org. Note that some people not on the current list may have privately declined the honor.
Q: Are all of the honorees still active in the industry?
A: Some of them are, but others are not. We feel their contributions are worth noting no matter when they may have happened.
Q: Do you have to be a game designer to qualify as an honoree?
A: No. The award is for Black professionals in the games industry. That includes artists, editors, writers, reviewers, producers, and all the other people behind the scenes. Black Excellence in Gaming is not just the purview of designers.
Q: Do you have any longer-term plans to encourage diversity and inclusivity?
A: We do. Some of those will remain private, much like the makeup of the Diana Jones Award committee. Others will be announced when appropriate.
Q: Will the Diana Jones Emerging Designer Award be given only to people from marginalized communities?
A: Going forward, we will make a special effort to reach out to people from marginalized communities about the award, but others will certainly be eligible as well. We will release more details about the Diana Jones Emerging Designer Award in the future.
The Diana Jones Award committee wishes to recognize the following individuals as exemplars of this year’s award:
Omari Akil
Omari Akil is a North Carolina based game designer, content creator, and gaming community advocate. He is the lead designer and co-founder at Board Game Brothas, a contributor on the Tabletop Backer Party media team, and a leadership team member of the Pathways Fellowship (a support and mentoring program for marginalized game designers).
Maurice Broaddus
With a dozen novels and nearly 100 short stories in print, his gaming work includes writing for the Marvel Super-Heroes, Leverage, and Firefly role-playing games and the Storium online game. He’s worked as a consultant for Watch Dogs 2 and Dungeons & Dragons. His tie-in fiction includes stories in Vampire 20th Anniversary Edition: The Dark Ages (Onyx Path), Pugmire (Onyx Path), Powered Up! (Green Ronin) and Knaves: A Blackguard (Outland Entertainment).
Allie Bustion
Allie Bustion is an independent and freelance narrative and tabletop game designer, working for companies like Wizards of the Coast, Paizo, Guildhall Studios, and Green Ronin as well as their own projects. Much of their work touches on harder topics, such as marginalization, societal privilege, grief, and loss, while also shining a light on things that bring joy, like friends and family, community, and hope. Not everything has to stay dark forever.
Tanya DePass
Tanya is the founder of the non-profit I Need Diverse Games, which sends marginalized developers to the Game Developers Conference, with passes provided by the GDC Scholarship program. She’s a former games journalist, partnered Twitch broadcaster, Diversity Liaison & Programming coordinator for OrcaCon and GaymerX. She’s also a RPG dev & editor, with credits at Monte Cook Games, Paizo, WotC and Green Ronin. She’s also a founding cast member and producer of Rivals of Waterdeep, an Actual Play stream on the WotC official Twitch channel. A recent accomplishment is that during the George Floyd protests, Tanya ran a charity stream that raised $140k for The Bail Project in a single day and led a team that raised almost $350K total for the cause.
Brandon Dixon
Brandon is a longtime omni-nerd who grew up during the golden days of Toonami, Spawn comic books, and G4. However, as a black man in the scene, he found himself longing for more stories that told the adventures of people that looked like him. Creating Swordsfall has not only been an effort to be the change he wanted to see, but also as his own personal journey. Swordsfall now spawns across novels, graphic novels, and tabletop RPG’s with no signs of slowing down yet.
Julia B. Ellingboe
Julia B. Ellingboe is a special education teacher, writer, and game designer. When school’s out, she writes games and fiction about things like vampires and social media (#TheRealColdtown, with co-designer Kat Jones, featured at Blackbox CPH 2019), action flicks (“You’ve Come a Long Way, Baby,” in the #Feminism anthology), love and monsters (Tales of Fisherman’s Wife/Hyahumonogatari Kaidankai, as yet unpublished), and slavery (Steal Away Jordan). Find her most recent work, “The Sleepover,” co-designed with Kat Jones, in Honey and Hot Wax: An Anthology of Erotic Art Games.
Jerry Grayson
Jerry D. Grayson, who is this Autobot, and what does he do?
Jerry has designed and published games since 2002. Flattered that others find his small efforts amusing, his proudest industry works are GODSEND Agenda, HELLAS: Worlds of Sun and Stone, and ATLANTIS: The Second Age. When not creating games that have all uppercase letters in the title, Jerry works on becoming a better human being through acts of civility and kindness to others.
Shareef Jackson
Shareef Jackson is a founding member of Rivals of Waterdeep, an actual play D&D show that features an all POC cast and gives everyone a chance to be the dungeon master. He is an adjunct professor at University of Wisconsin – Whitewater, specializing in diversity in gaming and how it affects narrative. Shareef has also participated as a speaker at conferences such as PAX East, C2E2, and DragonCon.
Cliff “CJ” Jones
CJ became a professional in the world of tabletop gaming as a co-founder of Wizards of the Coast and as one of the authors of its first publication, The Primal Order. CJ worked in technical support for WotC throughout the ’90s until Gen Con was acquired in 2001. At that time, CJ transferred to the new Gen Con LLC business, where he led the technical services department — most notably the registration system and website — for Gen Con until his passing in 2014. He is deeply missed.
Eric Lang
Eric, the Game Director of CMON, has been designing games for the last 20 years. Games based on cool licenses such as Marvel Universe, Star Wars, Lord of the Rings, The Godfather, as well as original titles such as Blood Rage, Rising Sun, Arcadia Quest, Victorian Masterminds, Cthulhu: Death May Die and many more. After several years in tropical paradise in Singapore, he has returned to his home in Toronto Canada.
Eloy Lasanta
Eloy Lasanta is the quintessential game designer, incorporating his love of gaming and RPGs into every aspect of his life. He’s used that to found Third Eye Games, and create Part-Time Gods, AMP: Year One, The Ninja Crusade, and many other RPGs, in addition to co-founding New Agenda Publishing, working within the World of Darkness (Onyx Path), and even lending his unique talents to the Firefly RPG (Margaret Weis Productions). He’s busy.
Rich Lescouflair
Rich is a long-time tabletop gamer turned RPG designer, writer, and graphic artist. His work includes design for Wizards of the Coast and Green Ronin, writing and graphic design for several D&D Adventurers League titles, and is a founding member of the Dungeon Masters Guild Adepts. He is co-owner of Alligator Alley Entertainment, in which he’s creator and lead designer of Esper Genesis, the 5th Edition powered sci-fi RPG.
Brandon O’Brien
Brandon O’Brien is a writer, performance poet, teaching artist and game designer from Trinidad and Tobago. His work has been shortlisted for the 2014 Alice Yard Prize for Art Writing and the 2014 and 2015 Small Axe Literary Competitions, and is published in Uncanny Magazine, Strange Horizons, Fireside Magazine, and New Worlds, Old Ways: Speculative Tales from the Caribbean, among others. He is also the poetry editor of FIYAH: A Magazine of Black Speculative Fiction.
Cody Pondsmith
Cody Pondsmith joined R. Talsorian Games years ago, entering in the deep dark depth of the mail room and working his way up from the bottom all the way to the prestigious position of General Manager. Tutored by his father, Mike Pondsmith, Cody was well prepared when, at the age of 16, he traveled to Poland and made a pitch for The Witcher license. He won the day and since become the line developer and principal designer on the bestselling Witcher TRPG line.
Mike Pondsmith
Appearing as a Mild Mannered Game Designer, Mike Pondsmith is in reality a Time Lord from the Far Future, here to warn all of us of a reality involving Giant Robots, cyber-enhanced Boostergangers, and an Invasion of Teenagers From Outer Space. When not involved in his day job of Saving The Future of Humanity, he can also be found in the nearest gravel pit, digging up million year old dead things with waaaay too many teeth and claws. He calls this relaxation.
Marcus Ross & Cara Michele Ryan
Marcus Ross and Cara Michele Ryan are the design & illustration team behind Water Bear Games. The duo is best known for their absurd costumes, elaborate prototypes and knack at winning design competitions. The company’s goal is to make modern gateway games with themes that invite in a larger audience. It’s going well so far: their published catalog includes Discount Salmon, BEEEEES! and Letter GO!
Laura Simpson
Laura Simpson (Sweet Potato Press) is an award winning game designer and the creator of Companions’ Tale, an ENnie nominated, Indie Groundbreaker Game of the Year winner. She has also designed Driving to Reunion, part of the IndiCade-nominated anthology #Feminism. Her next game, Distant Stars, will be released Fall 2020 in the The Ultimate Micro-RPG Book, published by Simon & Schuster.
Chris Spivey
Chris Spivey is a veteran, writer, game designer, and developer who has a decades-old love of gaming, horror, and history, and a mission to create a more inclusive gaming world. His groundbreaking and critically acclaimed game Harlem Unbound won 3 Gold ENnie Awards and the IGDN Groundbreaker Award.
Bryan Tillman
Bryan Tillman is a 20-year professional comic/game artist as well as an educator of the arts. He has conducted many panels and lectures for convention such as, AwesomeCon, MegaCon, GenCon, and San Diego Comic Con. During his tenure, Bryan has published three instructional books: Creative Character Design Vol.1 for Focal Press, Vol. 2 for CRC Press and The 30 Day Pitch Bible for Kaiser Studio Productions. Bryan also created and illustrated a tabletop RPG TCG, Dark Legacy, which was released by UpperDeck in late 2018.
Allen Turner
A game designer, storyteller, artist, dancer, and author of Black/Lakota/Irish descent, Allen Turner believes in the power of play and story as fundamental, powerful medicines which shape our sense of self. Allen creates experiences pulling from the myths and folklore of indigenous and tribal peoples worldwide, while exploring allegorical battles with depression, solitude, identity, and erasure. He continues exploring the conversations initiated in Ehdrigohr on his blog via fiction, musings, photography, and introspective gaming.
Aaron Trammell
Aaron Trammell is the Editor-in-Chief of the journal Analog Game Studies and an Assistant Professor of Informatics at UC Irvine. He has published seven co-edited collections, sixteen journal articles, and eleven book chapters on games and culture, including several critical essays about the representation of race, gender, and sexuality in Dungeons & Dragons. He is presently hard at work completing his book about the influence of hobbyists on geek identity today. To learn more about Aaron’s work, email him: trammell [at] uci [dot] edu.
Jabari Weathers
Jabari Weathers is an illustrator and upcoming tabletop game designer and writer from Baltimore, Maryland. You may have seen their work on many indie RPGs from 7th Sea to Bluebeard’s Bride. They are unsure what project in particular they are being recognized for by the DJA beyond being black and in the industry—which shouldn’t be regarded as a project.
#WeHaveAlwaysBeenHere
#YouAreFinallyLooking
Travis Williams
Travis Williams began his career in entertainment in 1990 as one of the co-creators of the “World of Darkness” (Vampire, Werewolf, Mage) roleplaying games from White Wolf. As a game producer, Travis has worked on popular fighting games (Street Fighter, X-Men Children of the Atom) to adventure games (Hell, Bureau 13, Sanitarium) to MMOs (The Matrix Online, Vanguard: Saga of Heroes, DC Universe) to sandbox gaming (PAIN) on the PlayStation. Travis is currently the Vice President of Digital Gaming at Lightstorm Entertainment where he is responsible for Titanic, Alita, and Avatar games across all media.
Camdon Wright
Camdon Wright (He/Him) is a TTRPG designer, first-generation American, biracial Ethiopian, and co-owner of Unicorn Motorcycle Games. He serves as the Diversity Coordinator for the IGDN where he leads their yearly Diversity Sponsorship, mentorship program, and sits on the leadership team fighting for a future where a diverse spectrum of creators will be seen as more than their marginalizations. His games include the 200-word RPG Secret Person of Color and the recently released One Child’s Heart. Camdon has also written for Ulisses North America, Pinnacle Entertainment Group, Darker Hue Studios, and Gnome Stew.