The BAFTA Games Awards takes picking winners very seriously

The answer’s in the winners. BAFTA can often surprise with interesting, idiosyncratic picks. This is even and especially true in the Best Game category, where BAFTA often makes a choice you won’t see in any other major awards ceremony: four of the last eight winners were What Remains of Edith Finch, Outer Wilds, Returnal, and Vampire Survivors. If any awards body is going to stop Clair Obscur: Expedition 33’s almost unbroken Game of the Year sweep, it’s BAFTA.

Why is BAFTA so different? It makes sense that it diverges from The Game Awards, which are voted on by the media, or the Golden Joystick Awards, which are selected by the public. But it also differs from the DICE Awards, which, like BAFTA’s awards, are picked by a body of industry professionals.

BAFTA is the only arts academy which brings the game industry under the same banner as the film and TV industries, so BAFTA has a lot of experience in film and TV awards that the games chapter can draw from. And, as I found when I spoke to the organization’s Games Committee chair Tara Saunders, BAFTA takes choosing awards very, very seriously.

“I do think BAFTA members veer towards selecting innovation or narrative depth over budget and hype, I'm going to be honest,” Saunders told me. “I think they value the work of indie teams, they value creativity and artistic expression.” That’s fair, but so do most of the game journalists I know who vote on The Game Awards. There’s clearly something else going on here.

It turns out that something else is effort. BAFTA puts a lot of work into selecting and growing its membership. It puts a lot of effort into the awards voting process. And its voting members put in a lot of effort, too.

The BAFTA Games Awards are voted on by BAFTA’s 1,400 games members. These, Saunders said, are mostly video game developers and craft professionals, and there is less membership among marketers, PRs, and publishers. “The BAFTA membership is made of craftsmen that recognize good craftsmanship,” she said. The membership has a strong basis in the UK’s game industry but is global, with “good representation” from North America and across the globe, as well as from different types of companies, from the smallest indies to big AAA teams.

BAFTA is also emulating the big film and TV awards by pushing to create specialist craft chapters to vote on each award. At present, there are six categories voted on by specialist chapters: Artistic Achievement, Audio Achievement, Game Design, Performer in a Leading Role and Supporting Role, and Technical Achievement. Chapters also include professionals from other disciplines with a deep understanding of the category, like game directors or casting directors for the performance categories. It’s a far cry from The Game Awards, where (from personal experience as a jury member) voters are left to decide what success in craft categories looks like for themselves.

“That's something that I think has been a learning from the film awards,” Saunders — an animator by trade — said of the specialist categories. “I think it leads to better breadth and better depth of nominations.”

BAFTA voting is organized into three rounds. In the first round, the entire membership (or the specialist chapters in those categories) decides the longlist. Voters are encouraged to abstain in categories they’re less familiar with “rather than just vote for what you've heard of.” After that, voting splits into two tracks. Best Game and British Game go through two more rounds with the entire membership, first to decide the eventual nominees, then the winner. Every other category goes to a hand-picked jury.

The juries are BAFTA’s special sauce. Each category has its own jury of between nine and 12 members, selected by the committee: “big enough for there to be a really broad spectrum of opinion in there, but they're not so big that you can't have a healthy discussion,” Saunders said. The jury members all have relevant expertise in the category — whether it’s Multiplayer, Music, or Narrative — but are otherwise selected to be as diverse as possible “across gender, race, type of company.” They’re also filtered not to include members with games releasing in the same year.

Jury members even undergo bias training. “There's a load of things in there that I think maybe other award bodies don't do — making sure that everybody's played every game,” Saunders said. “The jury chairs check in on that all the time. You can always tell when it comes to the discussion point if somebody's played. And what I'm finding is that actually they all have played and they're taking their roles exceptionally seriously.”

Juries don’t discuss the games between themselves before they sit. After discussion, a blind vote whittles the 10 longlisted games down to six nominees and determines the winner. Jury members leave the room knowing what the nominees are, but not the winner.

The jury phase ensures winners are determined through detailed discussion of each game by a small, expert panel. “I think if you don't have a jury round where people actually get together and just go through each game and the merits of each game, there is a temptation or a risk, I would say, that people just vote on what they've heard of,” Saunders said. Beyond that, the discussion itself can still change voters’ minds.

The downside? It’s a lot of work for the committee, the jury chairs, and the jury members. “I must admit, they're very, very exhausting,” Saunders said. It’s also a lengthy process; depending on the genre, 10 games can represent an intimidating amount of playtime to fit in.

The cost of all this process is the BAFTA ceremony’s relatively late date — this despite eligibility closing in mid-November, six weeks before the end of the year. Couldn’t the April awards at least afford BAFTA the luxury, unlike The Game Awards, of considering a full calendar year of releases?

“We're always crying out for as much time to play as possible,” Saunders said. ”And for me, I think if that date was any later, that window gets smaller and smaller to a point where it compromises the awards. So pre-Christmas is for us, because everybody gets a lot of time over Christmas to play.”

Games are big and complicated. They take a long time to play and leave a lot to talk about afterward. BAFTA takes the business of judging them so seriously that it takes almost half a year to do it. Is it worth it? That’s an open question — but at least someone is doing it.