The DICE Summit, presented by the Academy of Interactive Arts and Sciences (AIAS) is the annual gathering of the games industry’s top creative people and executives, taking place this year February 16 through 18th at the Mandalay Bay and Delano Hotel in Las Vegas. During the Summit, the DICE Awards are presented, honoring the top games of the year in a variety of categories.

These awards are seen as the premiere game awards because they are awarded by the members of the industry, in the same way the Motion Picture Academy Awards (the Oscars) are awarded. Because of this, the marketing impact of these awards is huge. You can bet every game that wins a DICE award will be spreading that news far and wide, because this sort of independent judgement of a game’s quality is very influential in getting the attention of game players and ultimately, sales.

The [a]listdaily caught up with AIAS president Martin Rae to talk about the DICE Summit, the DICE Awards, and the impact they have on the games industry.

MARTIN RAE - Headshot 2015 LO RESHow has the DICE show changed over time?

Let me start with why DICE is important, and I think it’s really important on a couple of fronts. The awards show was born out of a desire by industry players that  here we are, an incredibly important big industry, that doesn’t necessarily do a great job of recognizing the creative talent of their peers. They used the Motion Picture Academy as their model. They said let’s have a professionally vetted membership base, that every year can look at the historical year at great creative accomplishments and let’s publicly recognize them. We have over 30,000 members, all professionals in the industry, they’re the people involved with creating the games. They select from the nominations what they consider the best of the best for the finalists, and it’s peer-voted. I don’t think there’s a greater honor than being recognized as the best by your peers.

On the summit side I think we do a pretty good job of getting really bright people on stage. What we try to do is have forward-looking and inspirational talks. I always like to think that if you attend the sessions and pay attention, there will be things that you bring home to your team, to your company, to your personal life that really improves how you create things or how you go about your life.

This year we have a great mix of people, great game creators and designers, really interesting entertainers in their own right. We have Guillermo del Toro, Todd Howard, the Glu folks who have redefined the celebrity model for putting games out. We’ll have film folks up their talking about how you take care of properties cross-media. We have Penn Jillette, very talented and successful entertainer, author, and magician, and he’s doing some interesting game stuff with Randy Pitchford and the Gearbox folks. He’s a unique creative mind that other people can learn from. We’re lucky to have people like that who say “this industry is important, and we want to hit the stage and talk to your folks.” Many of these are not game designers or developers, they’re just great creative minds.

Automobiles have become a platform, not just a user platform but an experience platform. It’s almost gamelike. We’ll have some folks that are intimately involved with technology and things that we’ve learned from the game business about how they’re designing platforms within an automobile.

We had a very good experience at our conference in Barcelona, we did some roundtables. A moderator kicks it off with nine other people at the table, then it’s a freeform discussion for sixty minutes. We don’t stream it, there’s no pres sin the room, so it can be very candid. People said there was unbelievable energy in the room, and we’ve brought it to Las Vegas.

How has the impact of the DICE awards changed in this, the 19th year of the awards?

The stature has grown. People at the awards tell me the DICE award is the one award they want to win most. As the industry has evolved, the awards have evolved. Early on there were console-specific awards, and it’s much different now. As an example from four or five years ago, Angry Birds ended up as finalist for game of the year, and at the time people said “it’s just a little mobile game, how can you even look at that?” And our peers said this, in their opinion, was one of the top five games of the year. It had that big of an impact on them from a consumption and gameplay perspective. Something like that would have been unheard of early on. Anything now that breaks a boundary from a design perspective or an engagement perspective can get recognized. It’s much more wide open from that perspective.

As a recent example, we honored the Apple App Store last year with our technical impact award. Why would that be honored? When you really look at, when our board considered that, it has had a fundamental impact on distribution, accessibility, and recognition for independent developers that has been really profound. It spread the demographic for games immediately. That’s another example of how our awards have evolved.

You have VR and AR being represented in the events area at DICE. What’s ahead for designers and developers in the coming year with those technologies? What other important trends do you see?

They’re already looking hard at VR and AR. VR has been around for quite some time, it always had some interest in the technology. Back when I had a game studio we were working on some stuff for the Virtual Boy for Nintendo. Back then the promise was there, but the reality wasn’t. Now from a technical perspective we’re to the point where you can really do something with VR now. That’s really exciting. We have FaceIT there with a celebrity eSports tournament. I think eSports is just the tip of the iceberg now – you’ve got a whole generation growing up with ganes , appreciate them from a competitive perspective, and that’s an area that will only get bigger. Every game designer now sits down and thinks “What can I do with  AR and VR? What can I do from an eSports perspective to get my community engaged in things that have value?” Games are becoming a longer term service and a piece of someone’s life. In many respects, the thirty-hour experience, while valuable , becomes even more valuable if they can continue to play with their friends over the long term. People are social creatures and they want to play with each other, they want to have social relationships, and we get to do all of that – you can play any time, any where, with someone across the globe. It’s much different than an other entertainment medium.

How do you promote the awards, and let the world of gamers at large know about the awards?

We’re streaming on multiple channels, YouTube, Twitch, Hitbox, a number of channels. They’re all promoting out to the broader game community. The nice thing about today, versus nineteen years ago when we started, is that with social media and almost instant communication, the ability to hit Internet streams, a lot of people can get involved. Some will watch the whole thing, some will watch pieces, many will just communicate socially about it. Who won, who didn’t win, what they say on stage – they’ll experience it in a lot of different ways. It will be promoted heavily through all our stream partners and through press and social media channels.

The live stream for DICE can be found at:

YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/OfficialAIAS/live

Hitbox: 

http://hitbox.tv/DICE

http://hitbox.tv/DICEAwards

Twitch: http://www.twitch.tv/DICE