GameCity, Europe's biggest gaming festival, has announced the shortlist for the inaugural GameCity Prize.
The shortlist includes Minecraft, Ilomilo, Superbrothers: Sword and Sworcery EP, Pokémon Black, Portal 2, Child of Eden and Limbo. The judges include Jude Kelly OBE, Artistic Director of the Southbank, Nitin Sawhney, producer, composer
and musician and David Rowntree, previously the drummer from Blur.
The award aims to recognise the game as a whole art-form and cultural artefact, as opposed to other games awards such as the BAFTAs which recognise games' components such as music, design, movement.
Iain Simons, GameCity director, said: "The awards will value games as a whole, for their artistic and cultural value, rather than breaking them down into their parts. Games have been trivialised for twenty years and kicked around by the media. The industry has been apologising for itself for too long. We're here to say that games are worth talking about, and we want people who are not into games, who've never played a game to appreciate them as interesting and culturally relevant."
The free gaming event fills Nottingham city during October half-term and like the prize, it aims to show gaming as an art-form to be recognised as important, artistic and open to all.
The festival, which has run for six years, will take over the whole city from cafes and schools to the central market square and the Nottingham Trent university campus.
Eric Chahi, maker of 1990s video game Another World will curate the first day. Putting gamesmakers front and centre is another aim of the festival.
"Every film festival has the directors present, so we think it's important for people to meet the makers of the games and see that there are creative people behind these art forms," Simons said.
Nottingham Trent University launched the first national video game archive, which is stored at the National Media Museum in Bradford. It offers undergraduate courses in aspects of games making, and in 2012 will introduce a masters in games and play.