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9:11am on Sunday, 19th April, 2026:
Anecdote
I was on one of the juries for the BAFTA games awards that were presented this week, so I thought I'd explain how these things are decided for the enlightenment of those who don't know.
There are 18 categories. One of these, the Fellowship, goes to an individual and is decided upon using an arcane system to which I'm not privy. The rest are decided by votes.
First, there's a list of nominations. Companies get to nominate their own games, but it costs £220+VAT for each one, or twice as much for a late entry, which discourages developers from blanket-entering. Also, they have to make their games available to be played for free by the BAFTA games electorate (of whom there are around 1,400). The games must have been released within a set period, which is something like mid-November to mid-November, so some late 2024 games were on the 2026 list. The games are entered in different categories, but there's no extra charge for each category; we do therefore see some blanket entries, although a few categories have eligibility criteria. You're not going to be able to name which voice artist you're putting up for a voice-artist award if your game doesn't use any voice artists.
The games are played by the BAFTA members and they vote on them. There are so many games — around 200 — that few people are going to play them all, and even if they do, they won't necessarily play them for very long. I myself played 40 or so well enough to form an opinion on them. Some of the others were clearly no-hopers from their descriptions, and some looked promising but were console-only and I don't have a console. Some of the games, I'd already played so didn't have to play again.
For two of the categories (best game and best British game), that's the end of the story. The ones that scored highest are the winners. Both my votes in those categories won, so I'm pleased with that.
For the remaining 15 categories, there are juries. The highest-scoring games in each category are put forward into a longlist. I don't know what the rules are for deciding this, but I suspect it's something sensible like "the top X games that scored more than a threshold of Y votes". There were 11 such games in the category for which I was on the jury. Overall, about a third of the games that were entered made it to one or more longlists.
There are nine to twelve members of each jury (mine hadd twelve). Jurors have to play all the games on their longlist. I'd already played most of the ones on mine, either naturally (nothing to do with BAFTA) or in the earlier voting process, but I replayed those anyway. The games are discussed one by one, then there is a vote. The top six games in the vote comprise the shortlist. Shortlists seem to be the reason that we have the juries: it means that the top six are decided by actual experts rather than publicity campaigns, and it reduces the noise from voters who perhaps weren't as diligent in their decision-making as they might have been. The six nominees will have short showreels shown prior to the actual award, and being nominated for a BAFTA is seen as a feather in the cap, so the discussion to decide the final six is earnest. None of the jury members know what the other jurors voted for, nor do they know how many votes each game received.
Oh, as a note to future entrants: if you use AI to fill in your nomination forms, that's going to give the impression you're not serious about the awards.
Given the top six, the jury now has to decide which one is the eventual winner. There's a second round of discussion, with arguments made for and against each game. Maybe if there's an obvious winner, this doesn't happen, but in my jury there were several strong contenders so we did have a lively discussion. At the end, we all voted for the one we believed should win. In the event of a draw, I believe we would have to vote again, but there wasn't a draw in my jury's case.
Here's the key point: the jury members don't know which of the six shortlisted nominees won. It's all done electronically, and only the auditors find out. Therefore, although I could tell you in advance of the awards which games were in contention (well, I could have done if it was allowed), I couldn't tell you which one won because I didn't know. I could only say which one got my vote. As it happened, that one did indeed win, but I didn't find that out until it was announced at the ceremony.
There was one big surprise for me in the awards. Back in October, I wrote "given that the soundtrack for Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 topped the Billboard classical chart for ten weeks, I think it's safe to say that if it doesn't win the music BAFTA there's something seriously wrong."; it didn't win the music BAFTA, therefore there is something seriously wrong. Whether that's with the Billboard classical chart or the BAFTA music jurors' tastes I don't know, but it certainly caused me to raise an eyebrow.
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Copyright © 2026 Richard Bartle (richard@mud.co.uk).