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SAN FRANCISCO – Multilingual cheers exploded in the city's SOMA district Thursday night, as creative minds from around the digital-media world gathered for the sixth Invision Awards.
What the ceremony lacked in the Hollywood-style glamour typical of other new-media awards, it made up for in international appeal. The festival, hosted by New Media magazine, awarded prizes to top Web sites, CD-ROMs, and other multimedia productions.
Best of Show honor was split between The X-Files Game, by Hyperbole Studios, and Ceremony of Innocence: The Mysterious Correspondence of Griffin and Sabine, the narrative by Real World Multimedia based on the elaborate book by Nick Bantock.
This year's ceremony was folded into the Insight conference, which boasted the motto "Upgrade your head." Hal Josephson, director of Invision, said the conference addressed what he saw as a missed opportunity for those in new media to meet and engage in meaningful dialogue. He hoped the event would become a "digital Sundance Festival," attracting recruiters looking for new talent.
Carl Shapiro delivered Insight's keynote Wednesday. The economist and author of Information Rules: A Strategic Guide to the Network Economy encouraged the audience to "upgrade selectively" and not throw away older economic models in a effort to embrace the new economy. Rather, he advised looking at appropriate historical precedence.
Shapiro noted several similarities between the development of digital media and the advent of other media, such as books, radio, and television. He said companies overly concerned with copyright protection should "lighten up a bit" or lose ground to those who do. Those companies could take a page from libraries and video-rental stores, which expanded demands for their media, he said.
Representatives of the EMMA Awards – a European series of new-media prizes announced on 21 October – recognized the recipients who attended Invision at a lunchtime session. EMMA chairman Jonathan Briggs, a professor of new-media design at England's Kingston University, said his group was drawn to Invision because it was a "good niche conference" that stood apart from others in an environment that seemed to host an "e-biz conference every week."
Other winners included Taz Web: MediaBoy from Taz, for Web; HotBot from Wired Digital (Wired News' parent company), for information; Ode Architect by Intellipro, for education; The Apple Store by Adjacency, for business; Droidworks by Lucas Learning, for entertainment; A-Klasse: Die Zukunft des Automobils by Scholz & Volmer, for marketing; and Chronique de L'Afrique Sauvage by Montparnasse Multimedia for creative and technical excellence.
After the ceremony, Hyperbole founder Greg Roach said receiving the top award was bittersweet. The citation and the general success of The X-Files Game honored almost a decade's worth of work creating and promoting interactive drama. But he described the difficulties he had marketing other dramatic games and speculated about moving toward more standard gaming formats.
Expressing admiration for his co-winner, Real World Multimedia, Roach then pointed out that it had yet to find an American distributor for its hard-to-categorize.
