What is the Diana Jones Award?
The Diana Jones Award is an annual award created to publicly acknowledge excellence in gaming. The award was created to for the year 2000, and the first award ceremony was on August 4, 2001.
Why is this award different?
The Diana Jones Award is decided on merit, not popularity or commercial success. You may never have heard of some of the finalists, but you can be certain that they are all outstanding in their fields. What is more, because the winner is chosen by a closed, mostly anonymous committee, it is impossible for a manufacturer or publisher to stuff the ballot or interfere with the voting.
What is ‘Excellence in Gaming’?
The Diana Jones Award is designed to reward any combination of achievement, innovation, and anything that has benefited or advanced the hobby and industry as a whole; or which has had the greatest positive effect on games and gaming; or which, in the opinion of the judging committee, shows or exemplifies gaming at its best.
The precise interpretation of “excellence in gaming” is left to the discretion of the individual judges, who approach the subject from many different backgrounds and perspectives. Innovation, artistic merit, commercial success, cultural significance, longevity, and several other factors are all considered.
What is eligible for the award?
Anyone and anything within the games industry and hobby is eligible to win the Diana Jones award. That includes but is not restricted to: individuals, products, publications, publishers, distributors, retailers, clubs, organizations, conventions, events, trends, innovations, and concepts. It is possible that the committee may decide not to give the award if in their opinion nothing in the previous year was sufficiently outstanding to qualify.
How many winners are there?
There is normally one winner each year. However, there has been a tie in the past, and the committee allows for that possibility in the future. In the case of a concept being the winner, we also traditionally name several specific honorees who exemplify it.
What do the winner/honorees receive?
The winner or honorees for the Diana Jones Award receive the Diana Jones trophy. The winner may keep it for a year before it passes to the next winner of the Award. Honorees generally rotate possession of the award during that year.
Winners, honorees, and finalists also receive the right to use the Diana Jones Award logo for promotional purposes.
What is the Diana Jones Award trophy?
The Diana Jones trophy was originally created by the UK office of TSR Hobbies in the mid-1980s, to commemorate the expiration of that company’s license to publish the Indiana Jones Role-Playing Game and the subsequent destruction of all unsold copies of the game. It was liberated from TSR Hobbies by forces unnamed and subsequently came into the custody of a member of the Diana Jones committee.
The trophy is a four-sided pyramid made of Perspex, standing ten centimeters high and mounted on a wooden base. Sealed within the Perspex are the burnt remains of the last copy of the Indiana Jones RPG, including two still-recognizable cardboard “Nazi™” figures, as recorded in gaming folklore.
The Diana Jones committee believes that a trophy that embodies the destruction of the last copy of one of the games industry’s most unloved and least-mourned products is a suitable symbol for the aims of the Diana Jones Award.
Who is Diana Jones?
Nobody. The only visible part of the Indiana Jones logo within the trophy has been burnt away so that it reads Diana Jones, and the award takes its name from that.
Where can I find logos?
Our media images pack is right here.
How do I contact the committee?
You can contact the judging committee by emailing committee@dianajonesaward.org. Committee chair Matt Forbeck is at matt@forbeck.com