NEW YORK – French developer Ubisoft took home three awards Tuesday night at the 2019 Games for Change Awards ceremony, including becoming the first-ever recipient of the Games for Change Industry Leadership Award. Ubisoft’s history-based Discovery Tour by Assassin’s Creed: Ancient Egypt was also named Best Learning Game and took home the G4C People’s Choice Award voted on by the public via Facebook.
Nintendo Labo was named Game of the Year. The game combines physical and digital play patterns to teach and support principles of engineering, physics and basic programming. The platform uses kits that include cardboard cut-outs and other materials and provide a fun way for kids to explore topics while building fundamental understanding of the technology behind them.
This year’s awards also included two new categories. Prism (Yidi Zhu, Dan Wolpow, Ridima Ramesh, Yutian Zheng, and Xueyang Wang), a digital game that helps neurotypical children aged 8-10 empathize with their peers who have autism, was named Best Student Game while Homestay (National Film Board of Canada), a story of one family’s life with international students, won the award for Best XR for Change Experience.
“This year’s awards were really a reflection of how our organization and the Festival have evolved,” said Susanna Pollack, President of G4C. “To expand our award categories and also recognize the long contributions to education and social good of a AAA studio like Ubisoft speaks to the importance these trends have in society.”
The Games for Change Awards ceremony, hosted Brent Bushnell, CEO of Two Bit Circus, also saw the presentation of the Vanguard Award to Lindsay Grace, a Knight Chair at the University of Miami and founding director of the American University Game Lab and Studio. His work has been awarded by the Digital Diversity Network, Black Enterprise and others.
The other awards presented Tuesday night were:
- Best Gameplay went to GRIS (Nomada Studio), the story of a hopeful young girl lost in her own world and dealing with a painful experience in her life. Her journey through sorrow is manifested in her dress, which grants new abilities to better navigate her faded reality. Gris will grow emotionally and see her world in a different way.
- Most Innovative was awarded to Tendar (Tendar Claws), a humorous and provocative AR game that combines interactive storytelling, AR, sentiment and object recognition technology to promote discussion about current topics in mobile vision and artificial intelligence. Your guide: a fish-like creature who learns about the human experience by eating your emotions.
- UNICEF Kid Power (Teravision Technology, Teravision Games and 42 Mate), which turns everyday activity into lifesaving food for over 16 million severely malnourished children around the world, won Most Significant Impact. By connecting a Kid Power Band or other activity tracker to our game, families, friends and classrooms can save lives with every step they take.
Related: XR for Change Summit Kicks off Games for Change 2019
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