Earlier this month, we reported on a new awards show, the MMO Awards, which focuses on the community of MMO content creators. The show itself is scheduled for August 31st and will hosted by its organizer, Team Liquid's Gillian "Eiya" Long.
At first glance, the MMO Awards looks like a show all about recognizing the MMOs we love and play. However, as we dove deeper, we noticed that despite being named the MMO Awards, the show's awards are geared more towards content creators in the MMO space than the games themselves.
We contacted the event organizers to try to find some clarification on this and learn about its judging, how it came up with its categories, and its nominee selection process. The organizers responded, and a representative from EverEmber Creative answered a few of our questions.
To start things off, one of the major questions I had was why the team had chosen the name "MMO Awards" when the show itself was clearly more focused on content creators than MMOs. The organization's response was simple: it's a show inspired by other award shows, and the goal is to celebrate the "individuals and organizations striving to make the space better and more inclusive."
"While the name of the show may open the door to some confusion, our hope is that we can explore a different (but still crucial) piece of the MMO puzzle—one that goes beyond just the in-game experience to strengthen the entire space in unique, personal ways. The genre is the cause; the community is the effect. Our approach is to pay homage to the cause by celebrating the effect."
Inspired by award shows such as The Streamer Awards, The Game Awards and the *gamehers Awards, the organization's rep explained the approach was to not to come at it from a "broad scale," but rather celebrate the genre itself.
"But rather than approaching this event on a broad scale, we wanted to focus on the genre we all come from—MMOs—where community, player relationships, and collective achievements are at the forefront of the experience. "
Since there wasn't anything on the official MMO Awards website at the time of our initial article, it wasn't immediately clear how the categories and nominees were selected. Since the show's name is the "MMO Awards," naturally, it would lead one to believe that the categories would be all about the games themselves. However, the categories focus primarily on the content creators in the MMO space.
We asked how the categories were selected, which the org's rep described as going through "two phases."
Initially, EverEmber Creative, the agency helping Eiya organize the event, and Eiya herself decided upon a list of categories. The award categories primarily included "people, organizations, and content," with the rep stating that at one point, they had up to 22 different awards.
The second phase was to work with a "council of MMO content creators" to whittle the categories down to the ten they went with for this first awards show. As far as who this council is and how they were selected, they were selected by the creative team to present as "diverse a council as possible."
"We knew from the very beginning that we'd need a relatively impartial set of advisers to help guide this endeavor—mostly in the way of contributing to the MMO definition and in assessing and finalizing our list of awards," EverEmber's rep told us in an email. The company declined to identify who the council was for privacy reasons, but they did state that the 12 members comprised people affiliated with "major creator organizations, community organizations, online publications, esports teams and MMO content creation at-large."
Crucially, when asked, they also confirmed that since the council's contributions were made months before the nomination process, those who served were not exempt from potentially winning any of the awards themselves.
The nomination process was through community voting. Once the categories were made public, the MMO Awards asked its community to write in their nominees. In the first year, the MMO Awards stated that they received more than 65,000 total votes for the awards. The nominees were then whittled down to the four most voted for each category (though International Creator of the Year had five nominees, while Creator of the Year had six because the voting was too narrow to limit it to simply four).
Out of the ten awards, only one of them has anything to do with the actual MMOs themselves: Game of the Year. The selection of the four games (World of Warcraft, Final Fantasy XIV Old School RuneScape and Tarisland) were landed upon using a two-pronged approach. The first was the write-in campaign where the community voted on the individual nominees to be included.
However, the MMO Awards team took it a step further, matching up those games with the highest number of votes with how they define an MMO.
Via EverEmber Creative:
"This one was very important for us to get right, so we did the due diligence of researching how games describe themselves, how the MMO community defines that term, and how multi-game MMO creators define it. As you know, there are intricacies in the definition that validate some titles as MMOs and disqualify others. "
We've gotten this question a lot: How do we define MMO? It was a big topic, and we consulted several outlets and trusted sources before ultimately landing on this definition. Hope it helps!Oh, and don't forget to vote! Polls close Friday, August 2! Link in bio! EXCLAMATIONS! pic.twitter.com/ZvCeIWWR36
— The MMO Awards (@mmoawards) July 24, 2024
The final four were a combo of the highest voted games that also met the criteria set out by the organizers.
The awards show will air on Eiya's Twitch channel at 8 pm Eastern/5 pm Pacific on August 31st.
