How the Peabody Awards finally, officially embraced video games

The debate over whether or not video games can be considered art is a thing of the past. It took until 2022 for one of the most prestigious curators of excellent stories in entertainment, documentary, journalism, podcasting, arts, and more to officially recognize the medium through its own category.

The first-ever Digital and Interactive Storytelling Peabody award winners were announced on March 24.

In the past, there were scattered efforts to honor boundary-pushing stories through established structures. It even honored a website called Transom.org back in 2003 Jones helped organize a Futures of Media Peabody award co-sponsored by Facebook, hoping it would serve as a prototype for formalizing exactly the kind of award category it debuted today.

Jones said that the effort was intentional to signal that stories in this space have always mattered, that you haven't needed the confines of traditional broadcast media to tell amazingly powerful stories.

The new board of venerated jurors with an eclectic background in digital media unanimously chose to honor a total of 12 legacy projects. The winners capture a wide breadth of seminal yet also surprising turning points in tech-forward stories. There are video games like Journey and Papers, Please, as well as experiments in digital journalism.

The Interactive Peabody Board is separate from the jurors who pick the more traditional media categories, but the institution still has the same high standards.

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No matter what, it is a Peabody. Diana Williams, chairwoman of the Interactive Board and co-founder of Kinetic Energy Entertainment, said that the North Star is the stories that matter. It is about how the technology pushes the story.

The question is not just whether the story matters. You have to evaluate how well it engages with the audience and how well the technological form fits its contents.

Williams said that creators need to figure out how to best make that tech work for the story.

Digital terms like interactive and transmedia have been co-opted by commerce. You can be certain that in a pitch meeting, a marketing man sold the cross-promo of the superhero skins in the game as a way for audiences to interact with the game.

It was a challenge to regain access to some of the interactive stories. The jury had to look for long-forgotten floppy disks on more than one occasion. The jurors were forced to rely on institutional and muscle memory alone, as people who watched entire genres of the story disappear into obsolescence.

Papers, Please is a masterpiece of design and interactive storytelling Credit: Lucas Pope, 3909 LLC

Williams hopes that the Legacy Awards will serve as an industry-wide wake-up call on the importance of preserving even the most outdated digital narratives.

We need to think about where our history can be housed.

It feels like a definitive declaration of legitimacy for some of society's youngest media.

Across its 82 years, Peabody recognizes a really strong cannon of deeply meaningful stories. To be able to put video games or interactive documentary, or even social video alongside winners like Norman Lear, Rita Moreno, Carol Burnett, Sam Pollard, it says that the producers behind these medium are serious. Jones said that it was sending a message that the media had arrived. It is up to us, as citizens, to discover the power that has already been there. We spend a lot of time and money to decide on the stories that we should be paying attention to. It doesn't make a difference if it's a video game.

Digital media can now be seen as a testament to its importance because of what was once seen as disqualifying. The impact and richness of interactive stories continues to expand. The hope is that even more pioneers will be inspired to meet the institution's high standards now that Peabody is throwing the full weight of its gravitas behind recognizing excellence in the field.

The thrust of the Legacy Award is to show people just how much was built in the dark before us, and that we now have the chance to honor that and build from it. They pushed it out when the market wasn't ready, when the tech wasn't ready, and when the audience weren't there.

Today, Peabody is ready to recognize them all.

The Interactive Board will switch to selecting contemporary annual awards in the future. From the past year, creators will be able to submit their projects for consideration.

The future of the curation process comes with its own unique obstacles, and jurors likely won't need to hunt for floppy disks ever again. The Interactive Board was able to choose the cream of the crop from decades of history-makers with the benefit of hindsight, thanks to the Legacy Awards.

Jones acknowledged that they are stepping into the unknown. We will make it up as we go along.