In Play: The trouble with building games to last

[Administrator]

In Play is a column taking a weekly sideways look at new game releases.
This week, BAFTA announced the nominations for next month's Game Awards. All things considered, the institution has done a pretty good job of wrangling the mad diversity of the video game arts into a handful of accessible fields. Anyone who's tried to categorise works in this unruly and mutable medium will know how much of a fool's errand it can be.
I want to talk about one category in particular, though: Persistent Game. Now, BAFTA doesn't mean this in the literal sense of connected game worlds where changes made by players persist - like Eve Online, for example. Its broader definition is clearly intended to reward games that are built to run and run; games that don't have to be in their year of release to sustain huge, active communities, or to be actively worked on by their developers; games like League of Legends, Final Fantasy 14, or Destiny. That's a sound move by BAFTA, because gamers are less beholden to the release schedule than ever, and most of the biggest and best games in the world today are years old.
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