10th
Award-winning WorksEntertainment Division

We hoped to find a work which is on the cutting edge among the web works, one which shows a rapid progress in the speed of computers and communications, a rich presentation of images and so on. The hope, sorry to say, was not fulfilled this year. I guess the reasons for this might be that it is not easy to reflect technological innovations which progress at an accelerated pace in web presentation. It has become increasingly complicated as the methods of advertisement have changed, and mutual development is required with the community and mobile phones. In the audition meeting, opinions were split in both the primary screening and the final screening, and various discussions took place. I made a recommendation to reconsider the concept of what we see as a "work&rdquo" in the genre of Web and demonstrate it for the future. Under these circumstances, in addition to the need for high-quality and high entertainment value, we gave importance to innovativeness in technical elements and content with good conception equally and in the end works which real zed the idea of interactiveness were selected. I do hope we will see a Web work win a Grand Prize next year.

In my opinion, works of the type sent in this genre, short movies with a length of less than 10 minutes, will be more and more needed in the various media in the future. At the same time, I think that the entertaining aspects of a work will become more and more important in this genre. In the audition, among the mix of high quality entertainment visual images created for various purposes, including TV CMs, opening images of game software, music videos and others, the works whose presentation showed a special awareness of movement or characteristic features of media, or the works which made at tempt s to break away from the existing genre or style drew our attention and were impressive. The works with the sense of breaking into a new genre of visual images were selected.

The majority of applicants were games from business enterprises and one from a serial work. I hope we will have more entries from individuals and more original works in the future.
Apart from unique works such as OKAMI, which picked up the history of Japan as its background, and Rhythm Tengoku, a piece of work which epitomizes today's culture, original works such as Elebits and KARAKURI received high praise. Speaking of serial works, good quality and great works which were well -plotted, such as Pocket Monster Diamond & Pearl, OIDEYO DOUBUTSU NO MORI, New Super Mario Bros, and others, received high acclaim as did as prize-winning works. Among Electronic Play Equipment, Shaberu! DS Oryouri Navi realized a familiar theme using the latest speech synthesis techniques, and AMAGATANA provoked laughter from the Jurists with its extremely original idea. The presentation of lights and sounds which was seen in RGBy desk and others made us feel it had possibilities for expansion into industrial design. I was pleased with the works of Characters. There were a great number of original works submitted and I could actually feel the improvement in creativity.

I could not find a single piece of work with an innovative technology as the core of a commercial, product among the works entered in the Entertainment Division this year. However, there were many works where new representations and techniques had been fully utilized and favorite technologies sought out, and most of them were taken into the final review. The amusing and serious qualities of their approaches in the quest for a new frontier of presentation, further combining known technologies and ideas, seemed to have had a great impact on the evaluations. In OKAMI, the Grand Prize Winner, the artist tackled the difficult theme of the Myth of Japan and realized a totally new world in an action adventure game with a fresh presentation of CG technology, which was highly appreciated by all the Jury members. We have seen various newly-developed home video game machines this year, but not one has managed a significant achievement. We hope that we will see a work which makes full use of original technology running on those platforms next year.