This year the jury has been divided in 3 groups: "Game Jury" (categories Best Game, Best Innovation, Best Student Game, Best Audio, Best Art, Best Technology & Best Game Design), “Applied Jury” (Category Applied) and “Industry Jury” (Best Studio, Inclusion, Lifetime Achievement and Awesome Achievement).
Game jury
Bastiaan Vroegop
Bastiaan has worked as a gaming journalist and reviewer in the Netherlands for over a decade. He has covered the industry at big, general news outlets such as NRC Handelsblad and RTL Nieuws, while also working for specialized media like Gamer.nl and Eurogamer. Right now, he’s responsible for news and reviews at both NU.nl and Algemeen Dagblad.
Wytze Koppelman
Wytze works as curator at The Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision, one of the world’s largest audiovisual archives. His work, among other things, focuses on preserving Dutch game heritage as part of the institute’s vast media archive, for future generations to play and see. Currently, he’s developing a new museum for Sound and Vision, in which games will play an integral part.
Ard Bonewald
As an educational manager and lecturer of the Games Design & Production course at Breda University of applied sciences he is helping students get into the AAA Games industry. Before he started at BUas Ard had been active in the Games industry for over 20 years. He started as a Game designer working on PC, console and handheld games at Davilex and Playlogic and switched to casual games as a producer at Zylom/Gamehouse, eventually growing to the position of Director of Studio. He founded Tingly Games in 2012, designing and running an HTML5 games business, which eventually merged with CoolGames in 2016. As a Head of Studio at CoolGames he continued working on HTML5 games based on IPs such as Angry Birds, Tetris, Snake and Battleship as well as developing original IP.
Kim Verbon
From imagining new games from scratch to localization and going live, from pure entertainment to educational concepts and from web to app and console. Kim is working in the games industry for almost ten million minutes and loves every second of it.
Kim is currently working as a Kids Activation Producer at Squla to create a fun learning experience for children. Before that she worked at Spil Games, heading up the game design department. At Stello Girls as a Game Director and did consultancy for numerous clients ranging from gamification of educational concepts to games to enhance software adoption and onboarding programs for corporations. Attention to detail, crazy quirky stuff and going against all odds are a few of her favourite things in games… and life.
Inez Groen
Inez started her career in games as a gaming journalist at one of the earliest Dutch videogame website. She works as an independent game designer on applied games for institutions like DMO (Defensie Materieel Organisatie), Haagse Milieu Service, Fontys and European Erasmus+ and is the writer and narrative designer of an experimental docugame. She works at HKU Art&Economics where she teaches students about what it takes to be working in the game industry and how much fun that can be.
Esmeé van ’t Hoff
Esmeé (She/Her) is an indie game developer working on Tracks of Thought, a card-based RPG about self-reflection and conflict resolution. She’s also one of the Organizers behind Wholesome Games. This is a platform focused on curating games based on their feelings of comfort, compassion and coziness. She’s delighted they get to elevate these titles in their annual showcases, and a community of nearly 500k members across various social media.
Gino van den Bergen
Gino’s work had a big impact on game physics and many of his discoveries are still a common component in current game physics engines. He developed an early version of the SOLID collision detection library to support his thesis, and opened the source code to the public as GNU software. By public demand, Gino started to offer the SOLID library under commercial licensing and founded Dtecta Middleware in 2001. SOLID has been applied in top-selling game console titles, such as the Formula One series for PlayStation 2.
He also shared his ideas in a number of journals and books, and is best known as author of the book Collision Detection in Interactive 3D Environments.
Applied Jury
Ellis Bartholomeus
Throughout her career, Ellis Bartholomeus has been intrigued with the value of play. She graduated from the Design Academy in 1996 as a product designer and realised that to have audiences own a message they needed to interact with it. Since then she has been designing play as a method/tool to amplify self-motivated learning and enable rich social interaction. She co-developed over 75 games and playful interactive products on a wide spectrum of topics and wrote a book Apply Play • to get ahead of the game which has been published in four languages and is being used to learn and play more worldwide.
Dimme van der Hout
Wieke Schrakamp
Wieke works as a UX researcher at Valsplat, a strategic research and design agency. She studied communication and health sciences at the University of Amsterdam. After graduating she worked in the field of applied games at IJsfontein as project manager and researcher.
Because of her fascination with human behaviour, she has decided to dedicate her time fully to user research. She and her colleagues at Valsplat are always on the hunt for ways to improve designs and make them more effective in their outcome.
In her sparetime she’s been known to spend a morbidly amount of time playing the game ‘Don’t Starve’.
Industry Jury
Bertine van Hövell
Eric Bartelson
Eric Bartelson has been working as a game journalist for magazines like PC Zone Benelux and GameQuest since the nineties. He co-founded Control Magazine and organized events like Control Conference, Control Gamelab and the former Dutch Game Awards. Nowadays he works as a freelance journalist for various magazines, websites and tv.
