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, Career/Lifetime Achievement and Awesome Achievement).
The jury of the Dutch Game Awards 2023 is not yet complete.
More jury members will be added in the upcoming weeks.
Game jury
GlitchKraft
Willem Hilhorst
Willem works as Media Manager Games and Online at Nederlands Instituut voor Beeld & Geluid. In particular, he specializes in video games, interactive media and film. Willem is actively working on the archiving and preservation of games and for this he maintains contacts with various game makers, publishers, journalists and employees from the (inter)national games industry. In his spare time he writes about games, plays board games and practices archery.
Willem has been working for Beeld & Geluid since February 2021, where he started as a Storyteller for the new Media Museum. In this, he was active for the “play” and “tell” zones, which opened in February 2023. He completed a bachelor’s degree in Film and Television Studies at Utrecht University with a minor in Game Studies. During this bachelor, he worked for Nintendo of Europe in Frankfurt am Main as a Digital Media Creator. During the Master’s degree in Journalism & Media at the University of Amsterdam, he worked for the educational children’s program ‘Het Klokhuis’ as a researcher.
Paul van der Made
Paul was only 30 when he suffered a severe brain hemorrhage. Thanks to his rehabilitation he is able to participate in numerous things again. However, his hobby of playing video games remains a challenge. In 2016 he founded the HiPerks Foundation with which he wants to stimulate game development for people with disabilities.
Len Maessen
Ressa Schwarzwald
Ressa is the CEO and founder of Gameowdio, an audio outsourcing studio based in Rotterdam. Her main focus is audio direction, visioning and management. Starting 2009, Ressa has worked as game audio generalist: freelanced, directed audio at Aterdux Entertainment (Legends of Eisenwald), worked as audio producer for TinyBuild (Secret Neighbor, Totally Reliable Delivery Service, Party Hard), now one of her biggest goals is building audio team at CM Games (Nitro Nation franchise, Into The Radius).
She creates audio teams from scratch and manages them, working with outsourcing audio specialists from all over the world. Her real passion is implementation of effective and elegant audio strategies for developers to save time and money when creating great experiences.
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.
Céline Veltman
She creates audio teams from scratch and manages them, working with outsourcing audio specialists from all over the world. Her real passion is implementation of effective and elegant audio strategies for developers to save time and money when creating great experiences.
Applied Jury
Mathijs Konings
Mathijs Konings is the Chief Product Officer at Tover, where he leads a talented team in developing innovative products and services that greatly improve the lives of people living with dementia and other cognitive challenges. With a strong commitment to design thinking and human-centered principles, Mathijs and his team create engaging experiences that foster social interaction, physical activity, and mental stimulation.
Having built and managed high-performing teams throughout his career, Mathijs has successfully guided numerous products from concept to market launch. His extensive expertise in product management, design, and innovation, combined with a deep understanding of emerging technologies and market trends, is an important driving factor for Tover’s success.
Under Mathijs’s leadership, Tover’s products have gained widespread acclaim and are sold in markets worldwide, including North Western Europe, Northern America, and Australia. This global presence reflects the universal demand for their impactful solutions.
Passionate about making a positive impact, Mathijs works closely with customers and stakeholders to ensure Tover’s products surpass expectations and deliver tangible results. His team actively transforms the lives of individuals with cognitive challenges and enhances the quality of care they receive.
Joris Dingelstad
Joris Dingelstad graduated from the Hogeschool voor de Kunsten Utrecht with a degree in Game Design in 2022. That same year, he joined HackShield as a Developer and Designer. During his academic journey, he primarily focused on enhancing the game experience to make it more pleasing and satisfying for players. At HackShield, he leverages this knowledge, aiming to design educational interactions for players. Within the team, he applies his expertise to craft systems that empower his colleagues to work, design, and create with greater efficiency.
Furthermore, since 2020, Joris has been assisting with the Gamefeel course at the Hogeschool Voor De Kunst Utrecht, a program tailored for budding Game Design students.
Hanneke Scholten
Hanneke Scholten is an assistant professor at the University of Twente and co-director of the Games for Emotional and Mental Health (GEMH) Lab. In her PhD project at the Radboud
University, she designed and tested a game to help youth quit smoking. In this project, she collaborated with game designers and youth. In her position as postdoctoral researcher at GEMH Lab, she focused on understanding and improving youths’ emotional and mental health through technology. In her current positions at the University of Twente and GEMH Lab she is driven to build interdisciplinary collaborations through which digital experiences can be developed that matter to youth and improve their wellbeing. Furthermore, she strives to implement scientifically proven products in the real-world to have an impact on as many youth as possible. Hanneke is a vocal proponent of the potential impact of interactive media on emotional and mental health. To this end, she has published her work in international journals and delivered over 60 presentations and workshops on this topic to audiences of diverse backgrounds, including the scientific community, parents, youth, teachers, designers, and psychologists.
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
Juney Dijkstra
She was formerly a Business Owner at Paradox Interactive, responsible for business development & sales of a portfolio of 60+ titles generating $ 15m USD revenue YoY. Prior to that, she was Lead Producer at SOEDESCO Publishing, building the publishing pipeline & team for PC & console to support the worldwide release of 50+ games digitally & at retail, while also developing & running the in-house porting team. She obtained her Game and Media Technology MSc. degree at Utrecht University, alongside organising and running a variety of large scale events in the game development industry.
Bertine van Hövell
Martijn Schenderling
The jury of the Dutch Game Awards 2023 is not yet complete.
More jury members will be added in the upcoming weeks.
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.
