The Nuovo Award or Innovation Award is an award given at the Independent Games Festival (IGF), an annual event that takes place during the Game Developers Conference, one of the largest gatherings of the indie video game industry.[1][2][3] The award is given to honor "abstract, shortform, and unconventional game development which advances the medium and the way we think about games".[3][4] The award was designed as a way for art games to compete with traditional indie games, and the winner was originally selected from a group of finalists and given a prize of US$2,500.[3] In 2011, the IGF increased the prize money to US$5,000 due to the increased quality of the entries.[5]
The former IGF chairman Brandon Boyer described the Nuovo finalists as experimental games that attempted to distinguish themselves from established conventions, and would not fit in any of the other IGF award categories.[2][4] Nominations for the award are made by the IGF's judges. Eight finalists are chosen by an elected jury from among the nominees and a few others are given honorable mentions if they receive insufficient votes to become finalists. The winner is decided from among the finalists by jury voting.[3] Jury members include notable game developers and previous winners and finalists, including individuals such as Jason Rohrer, Paolo Pedercini, Ian Bogost, and Daniel Benmergui.[3][5] In the fourteen years since the award's debut, 105 games have been nominated as finalists, while 84 games have been chosen as honorable mentions. Sixteen games have won the award, the first being the platformer Between (2009), while the latest to be awarded is Anthology of the Killer (2024).