We lied.

Last month, we said the Kunkel Awards would release Top 10 lists of finalists in each category, and the gaming community would have a week to influence the judges with their comments.

But the Excellence in Photography/Illustration/Infographic category only had nine entries total. And most didn’t tingle our judges’ toes. They looked like this…

…which isn’t a terrible way to communicate information to readers. But it isn’t award-winning, either.

So our judges quickly culled those nine entries to two. Then they debated so much, we declared a tie between two Ars Technica photo galleries.

While this category had fewer entries than any other — our three judges are slogging through 116 in Excellence in Feature Writing, for example — we hope it sticks around and grows. Why? Because visuals are just as important in video-game journalism as they are in video games themselves.

The best images accomplish two things at once: They look good and they say something. Detailed infographics aren’t enough. Pretty pictures aren’t enough. Award-winning visual journalism drops you in the middle of the action and yells in your ear — much like the best video games do.

Next week: Finalists for Excellence in News Video/Streaming.

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This entry was posted by Michael Koretzky on Thursday, February 11th, 2016 at 2:02 pm and is filed under who. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.