Serious Games Awards: Winners and Finalists by Year Across Four Programs

Serious games awards recognize games built to train, teach or change behavior. Four programs publish winner lists that this site records. They differ in who judges, who can enter and when results appear. Dates below are as of November 2026.

Serious Games Showcase & Challenge (SGS&C)

SGS&C runs at I/ITSEC in Orlando. The 2026 event lasts from November 30 to December 3, and the award ceremony is on December 3. The 2026 submission window ran from May 1 to September 11 and is closed. The rules ask for a target audience aged 12 or older, an original game with measurable learning objectives, and a team representative at the conference. Student entries must be built primarily by students.

The 2026 rules sort awards by audience, into Government Audience and General Audience categories. The 2025 results add Best Student-Developed Game, Best XR Game, Innovation, People's Choice and Students' Choice. The Serious Games Showcase and Challenge winners for 2025 have a page of their own.

International Serious Play Awards

Professional studios, in-house training teams, independent designers, university teams, nonprofits and student creators can all enter. In the 2026 cycle, commercial and in-house digital entries were due March 15 and student and tabletop entries June 1. Sector awards are presented in June at Serious Play Conference Europe, and student and special awards in August at Serious Play Conference North America. Medals come in gold, silver and bronze, and the Serious Play Awards winners for 2025 appear in the table below.

Games for Change Awards

Creators submit their own projects. Entries must be digital and fully playable, except board and tabletop games, which compete only in their own category. For the 2026 cycle a game had to launch between January 1, 2025 and March 31, 2026, and the fee was $75 per project, waived for board and tabletop games. The deadline was extended to February 16, 2026, and the winners were announced on July 21, 2026 during the Games for Change Festival in New York.

BAFTA Game Beyond Entertainment

The category sits inside the British Academy Games Awards. Wikipedia describes it as honoring games that "deliver a transformational experience beyond pure entertainment." It was first presented at the 14th ceremony, and the 22nd went to Despelote. BAFTA's own pages showed an access-denied message in November 2026, so entry rules and the ceremony date are not stated here.

SGS&C is the only one of these serious games awards with a finalist list for almost every year: the file holds 344 finalist rows and 118 winner rows. A winner row repeats a game that also appears as a finalist. Games for Change has finalists for 2020 and nominees for 2023, and BAFTA lists five nominees for each ceremony. The Serious Play Awards winners are recorded as medals instead of finalists.

Serious games awards by year are easiest to read through the Serious Games Showcase and Challenge winners page for 2025 and the program pages below. Winners and finalists by year are listed only where a source names them. Where a year has no list, the page for that program says so instead of leaving a blank.