Meet the special select Jury for the Pavs 2021! Our Jury were invited from all over New Zealand and Australia to celebrate our awesome community! Over a month-long judging period, the jury has played and discussed finalists from each category and voted for winners. A big thank you to all of them for making the Pavs possible! See you at the Awards night!
Please note: Jury members with conflicts of interest did not vote for any games that shared the category with the conflict. For more details on our awards process, have a read of our transparency & the nz game awards guide.
Robert Yang
Indie
Robert Yang makes surprisingly popular games about gay culture and intimacy. He is most known for his historical bathroom sex simulator The Tearoom and his homoerotic shower sim Rinse and Repeat, and his gay sex triptych Radiator 2 has over 150000 users on Steam. He used to teach at NYU Game Center.
Moth Loths
Ludic Poet
Moth is a freelance artist, indie dev and ludic poet making art and games about everything ranging from climate collapse to minor relationship drama. When she’s not screaming in a cave somewhere, you’re most likely to find her building entire worlds that will likely never see the light of day.
Humphrey Hanley
Creative Director
Humphrey Hanley is a Content Creator, Accessibility Specialist, Videographer, Photographer, and coffee lover from Wellington, New Zealand. While broadcasting on Twitch, he focuses on motivating and inspiring people to make sure there’s one thing in every day that makes it worth being awake!
Lisa Blakie
Narrative Designer and Community Director
Lisa is an award winning Narrative Designer and the Community Director for mobile free-to-play developer Runaway Play. Prior to joining Runaway she wrote an honours dissertation about indigenous storytelling in video games.
Ella Oberschneider
Hi! I’m a self teaching student and startup game developer/technical artist using Unreal Engine. My partner and I recently founded studio Tales Tenebrous as part of an ambitious ongoing artistic narrative game project. I have a degree in Physics and Mathematics, and a passion for games and stories.
Vee Pendergrast
Operations Manager
Vee is a former managing director for an indie game company in Perth, West Australia who became passionate in government stimulus for the video games industry. Vee has worked on the games programs for Screenwest, SAFC, Screen Tasmania and NZ’s own CODE as well as assisting Screen Queensland and IGEA
Jonathan Chey
Indie Developer
Spent 15 years in PC/console development at large studios (most notably at Irrational Games which I co-founded in 1997) and the last 10 years as an indie during which time I’ve managed to ship a grand total of two games – luckily I like both of them though.
Cherie Davidson
Cherie “Games Midwife” Davidson is a videogame programmer and producer who has worked on multiple award winning titles (Untitled Goose Game, Dreams, Tearaway Unfolded, Necrobarista, Paperbark).
Most weekends you can find her digging around in her veggie patch or sipping a double shot soy mocha.