The Game Awards happened this past week.  Do you care who won any of the awards?  Probably not.  Let me tell you why!

The Game Awards

The Game Awards started in 2014, continuing the “proud” tradition left by the Spike VGA awards, before that collapsed under the weight of its own insanity.  The fact of the matter is that the Spike VGAs were not exactly respected in the games industry.  Having been in the games industry since before the first Spike VGA show in 2003, we never looked at them as recognition or praise.

The fact of the matter is that no one really considers these awards to be of any value or prestige.  Sure, I bet the people winning them are happy to get them, and the presenters are happy to get paid to be there, but no one actually cares.  The Game Awards have essentially no prestige, or gravitas, associated with them.  People speak with more reverence for Nickelodeon’s Kids Choice Awards, because at least those represent something.  For awards to have weight, they have to have prestige, and there’s a very real reason why The Game Awards don’t have it.

The Game Awards are obviously a commercial platform, rather than a celebration of creative achievement.  The entire time of the Spike VGAs, it was recognized that it was all an advertisement for some games that were nominated, or won, or as a platform for announcements for new games.  If we’re here to celebrate an accomplishment, then we shouldn’t be saying “Oh, wait, don’t forget we’re also doing this new thing!”.  You don’t watch The Oscars, and there’s an on stage interlude to announce that Brad Pitt has agreed to return in World War Z 2.

The Game Awards compared to The Oscars

If Games are trying to compare themselves to Movies, then it’s clear that The Game Awards are trying to be The Oscars, so let’s compare these;

The Oscars

• Overseen by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.
• Voted on by over 5000 voting members
• Almost 90 year history
• Explicit rules for voting and eligibility
• Does not take feedback from public for awards
• 21 active award categories, the most recent addition in 2001, and 12 discontinued categories.
• Some awards specifically target things that would take some expertise to discern, or otherwise would not be in the popular awareness, such as animated short, foreign film, editing, cinematography, and production design.
• Awards are given to the individuals responsible.

The Game Awards

• Overseen by one man at this point, Geoff Keighley
• Voted on by about 30 representatives from games media
• Including the Spike VGAs, a 13 year history
• Some rules for voting and eligibility
• Has fan voted awards
• 16 main award categories, 6 fan award categories, and a lifetime achievement award, for 23 total awards, though these categories vary from year to year.
• All awards are generally obvious to anyone, and do not dig so deeply as the Academy awards.
• Awards are mostly given to the game as a whole, rather than figuring out how to recognize the individuals responsible for exemplary work.

There’s more to be said, but this much gives us 3 important points where The Game Awards fail.

One: Scope.  There is plenty of criticism to be held against the Oscars voting pool, but at least there’s a lot of them, so it isn’t likely that they’re going to be swayed so easily.  The Game Awards small voting pool gives one voice too much power, and can lead to a personal preference actually swaying the result, rather than finding a broad consensus from a several thousand strong voting pool.  It also makes it much more difficult to have all viewpoints represented, hence the controversy of having only one woman invited to vote.  The fact that people have to be selected to vote brings up additional concerns about how objective they will be when voting.

Two: Categories. The Oscars have many long running categories, and while they do add or remove some, it is not common.  There are also categories that try to break down pieces of film production to honor people behind the scenes.  Granted those are never the parts viewers at home care about, but it’s there!  The Game Awards focus more on different genres of games.  Best shooter, best family game, best whatever.  In fact, for 2015, the game of the year, and the developer of the year had a 100% overlap of nominees, and had the same winner.  It was essentially the same award given twice.  It also doesn’t help that these categories change from year to year.  This year the “remaster” and “online experience” awards were removed, and in their place we got “multiplayer” and “art direction”.  Some of the categories don’t even work well.  Best mobile game?  Best indy game?  How do you define these things?  Is Candy Crush mobile?  It started as a browser game.  We need categories that are less based on artificial divisions, and try to dig down into the mechanics to the point where we can recognize more individual achievement.  We need more awards based on things like level design, character animation, new mechanics, world design, game balance, game stability even…  Simply going with game genre is a terrible idea, as a lot of games deserving of praise get there by breaking established genre definitions.  No Man’s Sky won for most anticipated game.  Why?  Is it a great flight game?  Is it a great exploration game?  Killer7 is a game that no one can look at and say it isn’t fascinating and deserving of respect, even if they hate playing it, but no one can define it, which is part of what engenders that kind of respect.

Three: Oversight. I don’t know Geoff Keighley, and he may be doing the best that he can as only one person, but there’s no support structure or credibility lending mechanism behind him.  For the awards to come down to a single person like this simply undercuts how much credibility they can have.  Instead of one person, there should be an organization, like the Game Developers Conference.

Pages: 1 2