Last night, The Game Awards, hosted by journalist and television producer Geoff Keighley, aired on … well, on the internet, streaming on Twitter, YouTube, Twitch, and just about every other platform imaginable. The successor to Spike TV's Spike Video Game Awards, the extravagant video event has the ambitions to be a major event in the culture of videogaming, crowning the top achievements of the year in a variety of categories while showcasing the newest, loudest, and most exciting in the industry.
The ambitions behind the program, which is now in its fourth independent iteration, are clear. The Game Awards feel like an attempt to emulate the monocultural pull of an award show like The Grammys, which honors and industry from that industry's perspective while also functioning as media spectacle. It's designed to appeal to both enthusiasts and industry insiders, honoring the work of the developers and artists building videogames while also catering to the interests of fans; awards for best game of the year are presented alongside appearances by industry luminaries and legends like Metal Gear Solid creator Hideo Kojima and Bethesda's Todd Howard. But there are also trailers for upcoming games, announcements from publishers, and a variety of sponsors catering to "the gamers." That uneasy balance of prestige and hype is intentional, and carefully crafted. "It's not The Oscars. It's not the [Game Developer's Conference] awards," Keighley told VentureBeat. "It's The Game Awards. It's a balance of awards and games that are coming in the future."
Perhaps for that very reason, every year I hear discomfort and frustration from my colleagues around The Gaming Awards. (Full disclosure: I represented WIRED on the panel of critics who judged the Awards this year, and WIRED has participated in the event in a judging capacity for several years.) Part of that is undoubtedly due to the alchemy of critical attention and commercialism inherent in the event's structure. To a lot of critics and creators, praising artistic merit while stoking consumer hype for future big-budget products presents an irreconcilable conflict. A commercial can't be a critical appraisal, after all, and trying to harmonize the two approaches is bound to be messy.
Some unease stems from more particular failures of the show itself. In 2015, for example, the Game Awards came under justified criticism for failing to include a representative proportion of women as judges. The gaming industry is large and complex, even by the standards of other global entertainment industries, and representing it accurately is a high challenge—one that The Game Awards hasn't always met.
Those shortcomings raise a frequent question: what kind of award show do videogames need? However, for all the ambition Keighley has shown in building the Game Awards, and for as entertaining as the event often is, I suspect that might be the wrong question. I'm not sure if games can or even should have the kind of central, broad-base awards show that film, television, and music have popularized.
The problem is that videogames are inherently an unstable medium. What it means to "create" a videogame is constantly in flux, and the staggering breadth of options available to game creators—in terms of technology, style, and content—continues to expand. Instead of than being one medium, the videogame industry is recombinant, pulling together elements of film, music, installation art, even theme park design, all held together by the duct tape of creative vision. You can see this tension in the genre divisions within The Game Awards' categories: what differentiates "Best Action Game" from "Best Action/Adventure Game"? Why is there one category for mobile games but none for any other platform? And what does the existence of a "Best Independent Game" award say about the relationship between independent and big-budget gaming?
It's not that the Game Awards has made right or wrong choices; it's that the choices are themselves intractably difficult to make. Drawing dividing lines between different kinds of games is challenging at best and impossible at worst. Someone will always be slighted, and whether purposefully or not, any award show trying to tackle gaming as a whole will end up imposing a value judgment on what is the "right" kind of game to make—and, by extension, what isn't.
Those value judgments become particularly tricky in an environment where aesthetic judgments are often politicized and weaponized against marginalized creators. There is no monoculture in games, as it turns out, but there are certainly toxic subsets of gaming fandom—and award shows seeking to unify the medium ultimately end up reinforcing an orthodoxy that can be used as fuel to attack more transgressive work.
It's important to honor the good work done in gaming. Good games should be celebrated, discussed, and given honors in keeping with their success. But doing so will mean accepting an industry that's fractured and a medium that exists only as a kind of amalgamation, drawing in talent and ideas from a million disparate directions. To celebrate games, we need to celebrate them where they are. And that's not just on our monitors or TVs or smartphone screens—it's everywhere.
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