So this year I left about one or two comments about individual trailers but otherwise said nothing about the game awards. It seems to have become a hot topic this year, which isn't terribly surprising. It's been an awful year for games labour, no matter how many times keighley states it's been an incredible year for games.
I keep seeing discussions about how to fix it. I think the problem for me is way deeper than that. TGA has been rotten from the root from the day it started. But it's also based on a questionable premise to begin with.
Let's start with the TGAs, because that's an easier target. Let's be real - the show is a sad, plaintive commercial, desperate for legitimacy. The awards are fundamentally uninteresting to me not JUST because they only pretend to celebrate the actual devs and don't actually care about industry conditions, but because beyond that, even beyond its tendancy to only award the most expensive games and ignore all other factors, the awards part are obviously just a sideshow. The "award marathons" barely even bear discussing. We all know what this show actually is. A veneer.
And so the question of how to redeem it is moot to me because it was garbage from the start. This is what it's engineered to do. The GAs are a comfort show for upper management people who want to believe that nothing ever changes. That they're respected and prestigious, that pouring money into games will always be rewarded, that they're Good and Important and checking all the right Diversity boxes (just enough for a token acknowledgement, but of course, never enough to get in the way of Real Business). In return, they give keighley the privilege of being Winter E3 and he gets lots of ad money. A simple business transaction. The rest is dressing.
So if you can't fix the game awards - and I guarantee you can never fix it because keighley doesn't think there's anything wrong with it, and any changes will only ever be token - the next question is a much harder one, about what the value and goal of awards shows is to begin with. In some articles about this I see people asking "what's the alternative? Can we have our own show?" I think it's more complex than that. The "purer" examples of popular awards shows we look to like the oscars still tend to be celeb-focused and while that may draw viewership I don't think it actually accomplishes the goal people are looking for here, which is a sense of respect for craft. Meanwhile, the gamesmanship aspects of picking the "best of the year" are already fairly moot in an industry where every single website does its own GOTY. What's, genuinely, the value of game awards shows other than self-congratulation?
Well, personally, I think that value comes in at the margins. I've said this before but IMO the important parts of IGF are not actually who wins - because that barely buys you any recognition anymore - but who sees your game in the process. Other devs, publishers and potential partners, and more. It's why I write my IGF threads. I think that, as an awards show, its primary utility is in exposing a ton of people to a ton of otherwise overlooked games. That, to me, is its value, far more than giving trophies to people who already know their games are good because they have 20,000 reviews on steam.
But that leaves me questioning a lot of other awards, frankly. Is "cultural recognition" valuable if it only goes to the people at the top - often not even the people doing the bulk of the work, in the case of games that use heavy outsourcing? Is it valuable when often those people were laid off long before the awards show ever hit, and the only ones left to attend are the senior management who did the laying off? Is it valuable when we'll never know any of those people as more than names, because the industry's incredibly labour-hostile and secretive nature prevents them from speaking about their own work for years or decades? Idk. I think our industry has Problems and the instinct to copy hollywood's prestige culture fails at actually having a valuable reason to exist.
That, IMO, is the real struggle of awards shows. I don't actually know what a "good game awards show" looks like because I'm not sure an awards show is the solution we need to these problems. And I think it's why the TGAs' glorified trailer show gets attention where everything else doesn't. We don't value workers here, and so no one else does.
