Maybe I'm part of the problem by writing about this, but I've finally figured out how to put my feelings into words. So here's why I dislike The Game Awards, first on a surface level, then on a philosophical level (and also an incredibly petty level because sure why not).
The Surface Level Stuff
It's the coldest take in the world to say that The Game Awards aren't actually an awards show, right? I mean, the majority of televised awards shows also aren't awards shows, but with TGA, it's so nakedly and openly not an awards show that it puts every other awards show to shame. Award categories are vague and have almost nothing to do with the way games are made, which leads to some really confusing nominations. See the big kerfuffle that kicked up this year over whether or not Dave The Diver counts as an indie game. Or how Sifu was nominated for "Best Fighting Game" last year. And then there's the completely useless "Most Anticipated Game" aka the "Please Don't Suck" award. There's something incredibly crass about an award that is effectively a measuring stick for how effective some game's marketing campaign has been.
I feel like I'd be more annoyed with TGA's award categories if it wasn't clear that TGA also doesn't care too much about them. Any award they can let a Known Name (or better yet, an old fashioned Celebrity™️) give away, they give them the stage. Every other award gets rattled off in a lightning round through the show so they can show you another 5 trailers for upcoming games. Hell, even the games allowed stage time are given the bare minimum. It's no surprise there were so many tweets this year complaining about winners being given 30 seconds for their acceptance speech while the latest Honkai: Star Rail trailer gets twice that. So many of the people accepting awards tonight were trying to give heartfelt, touching speeches and rather than, you know, celebrating those moments TGA needs to rush them off the stage for more trailers. In doing so, TGA is never allowed to actually be about the people making games. Not to belabor the point here, but when you've worked on a game that won at The Game Awards (yes I am talking about myself here), it ultimately means less than the trailers that came before or after it.
If Geoff Keighley would just eschew the "awards" part of The Game Awards entirely and rebrand his show as something like "Geoff Keighley's Gamer Christmas Extravaganza" or something like that, I might actually respect him a lot more. But I don't know if that would actually solve the problem with The Game Awards.
The Philosophical Stuff
On a fundamental level, The Game Awards celebrates games in a way that is completely incompatible with what makes games worth celebrating. The Game Awards does not celebrate the craft of making games, nor does it celebrate games as an art form, at least not its own art form. There are other award ceremonies that do both, albeit with their own issues, but there's at least an outlet somewhere to celebrate what makes games special.
What The Game Awards is celebrating is the concept of games. Rather than celebrate the quirks of game design or the unique ways games create narrative and performance, TGA is perfectly fine celebrating the social construct of games and the idea that games are Important Consumable Media. This usually manifests by treating games less like a cultural object and more like a Brand™️. These games are products and they're products that make you feel things and isn't that just the best thing in the world? This is how you get an awards show every year that is more brand marketing than awards show. TGA isn't interested in the human aspect of games, it wants to celebrate games as products made by faceless companies. Sure they're good products and they may even merit being examined as such. Hell, when you think about it in that context, something like "Most Anticipated Game" actually starts to make sense.
But when your only lens of analysis is games as Products made by Auteurs (I promise I won't get on my soapbox about Auteur Theory here), you miss so much of the point about what makes games worth celebrating in the first place. You believe games are Important™️, but only insofar as the number of news articles written about the game, or how many people are watching the game on Twitch, or its metacritic score, or how much money it made the company that produced it. The craft of the game becomes secondary and the only faces worth highlighting are the bankable ones. It's how Geoff Keighley can go on stage and proclaim that games are "something we can all agree on" and have it ring both incredibly hollow and incredibly shallow.
Because The Game Awards only looks at games as Important Consumable Media, it betrays the insecurity and desperation inherent to The Game Awards, and by extension Geoff Keighley himself. Keighley and his creative team want so badly for you to agree with them that video games are Important™️. But when they say they want video games to be Important™️, they mean they want video games to be treated like movies and TV. It's why The Game Awards ultimately feels so much like the logical corporatized conclusion of something like The Oscars or The Grammys. All video games need to do to be viewed as Important Consumable Media is to put on a big fancy show with lots of commercials and occasionally hand out some trophies. It's why people like Al Pacino get invited to these things. It's why the official TGA twitter account posts stuff like "video games have finally made it" when the TV adaptation of The Last of Us becomes the second most watched show in HBO history or whatever.
This hyper corporatizion of TGA also means that Keighley will never say anything meaningful or impactful about the world in which we make video games so as not lose the ability (read: money) to tell people how Important™️video games are. This especially holds true this year as not once did anyone on stage ever speak to the historic number of layoffs that have been seen across the game industry despite record profits, and despite many of the people who made so many of the games TGA proclaims to be celebrating tonight being laid off. Likewise, Keighley never once acknowledged the Future Games class or their open letter asking him to recognize the Gaza Crisis. This isn't the first time Keighley remained silent about the greater game industry landscape. In fact, I think the only time Keighley has ever spoken truth to power on his show was when Hideo Kojima was fired from Konami. Games are not made in a vacuum, and refusing to acknowledge the context in which these games are being made and the effect it's having on the people that make them is simply cowardice.
At the end of the day it feels like Keighley is embarrassed by what video games actually are and so he tries to treat them like other forms of media to provide a veil of Serious Mature Important Media through the elaborate song and dance that is The Game Awards. But by refusing to actually treat games like unique important art created by people, by refusing to acknowledge the world in which we make games, The Game Awards can only ever aspire to be a 3 hour long sizzle reel of upcoming games and fake platitudes about the cultural significance of video games.
And Now, The Petty Bullshit
When I worked for a university game design program, one of our student projects was nominated for "Best Student Game" at The Game Awards, and the student team was flown out to LA to attend the show. Not only did Geoff Keighley not give the award to my students, but he didn't even let the winning team come up to accept the award and give a speech. Because the award was given away very quickly on the preshow before moving onto a trailer for a mobile gacha game or something.
The students had a lot of fun at the show at least.
