What Good are Award Shows?
Being snowed in prompted me to listen to the latest and nearly one month old Out of the Game episode. Listening to Jeff Green’s ranting criticisms of the Spike Video Game Awards was comfortably pleasing, mainly because I tend to agree completely with his sentiments. Yes the VGAs are an embarrassing product of Spike TV. Yes they pander to a lowest common denominator. Yes they are full of tasteless humor and sexualization. And yes, is all obvious to everyone. This was true the last time I paid attention to them a couple of years ago and Jeff’s comments affirm for me nothing has changed. There’s an additional comment I have about the show though: are these awards, or any form of video game awards, even necessary in the first place?
Award shows are 100% promotional, no secret there. What makes an award meaningful is that it rewards achievement that otherwise would not have been recognized. Consider the Oscars. They cultivate a niche for a certain kind of a movie, a kind that’s not necessarily going to be a blockbuster, or that the general public may not otherwise watch. It places films in a culture resembling more of a meritocracy than the regular commercial world. Of course, there certainly is a large overlap between commercial success and award material when it comes to film. True Grit is being described as “Oscar bait” but would have earned its popularity without that association. But there are also lots of films that gain their reputation from awards. And even when the direct association between the Oscars and success of each individual film isn’t apparent, the Oscars (not to mention other film awards) contribute to a culture of consumers who are interested in and want to support films in this category.
Do the VGAs cultivate a merit-based category distinguished from the regular popular games? I suppose we’ll never see Wii Sports or Farmville win any awards, despite their astronomical profitability, but when the nominees and winners are represented by Call of Duty: Black Ops and Mass Effect 2 then the awards seem to be an extension of the regular commercial world rather than an alternative. I don’t mean to imply that any of the winners haven’t earned their GOTY titles, but is there any difference at all between aiming to win a VGA award and aiming to make money on launch day? I guess a better question is whether or not videogames are diverse enough to make this distinction. And still another question, what mainstream media outlet is going to be interested in hosting a show promoting games like S.T.A.L.K.E.R. and Moonbase Alpha?
« Contagious is Public Hari II »
3 comments
The award shows don't interest me, mostly because the sorts of games that I like never really come up. Did Retro Game Challenge get any nominations last year? Did Wario Ware DIY get any mention this year? Eh.
I really don't spend a lot of time thinking about them. Like you seem to be suggesting, they don't seem to have any criteria for gauging the value of a game beyond its popularity.
I really don't spend a lot of time thinking about them. Like you seem to be suggesting, they don't seem to have any criteria for gauging the value of a game beyond its popularity.
May I add a comment to an old post?
My observation of the VGA's is that they have improved a bit over the years in regards to the nominees. Some of them are a little more obscure, and others are games which caused a lot of chatter on the internet, but may not have been on the radar for mainstream gamers. However, these are still outliers in a very large list of safe, mainstream nominations. The best I can say is that they're no longer as blatant as the first or second year of VGA's, in which games were nominated before they were released, a feat which not only showed how rigged the decision process was, but also sadly didn't matter, because those games probably would have been nominated by gamers anyway.
In any case, I can think of one difference between the two industries. Winning an Oscar doesn't necessarily make a film a box office success, but it can grant an actor or director an extra level of respect and notoriety, which film producers can then exploit whenever those people work on a film which is far more mainstream friendly ("Academy award winner Joe Schmoe, in a broad comedy which will make us bank..."). That is one way in which their worth shines. With the VGA's, a victory is seen as a way to push for extra sales of the winning game, via a special edition re-release or something. The victory doesn't have much bearing, it would seem, on future productions.
From that perspective, film's approach is complimentary. The tentpole productions fund the artsy stuff, but the artsy stuff can give a false air of legitimacy to push a would be tentpole into prime position. Gaming, on the other hand, is using its award ceremony to squeeze the last blood out of games which are already old news. It's the shortest of short sighted.