It’s the time of year when you basically always feel slightly bitter. I’m talking about the awards season, of course, when tons of games take home trophies and plaques (or pictures of trophies and plaques) but not yours want win. But what is it really about? As a result of this week from Split screen Podcast, we talk about it and much more.
Fahey, Ash and me Start the episode by stepping back in time to the first video game awards shows that really had no idea what they wanted to be. The crown Gem of this starry voyage is light Cybermania 94, a 1994 televised video game awards show that featured a fake Hillary Clinton having her face blown off, and a short pro-wrestling segment. Somehow, it laid the groundwork for several other video game awards shows that continue to this day, including the DICE Awards and The Game Awards.
After realizing that awards are mostly bad and pointless, let’s move on to our first year Split screen Awards in which we succeed in winning the Gaming Oscars on the first try with decisive terms such as “Best emotionally manipulative moment in one Mario Game ”and“ best (read: worst) crisis. “Finally, we close with a discussion of the place of awards in the game industry and how they don’t really serve a purpose, but marketers definitely love them.
Get the MP3 Hereand view an excerpt below.
Nathan: The way The Game Awards votes is they have 95 media and influencer types and then polls online too. 90 percent of the votes are decided by the media and influencers, the remaining ten percent come from online surveys. I guess what The last of us 2The win really speaks to the homogeneity of the gaming industry – the fact that a lot of it is made up of people with similar tastes and backgrounds. In the end, a lot of people say, “Of course The last of us Wins. It is the great prestige game. “
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It’s the games that got the closest Oscar lure is to its own interesting term, isn’t it? Because at the Oscars, unlike The Game Awards, the awards themselves serve a purpose. I wouldn’t say it’s a good cause, but it is an existing one. At the Oscars, the awards themselves take center stage, and the institutional prestige of those awards means that while it is just an awards show, they keep the conversation going around the film for about half a year. And then when a film or a person wins an Oscar, they’re kind of hired – at least for a while. One of the most important things about getting an Oscar is that it guarantees you future and better work. You get paid more. You get more roles. If you’re a director or whatever, you can make bigger and better movies. Oscars decide what types of films are made.
People spend half a year promoting Oscars. You want to talk about awards shows as politics. The Oscars are literal politics. People fight to win them. I mean, the Oscars have at least one purpose, while the Game Awards are about announcements.
Fahey: They talk about the Oscars, and the nominations come out, and sometimes there’s a surprise like, “Oh, I didn’t think the Oscar crowd did that. I didn’t think they’d celebrate something like this this year. “The Game Awards nominations come out and you say,” There’s a list of the video games that we thought would appear in the Game Awards. ” There are hardly any surprises. You can use the nominations to guess what will happen.
I also wanted to point out the “Best Direction” award that we were talking about: Did you see who was honest about the “Best Direction” award? our article on how Last of us didn’t deserve to win it? George Broussard of Duke Nukem, the game that lasted 30 years.
Ash: God grant me the bloody boldness of this guy. I don’t understand how you can be a guy who was there Duke Nukem forever Complain about a game that is getting the best direction.
Nathan: I think the other thing to take into account here is that giving prizes for art in general is a damn bizarre practice. You talk about the games industry’s decades-long search for its own Oscars and say, “But why?” Why do we feel the need to do this? Why do we feel the need to give awards to say what the best art is when we don’t really consume art every day? I mean, yes, it can be useful to discover new things at times, but by and large it’s subjective. It’s personal taste. Awarding such awards only promotes the capitalist ideas of competition that we apply to consumer goods, but in an arena where they don’t even really belong. That leads to things like literal mini-industries emerging around things like the Oscars.
Even at a socket like KotakuWhy are we making a big post on the games of our entire publication of the year? It doesn’t really represent us ideally. We then also write about what we think individually. Just do each one. This is where the money ends for me when people say “this is the best game” or whatever. It’s all just one person’s opinion.
Fahey: I’m dealing with a problem to go a little behind the scenes. We’re discussing our game of the year and there is one game I had the best time with. For me it is Deer crossing. It changed the shape of my whole summer. It gave me something to do. If there was one game that would help me forget a bit of Covid, it was it Deer crossing. But apparently nobody else liked it, and Nathan hates it and …
Ash: I think it should be on the list too. I am with you, Fahey.
Fahey: We argued a bit, but in the end I said, “It will be on my personal list. I’ll be able to tell people why. “They’ll watch it and make my story of it, and in the end, I think that’s way more valuable than, ‘Here’s a game we all picked by the committee.’
Ash: In the end, it’s all personal taste.
Nathan: Law. The selection by the committee gives something only a hint of institutional legitimacy. But even then, what is it really? who is Kotaku? And yet, there is a financial incentive for many companies to send tons of free codes to websites during this time of year to get websites to declare them Game of the Year. Why are you doing that? Marketing. It’s nice to have a number of awards on your game box or in your trailers and commercials such as “This is the game of the year!” And here’s a fun fact: all you really need is a website or show to call your game a “Game of the Year” in some form, and there you go: you can put it on your box.
Fahey: A few years ago there was a game – one of those role-playing games from Europe that’s dark and brown – and an obscure little website named it Game of the Year, and not long after that there was an issue of Game of the Year. I forgot the name of the game, but you can search for “Game Of The Year Edition” and you will see a series of games that read, “How Was That Awarded?”
For all of that and more, check out the episode. New episodes drop every Friday, so don’t forget to like and subscribe to them Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or Stitcher. If you’re feeling inclined to do so, leave a review and feel free to send us a message at [email protected] with any questions or suggestion. If you want to yell at us directly, you can reach us on Twitter: Ash is @adashtraFahey is @ OnkelFaheyand Nathan is @ Vahn16. Until next week!
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