When I was in college I followed the Academy Award race with a passion. I was a theatre/film student eager to learn as much as I could about an industry I found fascinating and websites like awardsdaily.com and incontention.com were there to satisfy an audience that shared my interest. For two years I debated who the favorites were and who was the frontrunner, I ran to movie theaters on off-weekends to catch small oscar-bait films that would likely wouldn’t last long before being pushed out by big-money blockbusters, I rode the hype train all the way until Oscar night. It was a fun thing to do for a couple years, but in the end I learned something that made me uneasy with the whole Oscar race. It didn’t really matter.
People often get caught up in the moment and like to debate about “this thing” being better than “that thing”. In the end, time is the true champion and the only thing that can really tell the two apart. This becomes obvious when you start digging into the Academy Awards past. Kevin Costner beat Martin Scorsese for best director and Dances With Wolves won best picture over Goodfellas. There are puzzling cases of this nature throughout Oscar history. Such gross misjudgements are made because the Oscars aren’t actually about deciding what movie is Best Picture, it is about marketing your product to get the right votes. The Presidential Caucus of Hollywood.
One of the best things about video games, is that they are spared these eye rolling red carpet annoyances due to the youth of the medium. That doesn’t stop the myriad of award shows rolling out every year, but it helps keep them in perspective. The Last of Us rolled through the DICE awards earlier this month and racked up a ton of nominations for the BAFTAs, the next “who cares” games award ceremony. It is funny following The Last of Us’ wins, not that they are not well-deserved, but because they are accompanied by games like Assassin’s Creed IV and Grand Theft Auto V. It reeks of the same award show stench that Hollywood has so long over-indulged in.
Award shows have a dirty secret that they don’t like to let people in on: They are voted on by industry-only veterans. This seems like a good idea, who better to determine what is good or bad than the people who make the product? The problem is there are no requirement on what people need to play, no one checks to make sure people have spent time with Papers, Please or Gone Home. Academies send the same ballot to everyone and pray they get the right votes. This often results in AAA games patting themselves on the back, more people work on them, more people play them, so that is what inevitably rises to the top. Games like The Stanley Parable or Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons are dismissed to the Best Innovation Category, or Most Original Gameplay. The fact that a AAA marketing team is required to sneak into the Best Game category is puzzling and proves the lack of credibility these award shows have earned.
What is the best game of the year? How can we determine if The Last of Us is better than Grand Theft Auto V? Who can tell us? We can’t trust award shows. Publishers seem to slap “Game of the Year Edition” on any old title (see: Dead Island). Even the top ten lists and critic awards that release at the end of the year are far from definitive.
No one has time to play all the best games that came out in 2013. Even those who work in games journalism will find themselves overwhelmed by the sheer content that floods the market week-to-week. However, that is why top ten lists, and Game of the Year articles are the best way to discover what games really made an impression. No singular publication stands out, but by perusing different lists and reading different articles you can get a feel for what titles are mentioned consistently. Put more stock into publications and journalists whose opinions align with our own and read their specific lists. You may not find a clear cut victor, but you will get a snapshot of the landscape, and hopefully you will discover games that might have slipped under your radar.
This why top ten lists, award shows, and all the other garbage is actually important and why it is worthwhile. Not to celebrate games like Assassin’s Creed or Super Mario 3D World, they are already celebrated with their high-profile releases. Instead, these lists should try to draw attention to the titles players might have missed, the games that are every bit as good as Grand Theft Auto, but don’t have the budget. They don’t deserve their own “Best Indie Game” or “Best Downloadable” category, they should be shoulder to shoulder. These dumb sub-categories are no different that the Oscars having Best Animated Feature category or thinking a Best Screenplay nomination is all an indie film deserves. It is lazy, hamfisted, and unfair, it hinders these awards and cheapens their announcement.
Lucky for games, whoever wins the BAFTA or whoever won the DICE awards doesn’t matter. Lucky for games, no one really cares, it doesn’t boost sales numbers, it doesn’t change Steam sales, it just is what it is. The dirty secret that all Game of the Year announcements don’t want you to know is that no one actually played everyone of the hundreds of games that came out last year. No one really can tell you what the best game is. You should do the research and figure it out for yourself, but even more importantly you should play what you think is the best game this year.
Game awards aren’t going anywhere, they are way too popular. But I hope they don’t see any raise in importance. I hope game of the year lists and award shows can continue to be appreciated and dismissed as easily as they have always been. What good are awards when no one cares? No good at all, but that is what makes them fun.
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