TheGame Awards, hosted every year by Geoff Keighley, are meant to be a celebration of games and the industry as a whole. I’m fully aware there’s been equal love and ridicule to the show, and to play my cards now, I do end up somewhere in the middle, while leaning positive.
Not so much this year’s show though. 2023’s VGA continued a practice I’ve not loved about the show before, and heavily dipped into an aspect I understand, but think there’s a line.
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World Premiere
In the wise words of Gleeman Vox fromRatchet: Deadlocked: “Commercials commercials commercials commercials!”. The VGA saw its fair share of glorified commercials this year, and y’know, I do get it.
For whatever you or I may feel about The Game Awards, it’s obvious this is an awards show that really cares about the industry it’s talking about. The Oscars have become nothing but a showcase for a host who thinks they’re funny (and they never are), and even the Tonys gets in hot water for trying to remove categories with the faintest of reasons.
The Game Awards, however, lets developers give their speeches in full and doesn’t cut the mic (the Oscars seriously do this; it’s embarrassing). The Game Awards keep their jokes and skits short, and they never forget the topic is games. Even the stage numbers are only from game soundtracks, and they don’t overdo them just for the sake of padding air-time.
But, they also show a ton of trailers for upcoming games, and with Geoff at the wheel, we even get to see tons of trailers for games announced for the very first time. Admittedly, this still feels like part of the celebration. The Oscars could do with showing movie trailers instead of having the host bather on about nothing (I swear my Oscar hate is over for the time being). But, there’s a line, and I feel the 2023 show crossed over it.
The first hour in, I remember nearly screaming at the TV, “Just get to the awards already!” They’d only given one or two, not counting the pre-show, which for some reasonalsoshowed trailers and gave awards despite technically not being part of the actual awards show. Sorry if you missed Best Family Game; that was before the show! Just after some world premieres of course. Same with the E-Sports and Content Creator categories, all done before Geoff stepped on stage.
Like I said, the VGA does feel like it cares about its subject, and adding into the hype train cycle is ultimately fine by me. When it becomes the main focus, though, I wonder why they couldn’t have just been saved forGamescom, which Geoff Keighleyalsohosts. I get that they want viewers to stay for the trailers, but we came for the awards first and foremost.
Cut The Fat Not The Meat
My distaste for these trailers came around once Geoff Keighley just started rattling off award categories and the winners, back-to-back-to-back, withoutanyof those winners getting to go on stage to discuss their win. This has happened before at the VGA, but man, it’s been a while since there were this many categories done dirty like that.
It happened so much. I wish I could tell you each one, but I swear this was at least half the categories! The one that stood out to me the most was Best Indie Game, because whilenoneof the awards deserves anything less than getting time on the stage, Best Indie Gameespeciallyneeds to be presented on the stage. The poor category’salready had controversyonce this year, so this is the worst time to just brush it off to give trailers the air-time instead. Not to mention the fun joke involvinglast year’s long speechfelt hollow when Hideo Kojima was allowed to chew up air time to say he and Jordan Peele have a new game coming and then nothing else about it.
“But what about the trailers you liked, Wyatt?” I hear you ask. Well, person I invented, IwishI could tell you, but frankly, we were so swimming in trailers I plum forgot most of them.
I remember the Brothers: A Tale Of Two Sons remake, Pony Island 2, SEGA’s announcement to bring back old IP, and Blade. Not joking, that’s it. My eyes and ears glazed over until it was time for an award. I looked at the clips uploaded by themselves later and mostly went, “Oh yeah, they did announce that, that should be cool.” The hype train chugged for a bit, and then stopped for gas, and stayed there forever, because trains don’t run on gas but no one told the conductor.
I didn’t care for this year’s show. I barely remember the world premiers, and I’m so angry they breezed through a lot of the awards that I don’t even have takeaways on who did or didn’t deserve the win. I was marketed to on a night I expected to be happy for developers and voice actors. Way more than usual. And it’s hard to be happy about that.
