This story is part of our new Future of Gaming series, a three-site look at gaming’s most pioneering technologies, players, and makers.
You could make an argument that the cultural weight of any given artistic medium can be measured, at least in part, by the respect afforded to its award shows. The Oscars, the Booker Prizes, the Emmys, Grammys, Tonys, and more, aren’t just opportunities for the world’s various famouses to get dressed up and hand statues to each other; they’re also a way for society, as a whole, to say that film, literature, TV, etc., matter enough for us all to sit up and take notice of their best and most brilliant elements.
This does not bode especially well for the future of video gaming, and its reputation as a whole.
This year marks the 10th installment of The Game Awards, the show that pretty much everyone in the gaming sphere acknowledges is the “best” version of an awards show that the artform has ever had. Masterminded by journalist Geoff Keighley (working off of his experiences with long-rebranded TV network Spike’s own Video Game Awards in the previous decade), the TGAs set the tone early on by eschewing Hollywood almost entirely, skipping the networks for streaming so that Keighley could put together a show that more closely matched his vision (and length) for a proper awards program. If you simply look at the list of “Game Of The Year” winners from its annual broadcasts since 2014, they sketch out a fairly satisfying (if also overly safe and corporate-focused) vision of the last decade of gaming, with well-acclaimed masterpieces like The Witcher 3, Zelda: Breath Of The Wild, and Elden Ring all dominating the lists.
But a decade in, The Game Awards have also revealed the cracks in their own structure, and in the world of gaming culture/critique/conversation as a whole. These are big, systemic issues, and if gaming—still just half a century old, as anything approaching a subject of serious critical discussion—is going to continue to evolve and grow, they need to be addressed if the artform is ever going to clear the (admittedly low) bar of having an award show as culturally relevant as, say, the Oscars.
What’s the biggest problem with The Game Awards?
The biggest issue that’s faced Keighley and his team, all this time, is one that’s always been an issue between gaming and the legions of writers, video makers, and journalists who cover it: Navigating the tricky, frequently murky relationship between critics, developers, and the gigantic corporations who publish most major games (and who typically serve as the go-betweens between the two aforementioned parties in the process). Keighley has always been upfront about the financial relationship between the TGAs and the major gaming studios, with Nintendo, Sony, Microsoft, and many more all helping to foot the bill for the TGAs through various corporate sponsorships (and with people like Nintendo president Doug Bowser, Activision’s Rob Kostich, and Microsoft’s Phil Spencer all sitting on the show’s “advisory committee,” which, in turn, selects which critical outlets will produce each year’s list of nominees).
Which makes sense, for the studios, who clearly see The Game Awards as an advertising opportunity first and foremost. Sitting down to The Game Awards is an exercise in weathering ads both internal and external, whether you’re watching the actual commercials that run between each segment, or the trailers and game announcements that are actually inserted into the show proper (and which frequently take pride of place over actual awards). That latter part is a feature, not a bug, as far as Keighley’s concerned: In a 2017 interview with our colleagues at Kotaku, he noted that “We’re half an awards show, half a sneak preview of new games and announcements,” adding that “other people have run that experiment” of trying to do a show that’s solely focused on awards, and failed to capture the public’s attention.
Which might be accurate—it’s worth noting that Geoff Keighley has a lot more experience, and success, running a gaming awards show that people actually watch than we do—but it still speaks to an uneasy tension situated at the heart of gaming’s relationship with itself, at the interplay between journalism, marketing, and critique. Keighley conceives of the show as a hybrid creature, but doesn’t seem to perceive that it’s one whose various heads threaten to pull it apart as they follow their individual drives: Marketing requires access and participation from the companies providing all these hot scoops and new trailers, while genuine critique requires distance from those same processes, and the show’s two elements—weighted heavily toward the former, with Keighley going out of his way to acquire the biggest reveals and trailers to get eyeballs on his show—sit ill-at-ease with each other. It also just looks bad; if the Oscars, the benchmark Keighley and his team are clearly shooting for, filled their run time with commercials for upcoming movies, it’d be labeled tacky at best.
(To be extremely clear, we are not suggesting any support for tired old allegations that corporations are somehow “buying” awards or good review scores for themselves, an easy fallback for people to resort to when these issues get too complex, and pretty clearly patently untrue. But we will argue that crowding the show’s genuine critical content with an onslaught of corporate-provided marketing serves to diminish the rigor being put into the selection of the awards themselves.)
Where do gaming awards show go from here?
There’s some hope that at least some of the issues affecting The Game Awards might resolve themselves with time, and continued success. A certain fundamental lack of confidence is central to the current relationship between the show and the studios—because, real or not, there’s a perception that the TGAs need buy-in from the studios being covered far more than the studios need them. As the show continues, and continues to draw eyes, then its power as a platform will inevitably build, and the idea that Keighley has to go hat-in-hand to EA, Ubisoft, Nintendo, etc. to get a new crop of trailers to show off each year will presumably diminish.
At the same time, though, it feels like there’s a need for a more stable body of independent minds calling some of the shots for how things are run each year. Say what you like about the Academy Of Motion Pictures Arts And Sciences, but, as a fraternity made up of actual filmmakers as much as studio execs, it carries a level of clout and independence that leaves the Oscars at least partially insulated from corporate pressure. Despite the presence of people like Metal Gear Solid creator Hideo Kojima on the show’s advisory committee, the TGAs carry precious little input from actual game creators, as opposed to the business types pulling companies’ strings, and it hurts the show’s ability to stand up for itself. Opening voting up to journalists, and the public, has obvious democratic merits, but it similarly leaves The Game Awards without a hard core of defenders willing to assert the show’s independent identity. An established “Academy but for games,” made up of a blend of creators, writers, and thinkers, is a lofty, possibly ridiculous goal—but it’s also the sort of step that instills that vital confidence required when a show like this purports to speak for, and pass judgment on, an entire medium.
For now, though, the TGAs really are the only game in town: Criticize the show as we might, Keighley and his collaborators’ blend of marketing and celebration has seized the cultural momentum and come closer than anyone, ever, to creating an independent awards show that reckons with gaming on its own terms. (Cynically, we might note that the show’s deep obsession with marketing materials might simply be a reflection of gaming culture as a whole, so beholden as it is to hype/backlash cycles, rather than any kind of aberration.) But that level of primacy is also why we have to hope for the show to be better, to transcend mere marketing in favor of a more pure celebration of games, and creators, rather than the corporate machines that oversee their production. Right now, Keighley has created the biggest industry show on the planet; we hold out hope that, in the future, he might transform it into something that’s more of a a celebration of art than a series of ads for commercial products.