If you missed it, the so-called Game “Awards” was broadcast a few days ago. I don’t usually pay a lot of attention to the event – I have my own End-of-Year Awards to prepare for, after all! – but one particularly striking image has come out of the highly-commercial event, and I wanted to share my two cents.
Overshadowing the awards ceremony itself, and even many of the award winners, was a simple phrase that was shown on a massive prompt facing the stage: “Please Wrap It Up.” After being given as little as thirty seconds to speak upon receiving an award, the message would be displayed to developers and award-winners – before music would begin to play and they’d be ushered off-stage. Out of the entire three-hour broadcast, barely ten minutes was given to the award-winners themselves – who are, surely, supposed to be the stars of any awards ceremony. The rest of the time was dedicated to advertisements, trailers, speeches by the presenters, and even musical acts. Some awards weren’t even presented at all, being skipped over in a mere couple of seconds.
I’m far from the only person to have noticed this, and that’s surely because the Game “Awards” has become incredibly unbalanced. By prioritising trailers and presenters plugging upcoming games live on stage over the actual awards, the Game “Awards” is in danger of losing its audience. People turned up hoping to see their favourite titles of the year being honoured, not ushered off-stage after thirty seconds to make way for an incoherent ramble from an overhyped developer about his latest (completely unseen) title. Yes, I’m talking about Hideo Kojima. Or to make way for yet another trailer or commercial – practically all of which, this year, were entirely CGI creations that didn’t show any gameplay.
There’s a line to walk here. I think a lot of folks would agree that the likes of the Academy Awards and Golden Globes, which honour the best films of the year, can be pretentious and can feel like an industry congratulating itself and inflating the egos of its stars a little too much. Fewer and fewer people pay attention to the Oscars and Golden Globes as a result; those broadcasts have been losing viewers by the boatload over the past few years.
But would more people tune in to the Oscars if half of the awards weren’t presented on-screen, actors and directors were given less time to speak, and the broadcast was overstuffed with adverts and trailers? I mean, more than half of the Game “Awards” three-hour presentation consisted of trailers and adverts. That seems excessive, and there has got to be a way to strike a better balance.
The creators and producers of the Game “Awards” are trying to frame the event as video gaming’s equivalent to the Oscars or the Golden Globes… but if the games industry wants that kind of prestige, the ceremony has to be handled better. Right now, it’s an overblown advertisement – worse, somehow, than the likes of E3, because at least with E3 I knew from the start what I was getting into. The Game “Awards,” by putting its emphasis on the statuettes it plans to hand out, feels deliberately dishonest in its marketing. But at least it has that in common, rather ironically, with many of the video games it advertises.
It feels incredibly disrespectful to developers to invite them to a fancy ceremony under the guise of potentially receiving an award – only to then give them in some cases literally no time whatsoever on the stage to accept that award. If these awards are, as the organisers would like you to believe, the most prestigious in the industry… shouldn’t they want to see people receiving them? Shouldn’t that part of the broadcast be the biggest deal? After all, if receiving a Game Award is so unimportant that it’s relegated to a footnote in its own live presentation, why should anyone give a shit about who the winners or nominees are? If the titular trophies are so meaningless to the Game “Awards” itself… what’s the point?
I don’t like to throw the word “scam” around lightly; I think too many people do that these days, leading to the word’s impact and severity being diminished. But if you entice audiences to turn up to your event under false pretences… we’re definitely getting close to “scam” territory. The Game “Awards” pretends to be an Oscars-style ceremony with fancy suits and statuettes, then it flips the script on viewers and shows them basically two-plus hours of ads and barely ten minutes of actual award-winners. What else can we call such duplicity?
Maybe some folks like tuning in to watch the trailers – and that’s okay. I like a good trailer as much as the next person, and it can be fun to look ahead to games that we might hope to enjoy in the months and years to come. Some of these trailers can be well-made, with creative visual effects, great soundtracks, celebrity endorsements, and much more. But that isn’t the point I’m making. If I choose to watch ads and trailers, that’s up to me and I can do that all I want. But if the Game “Awards” pretends to be an awards ceremony just to trick me into watching two hours of ads… well, I don’t appreciate that.
And let’s be honest: that’s exactly what’s happening here. The organisers of the Game “Awards” would ditch the statuettes in a heartbeat and make the entire event nothing but trailers, celebrities, and advertisements if they could get away with it. They don’t give the tiniest of shits about handing out awards or honouring the best and most creative titles of the year – all they care about is selling more and more advertising space and making a metric fuckton of cash, and they’ve done that by diminishing and minimising the actual awards portion of the broadcast so much that it feels like a footnote.
So what’s the solution? I don’t really have one, if I’m honest. Maybe the complaints received about the “Please Wrap It Up” screen will prompt some minor changes, and perhaps for the next year or two you might see award recipients being given sixty or perhaps even ninety seconds to speak. But sooner or later the desperation to grab as much cash as possible will overwhelm the Game “Awards” organisers once again, and the excessive ad-to-award ratio will be back.
The only thing we can do, as consumers in this marketplace, is register our disapproval. Don’t tune in to the next Game “Awards” and let the organisers know that we care as little about their made-up trophies as they seem to. If fewer and fewer people tune in, and make it clear that the reason we aren’t bothering to watch is because of how unbalanced the broadcast is in favour of trailers and ads, maybe the message will get through. As we’ve seen with the collapse of E3, no event in gaming is sacred or safe – they rely on our viewership and patronage to remain relevant.
I won’t bother watching another Game “Awards,” because what’s the point? If the organisers care so little about the actual awards, why should I?
All titles mentioned above are the copyright of their respective developer, studio, and/or publisher. The Game Awards can be streamed now on YouTube. This article contains the thoughts and opinions of one person only and is not intended to cause any offence.
Trekking with Dennis 