I watched the Spike VG Awards, because they were there, and because as a video game blogger I should probably do such things. But mostly because they were there. And I knew they were going to be embarrassing and juvenile because they just are, despite the class imbued by Neil Patrick Harris.
But I guess what bugs me about the whole thing is (well, it’s a lot of things, but I’ll start with this one) is that the show isn’t so much a celebration of the stuff we’ve done this year in the game industry as it is about the previews. Like, okay, you guys at Bioware — we love you, have an award as a token of our love — you made Mass Effect 2 and it was pretty great but what we really wanted to know is what does Mass Effect 3 look like? I mean who really cares who wins Best Voice Actress — I’m sorry, best Performance by a Female Human? Don’t even show that award; nobody here on Spike cares about women doing things especially if they are getting lauded rather than just talking about boners. It would take up the time for more previews where there are teasers that don’t show any actual gameplay and then when those games actually come out we can ignore them like we’re sort of ignoring this year’s games now.
I used to subtitle this blog “Game Design Thoughts from a Late Adopter” and truncated it a bit because it just felt like a mouthful, but here’s me being a late adopter right now. I haven’t even gotten around to most of the award-winners on this year’s show. Red Dead, for example, I’ve just been slow in getting to when faced with the wonders of many other things that are more like me, and CoD Blops doesn’t interest me so much at all. But it’s not even about that now, that’s dead tech, just laud them a little so we can move on to the next greatest thing. It feels like the game industry is always in a rush to see what’s next, so much so that there’s no room for a breath of air anywhere to enjoy what we have made.
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