About a week ago was the airing of the 2011 Video Game Awards. First off, the program was aired on Spike TV. If that's not a red flag against the quality and validity of this program then I don't know what is. If you don't know what I'm talking about then just consider that Spike TV is the home of programs such as TNA Wrestling.
It's quality, family programming at its finest. If that's a little too heavy for you then Spike TV has more, an infotainment show called Manswers.
Entertaining and informative! With such a classy network available it'd be stupid not to host the VGAs on Spike TV! For those who don't know, Spike TV used to be known as TNN which you may remember as the former home of WWF programming and countless reruns of Walker Texas Ranger. As you can see they've cleaned up their reputation since then.
The VGAs were hosted by Zachary Levi. Is that right? Who is Zachary Levi? I mean, not only do I have no idea who this person is but he has no credentials to be hosting this show other than he's a person and he can read. Try to follow the logic: for the Emmys you should get television personalities to host, for the Oscars movie stars, for the Grammys musicians. Makes sense, right? Shouldn't you be getting some video game personalities to host the show? It seems like most of the behind the scenes guys aren't the best public speakers or their secrecy would have us believe but between eloquent, humorous people like Cliffy B., Ken Levine, Ted Price and such there's plenty of people who could pull off hosting duties. Granted a lot of these types of guys appear throughout the show to present individual awards. That's cool. But for the host couldn't they at least get a major voice actor or something? Someone we'll know? Not just some random actor who happens to be free and likes money. Speaking of which, why was Charlie Sheen there? Huh?! His speech summed up my sentiments exactly. He was only there because someone called him and offered him money. He couldn't care less about video games or the video game audience. He was there to read a few lines and eat free food in between his full time 'winning' schedule.
Now, about the awards themselves. When there's a competition of many contenders vying for one prize then that prize becomes highly coveted and its value increases. When the amount of prizes multiplies with ambiguous differences among their qualifications then the value of each prize disappears. Basically, the VGAs are to award shows as a special needs class is to musical chairs. Here's an illustration:
Yay, everyone's a winner! Game of the Year, Studio of the Year, Gamer God, Best 360/PS3/Wii/PC/Handheld, Best Individual Sports, Best Team Sports, Best Song in a Game, Best Original Score, Best Graphics, Best indie, Best Downloadable Game, Best DLC, Trailer of the Year. This is a short sample of the total awards list but you can see that there's a lot of fat to be trimmed off of this roast. Not to mention that most of the awards had the same list of nominees to begin with. Plus, some of the awards don't even make sense. Best Graphics? Okay, best in what way? Say you wanted to argue the best graphics out of Bioshock and Gears of War. How would you do it? Which is more realistic? Which is more vivid? Which has a quantifiable lead on the others taking into account texture resolutions, simultaneous objects, density, etc.?
Which brings me to the most glaring flaw in the entire show: Most Anticipated Game. So we're handing out awards now based purely on hype rather than merit? Are we seriously going to do this? Fine, then lets go all the way. Let's start airing a bunch of never before seen trailers for brand new games during the show to get people excited about next year's games we want them to buy. Oh wait, they did that too! Fortnite, Mass Effect 3, Bioshock Infinite, The Last of Us, Metal Gear Rising, Tekken Tag Tournament 2 just to name a few all aired new trailers during the show. Summing up the show were musical performances by the Black Keys and Deadmau5. Again, neither have any significant connection to video games other than some people who like games may also like their music.
The VGAs are part popularity contest, part shameless advertisement, part charity award show, part B-Level celebrity variety show. In all fairness I'm sure the people that worked on the games that won awards worked very hard for a very long time. Your efforts deserve applauding...in the form of your salaries, the satisfaction of your customers and your promising future endeavors in the business. Maybe you take pride in these 'prestigious' awards but you know what the actual point of this was. A few games get to be rebranded with stickers and blurbs on the cover that'll offer little to no benefits while a few more names of hardworking teams get brushed off and forgotten. I hope that after party was worth it.
It's all bullcrap, man. People see the gaming industry riding high and they want to get a slice. They rent some girls and some less-expensive bands and attract the Madden crowd-the ones who already watch Spike.
ReplyDeleteFact is, no real gamers are watching these kinds of shows: Skyrim just came out!
Indeed, but I wanted to avoid just generalizing like that rather than presenting evidence. When I noticed it was on it was halfway over and I only half paid attention because I expected the Bioshock and Diablo 3 trailers were going to have release dates. When they didn't I started to wonder...'what exactly is the point of this show?'
ReplyDeleteWhat I think it is, is just a halfway show between E3 and GDC&TGS. There's been no big shows for months, all the big games are out, and most of the ad campaigns are over or fizzling out. Another thing, how can you have an annual award show on December 10th?! The year's not over yet you bastards! It's a clusterfuck...