Monday, 4 December 2017

Editorial: Fixing The Game Awards

Fixing The Game Awards

          In May of this year I wrote an article titled “Fixing Ubisoft’s E3 conferences”, where I went over all the ways I’d improve Ubisoft’s presentation at E3 this year over prior years. Much to my surprise, they did basically everything I said they should, creating one of the best conferences at the show this year.

          I’m not saying I should take credit for that, but I’m totally taking credit for that. You can thank me later.

          So I thought it’d be fun to do it again and fix another annual gaming show that’s been getting quite a bit of hate over the last few years: Geoff Keighley’s The Game Awards! And if the show turns out to be way better this Thursday, you’ll know who to thank.

          First off, a few rules. Firstly, I can’t change the award categories, the nominations, or the winners. In this situation I’m just the stage manager who’s deciding how the awards show is being presented and I have no control over the awards themselves. And secondly, I can’t just say “the show should only be awards!” I have to include trailers, live performances, and the like.

          The biggest problem facing The Game Awards from being truly appreciated as the gaming equivalent to the Oscars or the Emmys (despite being a very different show thematically) is the fact that at some time it feels like an award show in name only. Last year only 2 awards were formally given away onstage in the first hour, with others being relegated to the pre-show or commercial bumpers. Last year Jim Sterling started calling the show “The Game Advertisements” instead, and for a good reason.

          While I disagree with TotalBiscuit’s opinion that time should be given to explain why each and every winner was chosen for the award (the show would likely go on for 4+ hours if they did that), I still think more emphasis should be put on the titular Game Awards themselves instead of the extra stuff gunking up the show. There are enough categories that you can get most if not all of them onstage to be presented awards. Why not spend time with that instead of all the other stuff?

          So that’s one big issue, the other big problem is all the extra stuff. While I’m not opposed to having some trailer world premieres (if they weren’t there I’d likely skip the show overall), it’s the advertisements and the live performances that tend to get in the way. For example, last year’s show featured two notable live performances: one was a heavy metal band performing music from DOOM. The other was the song used in Mannequin Challenge videos. Which one do you think the audience of gamers left enjoying more?

          If you’re gonna spend all that money to get live performances at your award shows, make it something that the fans will walk away from saying “Yeah, that was one of my favourite parts of the night.” I love watching live performances of video game music, and considering this year had some awesome scores in gaming, it’d be a shame if we got some flavour of the month pop song instead of honouring whoever will win the award for Best Music.

          And then…there’s the ads. The Game Awards last year featured what felt like nonstop ads, from the Assassin’s Creed movie, to three separate instances of the same Hearthstone ad, to a man walking around in a giant razor costume and interacting with the audience throughout the show. That was…memorable, to say the least.

          While ads are necessary to keep the show running, last year they got to the extent that awards were literally being shoved to the sidelines in favour of more ads. An easy fix for this would be longer commercial breaks. That way we don’t need to see the exact same ad three times over the course of the two hour show, because we can have all the ads bundled together in one long commercial break. No more being interrupted every 7 minutes to watch a Go90 or Elder Scrolls Online commercial, because we get them all done in one fell swoop!

          So that’s how I’d fix the show: more emphasis on the awards, only have live performances if they relate to the games being awarded, and bundle the commercials together instead of spreading them out to reduce interruptions. Will they follow Ubisoft’s footsteps and heed my advice? I guess we’ll find out on Thursday.

Song of the Week

Introduction - Cuphead

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