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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