gameslol

(Repost.) As I’m sure you are aware, game award shows are mostly an embarrassment. The popular ones — G-phoria and the Spike TV Awards — are shown on specialized cable channels and aren’t as much about as games as they are just a show. A telling sign: search for images of these award shows and for every game picture you find, there’s at least three others of Snoop Dogg, Morgan Webb or… Ron Jeremy in a Mario suit. In a recent award show, one of the hosts even said she never played video games and appeared almost offended by the idea. These are extreme examples, but they make the point pretty well.

The game industry does have one award show that really matters, which is the Game Developer’s Choice Awards. It’s heartfelt, exciting and entertaining. Even the acceptance speeches are fun because the winners truly care. But it’s also completely industry-focused; the proceedings are almost like a private party and are not recorded or broadcast. That’s actually awesome (would this have happened otherwise?), but sadly there isn’t yet a respectable consumer-facing counterpart to the GDCA’s.

David Jaffe, the creator of God of War, recently wrote a lengthy rant about his disappointment with the Oscars, drawing parallels with game award shows. Hidden in his post are some really thought-provoking ideas on how to improve them. His solution: make gamers care. He says the best way to do so is not through a television event, but by putting it online.

“We need to embrace the very tech that we are celebrating! We need to take our awards online because THAT is where the fans will meet us; that is where the folks will care. That is where people will WANT to see Lord British give a speech upon being inducted into the Academy Hall of Fame; that is where people will WANT to see the game gods walking a red carpet (albeit a virtual one) and get the chance to chat with them in real time.”

He imagines such an online event as “an MMO weekend like The Burning Man festival, but for games” where gamers can wander the landscape, chat with famous game makers and check out content related to the nominated games. Now if that’s too high-concept, Jaffe also suggests doing a regular award show but air it live on sites like GameSpot and IGN and allow fans to watch and participate in real time.

Although a Second Life-esque implementation would pose many practical problems (3D avatar-based communication is really inefficient for this sort of thing), I think Jaffe is basically right on the money.

Before I started going to things like E3 and GDC and before I wanted to be involved in game making, the closest I ever got to “meeting” a game designer and really caring about what they did and what they had to say was on IRC, circa 1996.

I was a huge fan of the Monkey Island series. Logging in to #monkey-island on DALnet and watching Ron Gilbert or Dominic Armato (the voice actor who played Guybrush Threepwood) interact with the fans, as they occasionally did, was something truly magical. Even when the chat was completely moderated, as was inevitably the case when Ron participated, it felt like you were genuinely meeting (and if you were lucky, chat with) people in gaming that you admire.

I also fondly remember the Sierra reunion chat events at the now-defunct TalkSpot.com. These were a few years later, so technology had gotten a little better. Former Sierra designers would broadcast a live stream from a studio, with others on the phone, and questions pulled from both live callers and the chatroom. The immediacy of these chats was incredible even when a hundred or more fans were logged in. Half the fun was chatting with the other fans while we were listening to people like Ken Williams and Al Lowe recall stories from their years of game development.

Such online experiences brought me closer to the art of game making than anything else ever could have. That makes Jaffe’s idea ring especially true to me. It seems that if you want people to recognize the art and make awards more meaningful, involving the gamers themselves online instead of putting it on a limited-access non-interactive TV channel seems really appropriate. Perhaps I’m naive, but if the gamers really care about the awards, I think the glamor and media attention will come naturally.

(By the way: despite being pretty casual and characteristically f-bomb laden, Jaffe’s blog has some really nice posts. The complete design doc for Calling All Cars is a real gem, so check it out.)

This entry was posted on Friday, March 2nd, 2007 at 1:50 pm and is filed under Game Industry. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.