An "embarrassing indictment": developers decry last nights The Game Awards ceremony

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• NuXCOM_90Percent@lemmy.zip ⁨2⁩ ⁨years⁩ ago

  Most of the time, The Game Awards ™ and people’s obsession with it reminds me a lot of how people think the WWE ™ Hall of Fame ™ is some amazing honor when it is mostly corporate bullshit at its worst*

  Admittedly, I am not the audience. I am not watching for the Awards ™ or even The World Premieres. I am watching because my favorite Pride and Prejudice Podcast Site (Remap Radio) is rambling and talking about e-ink tablets.

  But this year AND last year actively pissed me off. Because everyone and their mother shat on Christopher “Teal’c” Judge for talking for too long and caring. Ignoring that he put in work on SG-1 back in the day and was largely never recognized, this is a guy who genuinely put his heart and soul into making Kratos (a guy who had to flee to a non-extradition treaty pantheon after all his murder and misogyny) into Gaming’s Best Sad Dad (who didn’t shoot any of his childre… Look, I am trying to say Arakawa deserves honorable mention). Here was someone ACTUALLY taking that bullshit seriously and everyone shat on him because it got in the way of the trailers.

  This year? They literally played off Swen while he was paying tribute to a fallen friend and colleague who contributed massively to the fucking game of the year. Remedy wasn’t quite that heartfelt, but it also was a genuinely amazing gaming moment where some of the unsung heroes of gaming for the past 20+ years were given the opportunity to speak to people who aren’t already Remedy sickos.

  All for what? So Kojima could get a fancy entrance and two have two people slobber all over his knob for ten minutes (although, seriously, getting Jordan Peele to write is genius. Kojima is a horrifically bad writer but is good at directing cutscenes).

  And I do very much want to push back against the narrative that this was an over correction because Teal’c talked too much. That… probably made them develop a workflow to play people off. But this had nothing to do with that. This was about preventing any developers from talking about two big fucking issues.

  1. Gaming is experiencing mass layoffs as a result of increasing inflation and economic uncertainty. All while shitheads continue the “lazy devs” narrative (which even Larian has pushed back against) and insist on waiting until games that actually have zero DLC and launch in a solid state hit 70% off and brag about it.
  2. Palestine. No matter how you feel about that, it is important to understand how much of The West’s understanding of the middle east is largely based on Call of Duty and other “brown people bad” media. To the point that the token minorities that the Keighleys use to promote themselves openly spoke out against ignoring this

  That said, I will say that giving Surgent Studios and Abubakar Salim a chance to talk about Tales of Kenzera was good. That is the kind of heartfelt “games can be more” presentation that we need.

  Ah well. Here is hoping we get gaming’s equivalent of Michelle Yeoh. She fucking earned that recognition after a lifetime of putting the work in and made it clear she would fuck up anyone who tried to stop her from talking about it.

  *: To clarify. the Keighleys are largely based off the voting by media outlets with a good bit of variety (even if some outlets very much seem grandfathered in) thegameawards.com/voting-jury. This is how you tend to get pretty solid nominee lists. But the actual voting is “90% jury, 10% fans”. Which means a critical darling will do great, but most things are going to be decided by that fan vote for the same reason that score aggregation sites like meta/open critic never made sense. Because maybe IGN loved the blandest star wars game ever but gamespot loved zelda and they cancel each other out.

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• NaibofTabr@infosec.pub ⁨2⁩ ⁨years⁩ ago

  “What good are honors from such people?”

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