This week (as of this writing) was the 2025 Game Awards, and with it came discussion from various avenues of game journalism and criticism about the place of The Game Awards. A particular avenue of speculation that I found myself being drawn down is, well, why do we care about The Game Awards? Part of this lies with the cynicism and not-quite-contempt that the Academy Awards are often also held in. This lead to me thinking about why the Game Awards grabbed people’s attention, why we cared then, and why the luster has fallen off now.
To start with The Game Awards, we also need to think about The Academy Awards and why those started. The Academy Awards started at a time when the motion picture industry was relatively new and was besieged at all sides by government regulation through hordes of small regional ratings boards. The film industry had also established the Hays Code in an attempt to stave off actual Federal regulation at a time when there wasn’t a level of case law around the First Amendment that could potentially stave off Federal regulation of the nascent art form. So, the Academy Awards existed as a way of showing a way that film could be art by giving out awards for people who were good at presenting film as an art form. Was this self-serving? Absolutely. Was the goal undermined by the Academy being a self-reinforcing network of people who were already in with the Hollywood establishment? Definitely. Did it work? Yes, I think you could make a definite case that the eventual relaxation of the Hays Code in place of the MPAA rating system, combined with studios and theaters that felt they could safely release and screen films that were unrated, would have been impossible without Hollywood making a big spectacle about how Films Are Art, Dammit! Further, considering various ways that moral guardians have managed to rear their ugly head even in my lifetime with their claims on how cinema has degraded American Morals (TM), whether it’s violence in Natural Born Killers, or homosexuality in Brokeback Mountain, we still need the Academy Awards, among others, even if they’re not willing to give awards to films that speak opposition to power or will otherwise rock the political boat, provided the award ceremonies center on the nominated films and the people who make them.
This leads into The Game Awards. On this blog, in past years of NextGen Magazine, I’ve discussed their coverage of what we now call the DICE Awards. At this point in our coverage, they didn’t have any way to broadcast the awards online, nor did they have any kind of TV deal, and they didn’t get much mainstream media coverage, outside of maybe some brief mention in entertainment magazines of the time. This was also a time when the video game industry still found itself besieged by moral guardians, and the threat of Federal regulation, even with the ESRB rating system in place, was always looming around the corner. Thus, this was the perfect time for the game industry to follow in the motion picture industry’s footsteps. There was one minor-major difference. The motion picture industry was also tied in with the people who made newsreels, which means they could make sure they got the word out. In contrast, the video game industry didn’t really have a way to ensure people learned about its awards outside enthusiast press.
By the time Streaming Media became more available, with sites like Gamespot streaming press conferences at E3 and having other regular live streams, the DICE awards had also started entering an era where they had made what I’d consider to be a weird, ill-conceived pivot. In an effort to try and build up the Academy Award comparison, they’d brought in notable comedians to serve as MC, and at this point in the history of the DICE Awards, their MC was Jay Mohr. For those unfamiliar with Jay Mohr, he is, in brief, an insult comic. His gimmick is being condescending, crass, and derisive in a disaffected 90s everything sucks kind of way, and the way that played out in his hosting duties by, in an informed, calculated manner, by trying to undermine the DICE Awards for humorous effect. This would be fine if he were hosting the Academy Awards that way, in the ’00s, where the Academy Awards had become enough of a mainstream, established, overblown affair, that aggressively stomping on the toe of its biggest night of self-congratulation wouldn’t have actually undercut the message of the awards – that films are art. But he’s hosting the DICE Awards, at a time when it would not be unreasonable for, say, attorney Jack Thompson to take Jay Mohr’s comments as a host of the DICE Awards, and for him to submit them in court as evidence that games aren’t art, and thus shouldn’t receive First Amendment protections.
In this window, former game journalist Geoff Keighley comes up with The Game Awards. The whole awards show would be broadcast live online through GameTrailers, and unlike the DICE Awards, these were also broadcast live on Spike TV, which was also part of most people’s basic cable packages. This magnified the potential audience, and the big flashy spectacle of the awards show was subsidized by game publishers putting forward their big world premiere game trailers to be spotlighted at this event. The trailers became so much of a spectacle that the awards themselves were shifted to the back burner, with frequently over half the categories not being given out on-air. However, gamers and game industry press embraced The Game Awards because we could watch it, unlike the DICE Awards, and while it would insult Capital-G-Gamers (like when Zachary Levi got teabagged on stage), it generally didn’t insult the idea that games themselves have merit.
However, three things happened to cause The Game Awards to lose their luster. The first is that Spike stopped airing them. They were still available for streaming, and arguably streaming video at this point had started to eclipse cable TV, or at least basic cable, in terms of commanding popular discussion. Second, Jay Mohr was no longer booked as host of the DICE Awards – with the show going through a few other hosts before settling on Greg Miller and various co-hosts. Finally, the BAFTAs started their own awards for games, and they, and the DICE Awards, streamed their own ceremonies online. Combine this with the fact that all the World Premiere trailers at The Game Awards ended up available on YouTube mere minutes after the ceremony ended (if not the minute they started showing in the Game Awards stream). It means that if you care about the trailers, you don’t need to watch the show. If you care about the awards and celebrating the best video games have to offer as an art form, you have better options for “Gaming’s Oscars”.
So, why are The Game Awards here?
I like The Game Awards medley of music from the various nominees for Best Game, and arguably, you need the budget of The Game Awards for that. Arguably, you could have Keighly’s Game Show (Keigh-3?) do the old-school CES thing of being twice a year, but who the hell wants to go travel for a whole week to LA this close to Christmas, with the added problem of that playing hell with everyone’s Game of the Year plans.
In short, this past year’s Game Awards, and the conversations around them, have served to heighten the view, in my perspective, that The Game Awards have become the Knockoff MTV Awards. They are supposed to be the fun awkward show for the game industry people to go to, and the one that theoretically the public gets to vote on. Except with the Silksong Dev Team going “Fuck this, we’re not going,” that knocks out the perception of this actually being the “fun show”. Further, the controversy around the treatment of Future Class Members has emphasized that this isn’t the “fun show”.
As a viewer, for the past few years I just haven’t watched the Game Awards on their own. Instead, I’ve watched them with MST3K-style commentary by LoadingReadyRun as live-streams or VODs. because I just haven’t found them that enjoyable to watch on their own merits. So, why should The Game Awards exist?
I don’t have an answer. They’ve reached a point where it feels like they’re being sustained by inertia, but as E3 has demonstrated, inertia doesn’t last forever.
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