The tradition of Game of the Year is lost in the fog of time, given that for decades every game with a minimum of notoriety ends up in some way boasting this title, perhaps to justify an all-encompassing re-edition or some relaunch on the market. In fact, this way of conceiving the “GOTY” does not make it very different from the various pizza “world champions” that we find in practically half of the Italian pizzerias: paraphrasing the essay Syndrome in The Incredibles, “if everyone is a world champion then no one is,” and stuff like that fits easily into the game prizes scattered like this. All of this would lead us to think of the GOTY as a sort of year-end tradition, halfway between goliardia and the corporate Christmas dinner, which each publication decides to assign with its own procedures and categories. On the one hand, this also allows you to make some interesting overviews on the videogame year that has just ended and, on the other, it allows you to keep the discussion alive in a period in which perhaps there is not much to reveal, in terms of novelties.
Perhaps also in response to this fragmentation of award ceremonies, attention has recently been focusing above all on The Game Awards and a few other major annual events, and as a result the discussion of the games of the year has taken on considerable proportions as Geoff Keighley’s event has grown in size. From an evening that is a little loud and rather naive like the version that was initially aired on SpikeTV, the modern event now seems to want to follow Hollywood styles at all costs, with great guests, red carpets and cocktail parties. Wanting to ape the world of cinema at all costs still doesn’t seem like the best way to finally demarcate the video game as a contemporary and autonomous “art form”, but if nothing else it works to attract media attention.
Video games focus on a huge number of genres, modes of expression and fruition, which can hardly be well represented in every aspect during a gala evening, but the problem is that, moreover, all the other “awards” initiatives various seem to all fall into the same address, beyond specific ones like the IGF Awards for indie titles.
Critics should try to value productions of all kinds and more or less highlight games within the broad spectrum of titles that come out every year and individual reviews, in their standard work, actually try to return a varied vision of aesthetics in this particular form of expression, but it is very difficult to condense the typical diversity of video games into a series of annual awards, especially when you are limited to fishing among a few strange games and already well supported by media and publishers.
So the question is: how much value do you give to the title of GOTY in your choices and tastes in terms of video games? Returning to the question of the many prizes present, it must also be noted that Geoff Keighley’s event is engulfing all the others and this risks creating a sort of hegemony of taste which tends to take the choices made on that evening as objective parameters on the quality of the games on the market.
In the “best” case scenario, it seems that the intention is to try to demonstrate the medium’s emerging maturity by trying to follow Hollywood and proposing its own version of the Oscar evening, without however relying on selection criteria that derive from rigorous and “academic” training such as the one that characterizes a by now consolidated art form such as cinema. At worst, it could seem like a sort of huge commercial, which however has the great positive side of it also representing an excellent opportunity to present very interesting news for the entire videogame panorama. And we sincerely do not doubt that most fans follow the evening just for the announcements and trailers “world premiere” (strictly with a big baritone voice) rather than to know the winners in the various categories.
Parliamone is a daily opinion column that offers a starting point for discussion around the news of the day, a small editorial written by a member of the editorial team but which is not necessarily representative of the Multiplayer.it editorial line.
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