What we learned—and what we need to learn—from the Game Awards 2023
The Oscars have Will Smith slapping Chris Rock… we have Epic Flute Guy.
Every year, The Game Awards (TGA) ring in the holiday season for the video game industry with an Academy Awards-esque honors show, conferring awards in more than thirty categories including Best Narrative, Best Art Direction, Best Performance, Best Audio Design, and the all-important Game Of The Year. Unlike its silver screen counterpart, however, TGA ups the ante by declaring the event open season for any and all publishers and developers—from the biggest studios in the world to the 17-year-old on her MacBook—to tease new projects and announce launch dates.
Altogether, the event makes for a second Christmas for fans of the medium, with excitement akin to unwrapping your presents and finding out what you're going to be keeping your eye on for the next year or two. This year’s show—although marred by disrespect in certain aspects—lived up to the hype befitting an awards ceremony for what many believe is the best year in gaming history.
Larian Studios' Baldur's Gate III was the star of the night—not only did it take home the marquee Game of the Year (GotY) award, presented this year by ModdedController360 (perhaps known more commonly as Timothee Chalamet)—it also swept through Best RPG, Best Community Support, Best Multiplayer and the Players' Voice Award. Actor Neil Newbon also took home Best Performance for his portrayal of Astarion in the game. Its success was a surprise to few; despite being launched alongside delightfully complex open-world titles like fellow GotY nominees Legends of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom and Spider-Man 2, the game proves that simplicity is the greatest sophistication. It takes the relatively plain turn-based RPG formula from tabletop Dungeons and Dragons games of old and kicks it into overdrive in a digital medium with artfully written and voiced characters and seemingly limitless narrative possibilities. Just like the D&D games it draws inspiration from, you can interact with the world in basically any way you see fit.
Other hits from the night's awards included Remedy Entertainment's Alan Wake 2, an innovative psychological horror/thriller survival game that bagged Best Directing, Best Narrative, and Best Art Direction. Insomniac Games' Spider-Man 2 had the unbecoming honor of being this year's premier flop with seven nominations and zero wins, which has not gone down well with Marvel fans on Twitter. Nintendo had itself another strong year as a publisher with Super Mario Bros. Wonder and The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom both being nominated for GotY and earning Best Family Game and Best Action/Adventure Game honors respectively. The latter award, in one of the surprises of the event, was announced by... Gonzo the Muppet?!
It was also a great year for reveals at The Game Awards. Some of my personal standouts included Exodus: a sci-fi game starring Matthew McConaghuey, who made a cameo at the Game Awards to announce this new project; Rise of Ronin, a combat-heavy historical drama set in 19th century Japan; Jurassic Park: Survival, a narrative-driven stealth/action game based on the titular franchise; Black Myth: Wukong; a third-person action/adventure game based on a Chinese folk myth, and Kemuri, spearheaded by independent developer Ikuri Nakamura. Very little about the game was revealed in its TGA trailer save for its vibrant art style (which is gorgeous), and Nakamura's tagline, "seeing the unseen," but it looks promising. Meanwhile, Scandinavian folk band Heilung christened a Hellblade sequel with a bone-chilling rendition of the game's theme, and SEGA (developers of Sonic the Hedgehog fame) decided to make the most of their time slot by turning the clock back and announcing not one, not two, but five games inspired by their early-2000’s classics. Other titles that have had social media on fire over the past week include Overdose, directed by gaming's Spielberg, Hideo Kojima, starring Jordan Peele and Hunter Schafer; a third-person adventure based on Marvel's Blade; and Monster Hunter: Wilds, the sixth-generation entry in Capcom's wildly successful franchise.
Evidently, with the caliber of guests the event has been able to attract recently, TGA's big-ticket value is skyrocketing, but the increasing star power of the event has also been lambasted as one of its biggest flaws this year. Lost in the luster of all the new releases was the fact that Hollywood headliners had more time to throw out anecdotes and barely-tangential jokes than developers did to speak about the games for which they were apparently being celebrated... at a game awards show.
To that end, some of the most tense controversy abounded on social media as videos leaked of a teleprompter nudging winners to hurry up and move on without being able to properly honor everyone involved. The palpable discomfort was further exacerbated by the fact that said prompter ran while the recipients of the GotY award were paying tributes to late colleagues that unfortunately passed away before being able to bear the fruits of their hard work.
This would be tone-deaf enough on its own, but especially so given how the industry was slammed with mass layoffs in 2023; game creators deserved a space to reflect. Swen Vincke, one of the Larian Studios developers that worked on the GotY-winning Baldur's Gate III, resorted to Twitter with a sixteen-tweet thread of things he didn't get to say during his winner's speech, writing notably, "Games are a unique art form, as important as books, music or movies. Many developers, myself included, make games because they love seeing others engage with their creations in a way only games can offer. They don’t care that much about the money made beyond it being the fuel they need to create new and better games. It’s worth reminding everyone that fuel is but a means, not a goal. Whereto and how we journey are what matter and what we remember."
The entire ordeal was a harrowing reflection of one of the uglier aspects of the popularization and mainstreaming of the game industry; the pervasive influence of fame and money therein. There's more eyeballs on celebrities than there are on the people that spent five hundred hours bolted to a desk working on environmental textures.
That doesn't mean it's fair.
One hopes for it not to be the legacy of an otherwise exhilarating event, one that inspired widespread excitement for what's to come in the gaming industry.
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