Maybe it is a generational difference in perspective here, but I don't understand your point of view for the most part.
Half the internet is Video Game reviews and press!
As for mainstream press, only boomers listen to that, and most current seniors don't play and never will play video games.
From my perspective you are bemoaning the fact that a dying industry that caters exclusively to senior citizens doesn't cover gaming news, and that the few video game "institutions" that try to copy these obsolete ways of doing things are bad and boring.
Yes, but so what?
We don't need institutions telling us what is good.
If you want to celebrate one of your favorite games, instead of watching The Game Awards, watch one of the 10 hour long thesis's uploaded to YT.
Dismissing something valuable as "boomer" is kind of fun in casual conversation, I admit, but it's not a fully grown-up way of looking at an issue. Those institutions were created because they had great value, and losing them is Bad, Actually.
"Half the internet is Video Game reviews and press!"
In a sense, but not really. A review that was paid for is valueless. "Press" that is 50 clickbait articles generated with help from AI is valueless.
If you dismiss journalism and journalistic standard as, "Lol Boomer," I suggest you google a pre-Boomer concept: Chesterton's Fence. In time, we will be forced to rediscover the reasons they were developed.
Edit: What makes the old "Boomer" media valuable was not that it was printed on paper and dropped at your door. It was that it attempted (and sometimes succeded) to follow a certain set of principles. The newsprint was not important. The principles were vital.
But if you think an event that's meant to celebrate our accomplishments being 90% ads and dopey filler is a good thing, well, lots of people agree with you. Just stop complaining about anything else venal or grasping about the industry. They are inextricably linked.
I did not mean to dismiss anything as Boomer. That is just a way more concise way of explaining my point than some essay on why this is happening. And in the end it does not really matter the why.
Mainstream media's audience simply does not care about video game, and no one can force them to care.
IMHO The service they provided has become obsolete. I will agree that they had great value, it is true, but they are currently as useful as carrier pigeons. Journalistic standards do not reside only in mainstream media, and I would; argue since they became obsolete they don't exist at all in mainstream media. No one is destroying mainstream media, it is just not a useful paradigm anymore and you cannot force people to care about it when better journalism exists outside of it.
Sure, large swaths of the internet are ads and clickbate, but within the non ad non clickbate internet half of it is video game related as well.
"Mainstream media's audience simply does not care about video game, and no one can force them to care."
Yes and no. The audience for video games is HUGE and growing each year. The people who are hooked on fortnite and LoL will be adults someday. You can't get middle-aged people to care about a game show now, but the audience grows every day.
Obviously, I feel the abandonment of responsible mainstream press and media is a disaster, but it will be up to time to tell if I am right or not.
What I really don't understand is you are claiming you respect and love mainstream media and want video games to be subsumed or emulate them.
But then when they do this (The Game Awards) with all their ads, corporate sponsors, and shallow 30 second soundbites, you don't seem happy?
The main problem I see with assuming the current 30 year old LoL fan will within the next 30 years transition to watching CNN is that the content is just too different. Someone used to watching 10 hour tournaments and 60 minutes tutorials on how one skill works is just never going to be interested in watching some anchor who has never even seen a match read off the scores on the latest LoL tournament.
Maybe as people age their attention span decreases? I just find it hard to believe that an entire generation will give up in-depth long form content written by experts for some news anchor with a journalism degree from Harvard.
I think the uncomfortable truth is that games are just not as socially accepted as other past times despite their popularity. Watching sports or movies are, although they are equally unproductive (maybe even moreso because you have zero influence on the outcome). It’s like porn - a LOT of people consume it, but nobody wants to be publicly associated with it because of the negative consumer stereotypes. You just kind of have to enjoy it in private and toil away in secrecy if you’re a producer.
I think it's true that the audience for this sort of show is low (though growing). It's a cheap sort of show to do, though. I believe it is possible to make a show that's more than an infomercial and doesn't lose money. It won't happen ,though, until someone in the industry CARES. Which is not in our mental software right now.
"Video games make the vast majority of their money from addicted, obsessive whales buying loot boxes and kids who buy DLC with the credit cards they stole from the parents."
As an old fan of Spiderweb since I bought Exile I as shareware, I hate that this is what gaming has come to. I miss the old days when you just bought a game and you were done. You didn't have to keep shelling out so you can finish the game and access all the content.
I understand what you want to say but I disagree with some points. I will write with Google Translate because my main language is Italian:
The video game market has to deal with entertainment and social diffusion that cinema has not had to experience. Even though a lot can be done with video games, the market has acquired very rigid rules on what a video game is and it is difficult to break away from it. it's capitalism, what works works, nobody wanted it, it happened, and rightly so in certain respects, the only way to fight some dynamics of a system is to understand them and not passively suffer them.
Even for video game journalists, it's impossible to do real journalism due to the very nature of entertainment and how algorithms and reader retention work. Newspapers must be active, share, discuss everything that is news and not criticism, and to do so they discuss banal things, making people perceive things that are not important for the nature and evolution of the medium, but for the market of the medium.
It's probably not something done in bad faith, it simply works and those who have had this approach or are predisposed to have it, and having survived it have become the cover and example of gaming journalism, thus becoming a standard and example of normal behavior. It's about social media, entertainment, and how outreach works on the Internet.
-Oscar
Regarding the Oscars, I don't agree that it is something so virtuous. I agree that the gaming sector has various critical issues but the same sector experts have been criticizing the Oscars for years. They are considered useless and mostly commercial or political prizes. They have ignored works from other continents for years, animated films are still separated today as if they were a genre, when in reality it is a technique. it's just show.
-Esports athlete
The best esports athlete is not the same as the best spectator. The best viewer of a video game is the closest thing to a viewer of a movie. When talking about video games we must accept that there is a dynamic not present in films and this is the interaction with the product. It would be limiting to ignore this dynamic, which objectively exists in video games, just because films don't have it. It would be like judging films only for the screenplay because some technical aspects of the films are not in the books. I agree that esports athletes are not an artistic aspect of the work like a director, but they are still something technical. They master the gameplay of a game which is nothing more than one of the technical aspects of a video game. You may or may not like it culturally but on paper it's like this. It's like a photographer who has taken control of a camera that uses a certain lens technology, added with the competitive aspect of challenging other people. Exactly, it's like sport.
But do we actually need global game awards? I mean, I don't feel like I do. What I care about is players' reaction, which I can judge through social media. And maybe about some niche sites awards - it's nice to see our games in GOTY lists on RPGCodex and RPGWatch, because those sites dig RPGs and I respect them. The more popular awards rarely go to games I think actually are great, so I feel no connection to them, neither as a game developer, nor as a gamer.
I do think awards are a very good thing. I'm going to write about their value when Oscar noms drop next month. I went into the arguments a little here, but this piece was already long enough.
Recently I completed The Talos Principle 2. I really enjoyed it. Gameplay is like alternating in 20 minute intervals between playing Portal 2 and watching “My Dinner With Andre” and I am that experiences exact target audience The reason I mention it is that Talos 2 is one of the few gaming experiences that deliberately tries to be Middlebrow.
Talos principle 2 isn’t high art or some marvel of game design but it’s an attempt to market to the same demographic that watches Was Anderson movies. When was the last game that tried that? The Witness, maybe? And before that?
Gaming doesn’t have the sort of institutions that honor quality, as you said. And the average gamer isn’t interested in playing a robot that alternates between laser beam puzzles and debating nuclear power. But there is a market for games like that, and that market is underserved.
I think it's a good idea to take video games are they are. Tetris is a great game, but it's not art. It's just perfect at being a Game. I'm totally OK with freeing our awards to admire the game-ness and not worry to much about whether it matches some High Art Yardstick or not.
Now, I don’t want to be TOO defensive of the Video Game Awards, but one bit of credit I do want to offer up is that their nominations for the big categories are generally at least games most people will have heard of. None of this, “Betty Oscarface in Pretentious Artsy Fartsy Drama all of a dozen film nerds have seen” nonsense.
That said, singular names will never mean anything outside of industry fanatics if they never get the opportunity for exposure. There isn’t a molecule of doubt in my being that there are OTHER developers than Kojima who deserve to be name dropped and recognized, and the game awards should be a vehicle for this.
Hopefully Keighley will take to heart the criticism of cutting off the developers so viciously while letting the drivel that was the rest of the show just drone on.
If you're going to have a giant show with a huge global audience to give an award with a century-long pedigree to call something Best Movie of the Year, then, dammit, you have to be able to look people in the eye and say with a straight face it's the best movie of the year.
In 2022, Avatar 2 and Marvel Uninteresting Sequels #719 and # 834 made more cash than Everything Everywhere All at Once, and they were fine. They just weren't better movies. At all.
If you want movies that made lots of money to get awarded, then again, as Don Draper wisely said, "THATS WHAT THE MONEY IS FOR".
Maybe it is a generational difference in perspective here, but I don't understand your point of view for the most part.
Half the internet is Video Game reviews and press!
As for mainstream press, only boomers listen to that, and most current seniors don't play and never will play video games.
From my perspective you are bemoaning the fact that a dying industry that caters exclusively to senior citizens doesn't cover gaming news, and that the few video game "institutions" that try to copy these obsolete ways of doing things are bad and boring.
Yes, but so what?
We don't need institutions telling us what is good.
If you want to celebrate one of your favorite games, instead of watching The Game Awards, watch one of the 10 hour long thesis's uploaded to YT.
Dismissing something valuable as "boomer" is kind of fun in casual conversation, I admit, but it's not a fully grown-up way of looking at an issue. Those institutions were created because they had great value, and losing them is Bad, Actually.
"Half the internet is Video Game reviews and press!"
In a sense, but not really. A review that was paid for is valueless. "Press" that is 50 clickbait articles generated with help from AI is valueless.
If you dismiss journalism and journalistic standard as, "Lol Boomer," I suggest you google a pre-Boomer concept: Chesterton's Fence. In time, we will be forced to rediscover the reasons they were developed.
Edit: What makes the old "Boomer" media valuable was not that it was printed on paper and dropped at your door. It was that it attempted (and sometimes succeded) to follow a certain set of principles. The newsprint was not important. The principles were vital.
But if you think an event that's meant to celebrate our accomplishments being 90% ads and dopey filler is a good thing, well, lots of people agree with you. Just stop complaining about anything else venal or grasping about the industry. They are inextricably linked.
I did not mean to dismiss anything as Boomer. That is just a way more concise way of explaining my point than some essay on why this is happening. And in the end it does not really matter the why.
Mainstream media's audience simply does not care about video game, and no one can force them to care.
IMHO The service they provided has become obsolete. I will agree that they had great value, it is true, but they are currently as useful as carrier pigeons. Journalistic standards do not reside only in mainstream media, and I would; argue since they became obsolete they don't exist at all in mainstream media. No one is destroying mainstream media, it is just not a useful paradigm anymore and you cannot force people to care about it when better journalism exists outside of it.
Sure, large swaths of the internet are ads and clickbate, but within the non ad non clickbate internet half of it is video game related as well.
"Mainstream media's audience simply does not care about video game, and no one can force them to care."
Yes and no. The audience for video games is HUGE and growing each year. The people who are hooked on fortnite and LoL will be adults someday. You can't get middle-aged people to care about a game show now, but the audience grows every day.
Obviously, I feel the abandonment of responsible mainstream press and media is a disaster, but it will be up to time to tell if I am right or not.
What I really don't understand is you are claiming you respect and love mainstream media and want video games to be subsumed or emulate them.
But then when they do this (The Game Awards) with all their ads, corporate sponsors, and shallow 30 second soundbites, you don't seem happy?
The main problem I see with assuming the current 30 year old LoL fan will within the next 30 years transition to watching CNN is that the content is just too different. Someone used to watching 10 hour tournaments and 60 minutes tutorials on how one skill works is just never going to be interested in watching some anchor who has never even seen a match read off the scores on the latest LoL tournament.
Maybe as people age their attention span decreases? I just find it hard to believe that an entire generation will give up in-depth long form content written by experts for some news anchor with a journalism degree from Harvard.
I think the uncomfortable truth is that games are just not as socially accepted as other past times despite their popularity. Watching sports or movies are, although they are equally unproductive (maybe even moreso because you have zero influence on the outcome). It’s like porn - a LOT of people consume it, but nobody wants to be publicly associated with it because of the negative consumer stereotypes. You just kind of have to enjoy it in private and toil away in secrecy if you’re a producer.
I think it's true that the audience for this sort of show is low (though growing). It's a cheap sort of show to do, though. I believe it is possible to make a show that's more than an infomercial and doesn't lose money. It won't happen ,though, until someone in the industry CARES. Which is not in our mental software right now.
"Video games make the vast majority of their money from addicted, obsessive whales buying loot boxes and kids who buy DLC with the credit cards they stole from the parents."
As an old fan of Spiderweb since I bought Exile I as shareware, I hate that this is what gaming has come to. I miss the old days when you just bought a game and you were done. You didn't have to keep shelling out so you can finish the game and access all the content.
Good blog post. I'm just impressed you managed to watch that show, I could never make it through this drivel.
I understand what you want to say but I disagree with some points. I will write with Google Translate because my main language is Italian:
The video game market has to deal with entertainment and social diffusion that cinema has not had to experience. Even though a lot can be done with video games, the market has acquired very rigid rules on what a video game is and it is difficult to break away from it. it's capitalism, what works works, nobody wanted it, it happened, and rightly so in certain respects, the only way to fight some dynamics of a system is to understand them and not passively suffer them.
Even for video game journalists, it's impossible to do real journalism due to the very nature of entertainment and how algorithms and reader retention work. Newspapers must be active, share, discuss everything that is news and not criticism, and to do so they discuss banal things, making people perceive things that are not important for the nature and evolution of the medium, but for the market of the medium.
It's probably not something done in bad faith, it simply works and those who have had this approach or are predisposed to have it, and having survived it have become the cover and example of gaming journalism, thus becoming a standard and example of normal behavior. It's about social media, entertainment, and how outreach works on the Internet.
-Oscar
Regarding the Oscars, I don't agree that it is something so virtuous. I agree that the gaming sector has various critical issues but the same sector experts have been criticizing the Oscars for years. They are considered useless and mostly commercial or political prizes. They have ignored works from other continents for years, animated films are still separated today as if they were a genre, when in reality it is a technique. it's just show.
-Esports athlete
The best esports athlete is not the same as the best spectator. The best viewer of a video game is the closest thing to a viewer of a movie. When talking about video games we must accept that there is a dynamic not present in films and this is the interaction with the product. It would be limiting to ignore this dynamic, which objectively exists in video games, just because films don't have it. It would be like judging films only for the screenplay because some technical aspects of the films are not in the books. I agree that esports athletes are not an artistic aspect of the work like a director, but they are still something technical. They master the gameplay of a game which is nothing more than one of the technical aspects of a video game. You may or may not like it culturally but on paper it's like this. It's like a photographer who has taken control of a camera that uses a certain lens technology, added with the competitive aspect of challenging other people. Exactly, it's like sport.
But do we actually need global game awards? I mean, I don't feel like I do. What I care about is players' reaction, which I can judge through social media. And maybe about some niche sites awards - it's nice to see our games in GOTY lists on RPGCodex and RPGWatch, because those sites dig RPGs and I respect them. The more popular awards rarely go to games I think actually are great, so I feel no connection to them, neither as a game developer, nor as a gamer.
I do think awards are a very good thing. I'm going to write about their value when Oscar noms drop next month. I went into the arguments a little here, but this piece was already long enough.
Recently I completed The Talos Principle 2. I really enjoyed it. Gameplay is like alternating in 20 minute intervals between playing Portal 2 and watching “My Dinner With Andre” and I am that experiences exact target audience The reason I mention it is that Talos 2 is one of the few gaming experiences that deliberately tries to be Middlebrow.
Talos principle 2 isn’t high art or some marvel of game design but it’s an attempt to market to the same demographic that watches Was Anderson movies. When was the last game that tried that? The Witness, maybe? And before that?
Gaming doesn’t have the sort of institutions that honor quality, as you said. And the average gamer isn’t interested in playing a robot that alternates between laser beam puzzles and debating nuclear power. But there is a market for games like that, and that market is underserved.
I think it's a good idea to take video games are they are. Tetris is a great game, but it's not art. It's just perfect at being a Game. I'm totally OK with freeing our awards to admire the game-ness and not worry to much about whether it matches some High Art Yardstick or not.
Now, I don’t want to be TOO defensive of the Video Game Awards, but one bit of credit I do want to offer up is that their nominations for the big categories are generally at least games most people will have heard of. None of this, “Betty Oscarface in Pretentious Artsy Fartsy Drama all of a dozen film nerds have seen” nonsense.
That said, singular names will never mean anything outside of industry fanatics if they never get the opportunity for exposure. There isn’t a molecule of doubt in my being that there are OTHER developers than Kojima who deserve to be name dropped and recognized, and the game awards should be a vehicle for this.
Hopefully Keighley will take to heart the criticism of cutting off the developers so viciously while letting the drivel that was the rest of the show just drone on.
Or, at least get better drivel next time.
Strong disagree.
If you're going to have a giant show with a huge global audience to give an award with a century-long pedigree to call something Best Movie of the Year, then, dammit, you have to be able to look people in the eye and say with a straight face it's the best movie of the year.
In 2022, Avatar 2 and Marvel Uninteresting Sequels #719 and # 834 made more cash than Everything Everywhere All at Once, and they were fine. They just weren't better movies. At all.
If you want movies that made lots of money to get awarded, then again, as Don Draper wisely said, "THATS WHAT THE MONEY IS FOR".