MARCH
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(Nothing but) flowers
With all the disappointment surrounding The Game Awards this year, I wanted to chime in with a suggestion and ask how you would like the show to change in future.
The Game Awards is now so focused on advertising the games of tomorrow that there is no space to celebrate the games released this year. The few developers invited to the stage to receive awards were quickly smuggled away. In fact, we spent more time with Gonzo (a Muppet) talking about his favourite videogame chicken than we did any developer receiving an award.
The gaming industry has always struggled to communicate how difficult it can be to make a game. The number of people and the amount of effort that it takes are often forgotten, which makes it even more disappointing that in an event where we should be celebrating their achievements, we hardly see or hear from them.
Personally, I would love to see more features highlighting why a game has been nominated. Let me peek behind the curtain and see what goes into the audio design for Hi-Fi Rush, or how Forza Motorsport has been designed with accessibility in mind, but most importantly show me who is doing it, and why it’s significant.
When that context is missing, the awards become a list of names devoid of any real meaning, used to promote the next crop of games rather than celebrate the ones already in our libraries. Not to add to your workload, but if Edge were designing and curating The Game Awards, how would you go about it? And how would you make it a more meaningful show?
Featurettes for each nominee? Was this year’s ceremony not long enough for you? In seriousness, we’re of the apparently oldfashioned opinion that awards should be more about celebrating and rewarding craft than advertising forthcoming attractions. We may disagree with some of its choices, but BAFTA tends to get closer to the ideal.
Psycho killer
In I Have No Mouth, And I Must Scream, Ellen cannot interact with yellow objects because of having been raped by someone in yellow overalls. Once the player overcomes her past trauma, she is able to venture deeper into the colourful pyramid. It’s long been my favourite example of narrative and mechanics working together in unison.
Naughty Dog games have often been criticised for not caring much about this. Heck, they even gave an achievement – ‘Ludonarrative dissonance’ – when you have Drake kill a thousand people. This never bothered me much because the Uncharted series is so over the top – I couldn’t expect it to take the player seriously if it wasn’t going to take itself seriously. But The Last Of Us seemed to
