The Flawed Game Awards delivered the best show in years

Game Awards creator and host Geoff Keighley has spent his life close to the video game industry’s Hollywood inferiority complex. He has been associated with strange collisions of gaming culture, pageantry and celebrity appearances since 1994’s Cybermania, where at 15 he was an “interactive product specialist” and Jonathan Taylor announced Thomas Mortal Kombat as the winner of Best Overall Game.

Thirty years later, Keighley has managed to combine Oscar-like glitz, glamor and prestige to celebrate an entertainment medium that hasn’t quite grown up yet but is perhaps more comfortable in its uncomfortable skin. The show delivered laughs, heartfelt thanks, rousing remembrances, and plenty of revelations about the big new game that most average people tune in, all without any major hiccups or anything collapsing under the exhausting weight of a nearly four-hour ceremony.

The only one who looked out of place on stage at the Peacock Theater in downtown LA last night was Harrison Ford, awkwardly sandwiched between his virtual Indiana Jones lookalike and the executive producer producing the hundred million dollar simulacrum of the action hero came to life. It was a reminder that gaming culture and the industry that produces it have long since changed, just as “Indiana Jones and the Great Circle” stands out most for the potential absurdity of its immersive sim antics rather than takes into account the relative grace of its Spielbergian source material to step out of the shadows of Hollywood, even if the gaming obsession with that old rivalry still occasionally peeks through the frame.

Keighley launched the Game Awards back in 2014 after breaking with Spike TV and abandoning cable distribution in favor of the streaming revolution. The move came after the infamous 2013 VGX disaster, which saw Keighley host alongside a visibly bored and at times belligerently distant Joel McHale. “Spike’s VGX Awards are turning into a new kind of chaos,” read a Forbes headline the day after.

After abandoning the old format, the 2014 Game Awards were immediately relieved of the condescending antics of the old media trying to get regular people to care about games, and instead aimed more directly at the fans who already understood why they were cool, exciting and so popular on the cusp of a radical evolution (coincidentally, the show included references to The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, No Man’s Sky, The Witcher 3 and other modern ones standard bearer).

But the modern Game Awards weren’t created in a day or even a year. The event changed and grew by leaps and bounds and gave us many beautiful but also many frightening moments. And as gaming has matured around the issue and people have become more critical of exploitative industry practices and the toxic communities they occasionally play with, the Game Awards have struggled to adapt, walking a fine line between paying lip service to gullible critics and urination for the companies that pay his bills and release his world premiere trailers.

Things came to a head last year when developers, facing a surge in layoffs as the gaming industry restructured in the wake of the coronavirus crisis, were told to “draw a line in the sand” with an event where It was primarily about celebrating people’s successes, and again came up with a list of sponsored games and game advertisements. The dissonance was best captured in the moment when Swen Vincke, accepting the award for Best Game of 2023 on behalf of the Baldur’s Gate 3 team, was chased off the stage while attempting to dedicate the award to his colleagues , who died during development.

Keighley is an insider who carefully collects and curates surprise game announcements, always making sure people know he got to play, see or hear about them months before anyone else. It’s a fanboy attitude that he cleverly transforms into authenticity. But the presenter has also demonstrated a tireless commitment to soaking up feedback and criticism, even if his responses in the moment sometimes sound tone-deaf and petty.

And just like the opening ceremony a decade ago, the 2024 Game Awards seemed partly a reaction to the previous year’s failures. The winners were given more time to talk, if only a little more. No one was visibly pushed off the stage. Even though half of the winners were announced in speedrun rounds between commercials for other games, many still had a chance to be seen accepting their awards. Getting the winners seen and celebrated is apparently what all awards shows are about anyway, even if it’s the bare minimum of what they can strive for.

Instead of protesting the video game industry’s greed or excess in one of the worst layoff years in the show’s (and the industry’s) history, Keighley gave the floor to honor Amir Satvat, a development executive at Tencent Games, who made personal contributions to his industry colleagues through his tireless work , where he documents industry layoffs, updates an extensive list of new job openings, and simply reminds other developers that when their lives are turned upside down, no matter how small the project, get stuck in they worked, or no matter how unknown the game studio that employed them is, there is someone who is a witness and willing to offer help. It wasn’t a radical call for unionization, but Keighley’s show comes closest to capturing the destructive side of the brands she idolizes.

And of course, the event brought with it the big announcements that fans had been eagerly waiting for. They got their first taste of The Witcher 4 and a look at what Naughty Dog, maker of The Last of Us, has been working on for years. Legends Fumito Ueda (Ico, Shadow of the Colossus) and Hideki Kamiya (Devil May Cry, Bayonetta) revealed new projects. There was more Elden Ring (a three-player roguelike spin-off), Borderlands (a new trailer for Borderlands 4), and Helldivers 2 (a free update that adds an entirely new enemy faction).

I haven’t mentioned the actual winners of the awards themselves much because they never quite get to the point. Every nominated game was more than worthy. While a culture steeped in leaderboards and score-chasing loves a winner, the event is primarily about honoring games through the sheer power of spectacle. Video game music played in orchestra halls has more than a touch of the old video game inferiority complex at work, but seeing Balatro music performed live on a stage in front of starving artists and CEOs alike is still an incredible moment.

And with the introduction of the GOTY winner, catharsis indeed occurred. Vincke, who returned from last year’s win to present the award to this year’s winner while wearing a truce pin, explained the remarks he couldn’t quite make at last year’s show. In his preamble, he laid out his recipe for GOTY’s success in an industry with rising costs, insatiable profit motives, and endless incentives to copy other people’s homework rather than try something new.

The studios that developed games worthy of such an award “didn’t treat their developers like numbers on a spreadsheet,” he said. They didn’t treat their players as users to be exploited. And they didn’t make decisions they knew were short-sighted based on a bonus or political considerations. They knew that if the game and the team came first, the revenue would follow. They were driven by idealism and wanted players to have fun, and they realized that if the developers didn’t have fun, no one would have fun.”

This year was the best The Game Awards in a long time, if not the best it can be. Why is the accessibility award still limited to the pre-show? How come so many categories are still so confused? Why do the actual awards still take up less than 10 percent of the show’s total running time? How is it that the finances surrounding the show, unlike the voting process, are still so opaque? There’s always next year, because as viewership numbers continue to prove, we’ll all be watching when the circus returns to town next December.

My personal favorite part of the series was the recurring parts of Muppets Statler and Waldorf. They essentially voiced the most common online jabs launched at Keighley in real time. The showman was always eager to please them, poking fun at them rather than undermining the humor with a witty retort. Maybe he’s learned that the best hosts are also willing to listen to everyone else’s complaints. And the gaming industry rightly has a lot of them.

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