The Game Awards want to be gaming’s Oscars, but they’re really just its Super Bowl
The annual Game Awards are just like the Big Game: Stuffed with corporate sponsorships, and most of us are only watching for the commercials
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Now entering its eighth year—with said installment arriving next month, on December 8—Geoff Keighley’s annual awards show The Game Awards is working as hard as ever to convince people that it’s the Oscars of gaming. That is: It’s a showy, corporation-friendly celebration of the medium’s safest bets and most average successes that nobody actually seems to like or respect all that much, but which we are all, for reasons that are murky at best, forced to concede does, in fact, exist.
The nominations for the 2022 TGAs, released earlier this week, are typical for the bunch: The most expensive games of the year—most of which got big trailer reveals or other promotions at earlier installments of the Awards—all take up the top spots, with a few “indie” titles sprinkled around just to keep things interesting. It’s not that games like God Of War Ragnarök and Horizon Forbidden West aren’t good games—as the person who reviewed both titles for the site, I can attest that they’re both very well-made examples of the AAA gaming form—so much as the fact that the intense corporate buy-in Keighley and his team have achieved with this show renders the whole thing feeling irrevocably beholden to The Money Machine.
This year, the biggest conversation surrounding the Awards—besides popular gaming account Nibellion quitting Twitter on just about the same day that their calm and collected approach to gaming news was nominated for “Content Creator Of The Year”—has been the conversation about “Best Narrative,” and specifically about Elden Ring’s inclusion in the nominees for the honor.
This conversation—between those who advocate for more traditional storytelling vs. From Software’s indirect approach to spinning its sprawling tale of godly siblings squabbling over a broken world—is less a symptom of Elden Ring’s merits, though, than it is the nebulous descriptor for the category. To draw out the Oscars parallels, the Narrative award is pretty clearly meant to map on to something like “Best Original Screenplay,” with past winners including beloved word nerd games like Disco Elysium and Red Dead Redemption 2. But gaming is only sometimes a writer’s medium; narrative in games is what happens as the players navigate a game’s world as much, or more, than actors navigating the words that are in the script. Attempting to shove a traditional story like God Of War Ragnarök, and Elden Ring, and a deliberately puzzle-like story like Immortality into one category, then having them fight it out, is just begging for the whole exercise to fall apart.
Best Narrative is nebulous mostly because The Game Awards themselves are nebulous; they exist in part to give platforms to the biggest releases—what other reason could there be for Most Anticipated Game, a category entirely predicated on the power of hype?—and so the categories must be melded to those needs. (Best Narrative, specifically, feels like a deliberate buffer against those criticizing the awards for being purely about the commercial, allowing a few more “artistic” games to get recognition as well.) Honestly, it’s enough to make me conclude that the TGAs don’t map closest to the Oscars at all, but another major American watercooler event. After all, we’ve already got a heavily corporate-sponsored, largely meaningless competition that most people watch only for the commercials: Congratulations to all involved for giving the medium its very own Super Bowl.
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They would give up their children to be the equivalent of the Super Bowl
I’m pretty sure the Oscars would, too. All the prestige isn’t really helping them draw in viewer, after all.
So your criticism is that the awards are poorly defined, and therefore the Game Awards Show lacks the respectability of other awards shows like the Oscars? Um, the Oscars suffer from the exact same problem. Hell, there was an article here just yesterday about how the rap category in the Grammys is poorly defined and needs to be expanded. I see the same arguments about what constitutes a lead performance and what should be considered a supporting role at the Oscars every year. And you realize the Oscars exist largely to provide free marketing and reap accolades for predominately “AAA” releases right? The better argument, in my opinion, is that ALL creative media awards shows are masturbatory circle jerks that in no way shape or form reflect the best releases of the year because they’re industry popularity contests. Like, for example, God of War: Ragnarok has more nominations than any other game this year. God of War has been out what less than a week? Did everyone who votes get pre release copies months ago that they’re able to so quickly see how fantastic it is or are they voting on historical precedent? Frankly, nobody really cares about any of them. Most sane people know awards shows are an excuse for capitalists to pat themselves on the back. I just want to see Elden Ring DLC announced already… (ha)
If you want proof that what FromSoft does could be classified as narrative, just check the many, many lore channels on Youtube. Granted, part of that is probably that people just can’t help themselves from speculating on any bit of incomplete information in fiction (the driving engine behind a lot of Lost fandom!), but the way they tell stories is very deliberate. Why the hell is the Variety site so dark? I had to highlight the text just to read the nominees.
Yeah, I’m having a hard time understanding the backlash. Elden Ring has more lore than a dozen other AAA titles put together. They hired GRRM to help write the story FFS! Video games are not movies. They’re not books. By their very nature they automatically eliminate more traditional narrative structures because the creator is largely not in control of the action onscreen… Just do a quick search on Youtube or Reddit for each nominee and the word “Lore” and see which one gets the most hits. If anything we should be celebrating what makes games different from other mediums, not embracing them being pigeonholed into traditional structures that don’t necessarily match their intentions.
Is lore really narrative though? Like I agree that Elden Ring has a TON of lore, but when I hear the term narrative, I think of the story in that game. And tbh, I couldn’t tell you what happened in the story of Elden Ring because the narrative wasn’t given priority like lore and combat was. Don’t get me wrong, I love Elden Ring and Soulsborne games, but they don’t really have much of a story. Lore, yes, but a story in that individual game, not so much
It seems largely like a semantic argument to me. In my mind, lore is the history of events that happened in this world, up to and including what is transpiring currently. The history gathered from environment and item descriptions gives us tremendous insight into what our own motivations in this story are and what is transpiring behind closed doors. And that story is absolutely fascinating in an industry that, while still doing monumentally better than in the past, still leaves a lot to be desired, story-wise. As far as I’m concerned it’s not a difference in what it is as much as how it’s presented… and I think we need to allow video games to tell stories in their own way because they are unlike any other creative medium considering the player’s agency within the game world.
But lore isn’t really narrative… Lore is background. When we talk about: What is a narratively driven game? And you compare Mass Effect or God of War with Elden Ring, there’s an astonishingly huge difference in execution. Mass Effect has a ton of lore, but everything that moves you forward is tied to an over-arching (choice driven) narrative. God of War puts your through a lot of tasks and trials, but the whole reason you’re moving forward is explicitly given to you with a full narrative explanation. There are twists and turns and a whole backstory to understand.While I do love the game, I’m in the camp that Elden Ring is not a narratively driven game at all. Sure, there is a narrative in there, but the general reason you do things isn’t for any specific purpose other than that fighting big bosses is part of the gameplay. They give you this requirement of defeating 5 demi-god bosses, but the reason for doing so isn’t all that clear narratively—the developers simply put 5+ demi-god bosses in the game for you to beat, and fighting bosses is the high point of its gameplay. There’s no narrative reason to go into half the dungeons other than simply wanting to get stuff you don’t really even need—you don’t even need to beat most of the dungeons to progress the game… Basically, it’s like an old school Zelda game (a pretty common comparison), but somehow with even less narrative, and some Zelda games aren’t narratively driven at all.The game uses a lot of its lore to tell you about its setting, but the whole narratively given purpose for burning the Erdtree (which isn’t even a choice) has absolutely no sensical setup except: you need to do it to beat the game. To further cement this notion is the fact that beating the game isn’t even the end of the game… Once you finish and select the ending you want, you basically start all over where the game is like: Okay, so now beat this 5-6 more times to get to the really good stuff. Essentially, any narrative purpose the game had up to that point is sidelined by needing to fight and grind your way through NG+ multiple times in order to do what exactly…? The story is over, right? But yet, the gameplay isn’t…? So the driving force to continue is to just face harder challenges, upgrade your stats and gear some more, and fight bosses (that you already beat) at a higher difficulty. At that point, what is the narrative? Well, it basically doesn’t matter after the end of the first playthrough. The ending you choose is done to effect the start over of NG+ and not to conclude the story in any meaningful way—effectively making the game driven by gameplay and not by a narrative of wanting to know what happens next.I’ve played through all of Elden Ring and one go of NG+ and spoke with a friend that went up to NG3+ about this same topic. It’s a really sad thing that after having beating the game 5 times between us, we can’t barely describe what the story actually is… The best way to get a sense of it is to watch the aforementioned lore videos on YouTube, but there’s so much there (and it’s all very disjointed from the game’s own explanation) that it’s still really hard to describe. Meanwhile, I’ve only played through the Mass Effect trilogy twice… back when it was on the Xbox 360 and last year when the Legendary Edition released. But if you ask me what the story is, I can very easily give it to you in just a few sentences. That’s a stark contrast with almost any FromSoftware game, and it’s mostly because they don’t give you a lot of narrative, just a lot of lore, which isn’t the same thing.
YMMV, but I would say the lore and narrative are inextricably tied to each other. Apart from the whole “Arise, ye Tranished!” preamble and a few NPCs giving you some exposition and direction, there’s not a lot of explicit narrative, but I implicit narrative in the design and the item descriptions. True, this “lore” is sometimes fuzzy and vague at spots, but I always felt this added to the scale and mystery of the narrative. But the narrative, abridged version: You are one of the Tarnished, once driven from The Land Between. Now, with the Elden Ring* shattered, you arrive back to attempt to set things right again (or at a version of “right” that aligns with one of the many factions in the game). There is obviously a lot more to it than that—a broader history, gods and demigods, etc— but that’s the elevator-pitch version.*(A magical McGuffin that imposes “laws” upon the natural world of the Worlds Between. It’s funny that you mention the LoZ series, because it is analogous to that series’ Triforce.)I would argue that this type of narrative (often termed diegetic narrative) is unique to video games, where it isn’t delivered passively, but rather parsed out through your interaction with the world. It seems like the industry has been chasing the “cinematic” experience—presumably because it ties video games to a reverred form of media—though I’m not sure it’s the best form for them to deliver narrative. If anything, they are probably closer to books, as that’s another form of media that demands active participation to tease out the narrative.I will admit that these FromSoft games do follow a similar structure in their narratives: the world is gone to shit, often because some Higher Power’s vain attempt to recapture some golden age (Make Lordran Great Again!), and you are a nobody who are the last, desperate chance to “save” (again, big asterisk on the exact nature of that) this dying and decaying world, since all the actual heroes have been corrupted or lost to madness.
I’d probably say that the core of Elden Ring is not the game providing you with a direct narrative to make you go around and find more story elements to explore, in which a bulk of its gameplay isn’t going through elements of the story arc, as it is more so focused on having you go out and fight things because that’s what the game’s primary focus. And when I say primary focus, I do really mean that in a sort of 90/10 split… 90% fighting and 10% lore and story. In this regard it is quite unconventional in the way that it tells you the story of what’s happening and why.When you play Skyrim, there’s a lot of combat, sure, but you spend a lot of time interacting with characters and running quests for them… Elden Ring doesn’t even have a quest log, which I guess is part of it’s charm (sort of), but figuring out what to do to go forward is EXTREMELY hard to parse from what the game and NPCs give you—if you don’t take notes or refer to an online guide. This problem doesn’t really exist for most modern narratively driven games, because there’s always some kind of marker or log telling you what you need to do next to progress. Some would infer this as “hand holding” but logistically, its just to keep people on track. Elden Ring doesn’t have that problem or even let you worry about it because, again, 90% of the gameplay is wandering around and finding things to explore and fight for no reason other than to just do it for fun. The remaining 10% has you going to a specific place to fight a specific boss or interact with a specific character, which you might not know to interact with in the first place, but when you do this, the spoken dialogue and next-step-tasks are often so convoluted that it’s hard to follow what to do or when. A lot of my time was spent following the Fextralife Wiki for a umber of character story missions (mostly because there’s no quest log), and some characters will move to places or disappear without notice. At a certain point, I find myself wishing for a bit of some hand holding because between gameplay sessions, keeping track of everything becomes a bit of a chore.Even though George R. R. Martin worked on quite a bit of the story and lore for the game, the conventions in which its told and understood is not prominent enough to qualify the game as being narratively driven. There’s no real weight to the story to provide any kind of gravity behind the events that take place. From talking about it with some hardcore gamers, a lot of people don’t really seem to understand the story beyond it’s initial premise—something I blame on the game’s unconventional storytelling methods and its focus on combat. Now, I’m not trying to say that what Elden Ring does with its lore and narrative are bad, my point is to say that it’s mostly not all that important, as there won’t be any story elements in the game that will have you derive a real opinion of it. Example: The Elden Beast is the game’s final boss, but even after you face it, you don’t/won’t know enough about it to discern it as a character… Simply, it’s just something in the way that you have to defeat to beat the game.Meanwhile, every modern Zelda fan will get to known Ganon or Ganondorf before they fight him and why they’re doing it (usually for a specific reason that’s far more than “he must be defeated”). Same with Mass Effect. In the first game, you get to know Saren really well, what happened to him, how it happened, and why you have to fight him. Then there’s the Reapers, which all 3 games spend a lot of narrative effort trying to explain what they do and why you need to stop them. It’s hard to play your way through those games without understanding the point of the journey, and that’s kinda my final point: Elden Ring was (substantially) less about why you’re on this journey, and far more dedicated to how (exploring and fighting). You could play through all of Elden Ring without grasping a single “why?” element of the narrative, which is pretty much impossible for a game like Mass Effect. The incredible difference between those two methods of story telling, IMO, is the reason why I think they need to be separated enough to conclude that Elden Ring is not narratively driven enough to be classified alongside story-driven games like Red Dead Redemption, Last of Us, God of War, Life Is Strange, Bioshock, Horizon Zero Dawn, Mass Effect, or Dragon Age. As a silly example and comparison with Elden Ring’s method of storytelling, Katamari Damacy has a good bit of narrative shelled out to you, along with some ridiculous world/universe lore, but it’s entirely unimportant. Your goal is to roll everything into a big ball, and understanding why you’re doing it doesn’t really add to the fun of its gameplay.
I’m not going to drive the point into the ground, but I will continue to insist that just because a narrative element is not explicitly laid out, it doesn’t mean that it isn’t there. For as much as I like the freedom to figure it out for myself, I will agree this non-handholding style of quest design (ie figure it out your damn self or consult a guide) can not be the most convenient to pick up and play or for playing in a non-contiguous fashion. Even the convenience of a simple pause—I pretty used the unofficial pause of going to the equipment menu and selecting “menu explanation” throughout—would make the game more approachable as a casual experience. And, yeah, FromSoft NPC questlines have always been inscrutable.
“Just because a narrative element is not explicitly laid out, it doesn’t mean that it isn’t there.”Oh, I hope I didn’t imply is… I’m not trying to imply that the game lacks a narrative. What I am trying to say that it doesn’t (majorly) drive the forward movement/progression of the game—where going around and completing aspects of the game aren’t explicitly because there’s a narrative/story reason to do them. Once you start the game you’re basically given a task: kill 5 demi-gods. There is a narrative to doing this somewhere, but it isn’t explicitly or cinematically laid out enough. You kinda need to pick up pieces about why you’re doing it in the world, but even then, it’s mostly an explanation of the game’s setting/world setup.The best explanation I found of this (because I personally don’t remember why this was a requirement) was this: The Elden Ring was shattered, and the great will is trying to reassemble it. It is doing this by guiding the tarnished to retrieve the shattered fragments of the Elden Ring (The Great Runes), which have corrupted the demigods with their power and mad taint. After reading that, I can kinda recall some bits of that, but honestly, that whole thing was kinda lost of me (which could be a fault of my own), but from gauging others, that narrative certainly isn’t at the forefront of the game, so the most major reason you need to kill 5 demi-gods is because that’s what the game requires for you to progress. This isn’t anywhere similar or alike to God of War’s setup for why Kratos is killing the gods, which gets laid out for quite extensively in each game, where there’s a story beat before and after every task or mission, which aims the player at a certain goal and plot point.To provide a simple comparison: in Elden Ring there’s a prophecy that says the Tarnished (your character) will one day return to the Lands Between, take the greater runes from the Demigods, and become the Elden Lord. The game also makes it customary for the Demigods to be challenged for their runes. To me… that’s pretty much just a setup task for why the game has you going around doing stuff, and it isn’t that major, as most all plot points that occur during this task are lore aspect of the world.Meanwhile, in God of War, the reason Kratos hunts Ares is because Ares tricked him into killing his own family (wife and daughter), which causes Kratos to seek revenge and become the new God of War. After that, Zeus (revealed to be Kratos’s father) gets jealous of his power and he thinks that Kratos would come after him and take his throne, mostly because Zeus killed his own father for that reason and thought his son Kratos would come after him the same way. This causes Zeus to rally his fellow gods in an attempt to try and kill Kratos and take his newfound godly powers, in which Kratos kills anyone that stands between him and Zeus.All of that from GoW is raw story that you play out beat by beat with the narrative being laid out cinematically. At every plot point, there is a story to tell as to why you’re moving forward, and why you’re going to have to fight the gods that challenge you. Conversely, while Elden Ring has a similar setup, the execution of it’s narrative is way different (as I mentioned earlier), and by that I didn’t mean to say that there was no narrative in Elden Ring, but simply that isn’t so non-conventional that it’s explanation isn’t intrinsically important to the task you’re given, and most players don’t even grasp onto it well enough to explain it. As recent as it was (within past 4 months or so), I kinda had to watch some lore videos on Elden Ring to figure out the whole prophecy thing, why you need the Great Runes, and what it means to be the Elden Lord. On the other hand, I haven’t played the God of War games I just described for at least 15-17 years and I still remember aspects of its story quite well, and that’s because the games moves the player forward by putting its narrative at the forefront.TL;DR – Sorry for the long explanation again… It’s difficult to get into this without trying to clarify everything (and there’s a lot to clarify). Again, my point wasn’t to say that Elden Ring had no narrative at all, it just doesn’t use it as the driving purpose behind it’s gameplay the same way that God of War does, which does a really good job of immersing the player into the story it’s trying to tell. For me, Elden Ring was all about showcasing it’s gameplay aspects: exploration, grinding, and boss fights, where the narrative reason for doing those things was kinda on the backburner and not very central to the game.
If it had been a “best narrative game” award, I would agree that Elden Ring isn’t the right one.But “best narrative” is very vague, and narration can take many forms.
I can honestly say I’ve never watched The Game Awards. Maybe a couple clips here and there like when they feted Kojima but I never watch because it’s all an infomercial. And ever since he was on G4, there’s something about Keighley that just rubs me the wrong way. I can’t even remember what it was.
This weekend, I am having trouble deciding what to play. I have just finished God of War (2018), and have decided to play something else before starting Ragnarok. I will probably be playing Until Dawn with my boyfriend, and outside of that (I’ll only play Until Dawn with him, so I need something for myself) I am trying to decide between Skyrim, Animal Crossing: New Horizons, or Tell Me Why. I’m thinking of doing Animal Crossing and either Skyrim or Tell Me Why, mainly because Animal Crossing is open ended and doesn’t really have a set beginning, middle, and end. So what do you all think?
May I interest you in Returnal? I’m legally obligated to tell everyone how good Returnal is at least monthly. Because it’s very, very good.
And also the one new game out that isn’t part of a mega franchise… yet.
I tried Returnal and didn’t particularly care for it. I’m not usually big into roguelikes (with the exception being Hades) but thought the atmosphere and the story was pretty interesting. Thanks anyways for the recommendation.
Play the one thing you mentioned that isn’t the billionth entry in a franchise.
I feel like Skyrim is a massive open-world game that demands a LOT of your time. Until Dawn is a great call, and short, breezy choice-based titles like that make for decent cool down, before chomping on something big again. Tell Me Why is another decent choice for yourself. It starts a little slow, but I found playing it comparable to reading a nice book. For a little more action, if you have them, I’d suggest Guardians of the Galaxy, or Tales from the Borderlands or if you’re looking for a little comedy. For more horror, A Plague Tale is doing well for itself, and an indie called Little Nightmares 2 is pretty awesome for creepy side-scrolling puzzles.
I started Guardians of the Galaxy and got about 8 or 9 chapters in but for some reason never finished. I should try and get back into it and play it again at some point and finish the game. I saw that A Plague Tale was on sale at the PS Store so I’ll see how much it is.I heard about Little Nightmares 2 but don’t know much about it. I may look into and check it out
Still playing a lot of Modern Warfare 2. Warzone 2 is a very weird experience. They added so much extra stuff that it’s hard to focus on the actual BR part. The weapon upgrades and battle pass are also needlessly complicated and more complex and hard to navigate than previous games. I still think Blackout was the best BR game ever made
The Game Awards have had big Steve Buscemi “How do you do, fellow gamers?” energy since their first year. Last year I watched a Twitch streamer and his community clown on them for a couple hours during a reaction stream, and it’s the most I’ve ever paid attention to them. I appreciate that they’re an excuse to announce new games, but so’s every Nintendo Direct, so even in that respect it’s an event I forget exists for the majority of the year.Much like Monster Prom 2: Monster Camp, which I largely forgot existed until its sequel came out a few weeks ago. Suddenly there was guilt over excitedly buying the game during week 1 after no-lifing the first game in the series for a month, only to shelve it and perpetually say, “Soon.”Well, “soon” happened this week, and I’m back in my dating sim hole. It doesn’t really play out like a dating sim; you read the set-up to a wacky misadventure and then are given a binary choice on how you’d like to resolve the situation. The two options are coded to one of your stats – smarts, boldness, creativity, charm, and fun – and if you pick the one with the higher number on your stat sheet, you’re rewarded with a few more stat points. After a certain number of these events, you choose the character you want to hook up with, and if you meet their stat requirement and you’ve picked them enough in the “which of these two characters do you try to impress?” scenarios, then you hook up during a meteor shower on the last day of camp. If you don’t meet the minimum requirements, you can soothe the burn with the frankly amazing closing credits.I’ve gotten the 7 “normal” good endings as well as 3 of 25 special endings with more obtuse or RNG-based triggers, and the game’s scratching the old Monster Prom itch better than Monster Prom did. Sure, it doesn’t feel as novel the second time around, but now that I’ve gotten a feel for the 6 main love interests and have reacclimated to the game loop, this universe is home again. I’m going to be playing this for several more weeks, though probably not to the exclusion of other games. Maybe by the end of the weekend I’ll decide which RPG to start in on.
Normally, dating sims do not interest me but Monster Prom and Camp ensnared me with their humor-laced claws. The characters, both romanceable and otherwise, and situations we all find ourselves in are ridiculously over-the-top that I can’t help but laugh over and over again. And on top of that the series is LGBTQ+ friendly – one asexual player chose not to go with anyone to Prom and got a good ending for themself. Not many dating sims can say they cater to all sexualities.
Alas my laptop isn’t strong enough for Steam so I bought the games for the Switch. I hope Roadtrip also gets ported over in the future.
Cool. So the Oscars, Golden Globes, and Grammys are really just the Super Bowls of their industries. That’s totally easy to understand as they are 100% similar to an active sporting event. I think I was getting confused for a moment.
Sue me, I like these. I enjoy the debates, the pageantry, and the bragging rights of all sorts of award shows, so I’m glad gaming has something that’s pushing for that kind of status, too. It’s a fun retrospective on the year that was, the World Premieres are exciting, and it’s also nice to give the creators their moment in the sun. So, it’s curious to me, that folks will claim to have their backs or stand up for them when there are behind-the-scenes issues like crunch culture or toxic workplaces, but when they’re given a large platform to be appreciated, suddenly no one wants to give a shit anymore.
Update on The Movies: I finally got this stable again after downloading a patch that lets older apps use more memory. Getting through the 30s but I’ve also imported some saves from the Mac version that MAY work so I can just do Sandbox whenever. Wonder what mod sites are still up. I’ve been delving more into Dreams as well, have played a lot of the tutorials. There’s some real potential here, the main limitation is that a given scene can only have so many elements (which makes sense) so it incentivizes creating longer experiences out of short scenes, as I’ve seen already. Sometimes the UI is a little tricky, I’m not sure if I can make the camera snap to an axis so I can be sure to place something evenly. I’m still not sure what I want to actually do with this, but I’m working on a spaceship now.
“largely meaningless”… Um the super bowl is not meaningless. Lol. You sound like a “ I read and write and all sports people are dumb jocks” kind of person. I do love the take on the narrative/screenplay comparison tho..