I was watching the Oscars last night and realized something. The way we give awards in the video gaming world is kind of backward. We honor games more than we honor game creators. Granted, some Oscars are like this, like best picture, but every other Oscar is celebrating a person for the work they did on a movie. It’s phrased as “the nominees are (person) for (movie)” putting the person’s contribution first, and the work that they helped develop second.
In the gaming world, we rarely talk about people. We sometimes give awards for best designer, and that’s about it. Otherwise, most of our awards are “best in genre” awards. Best FPS, best fighting game, best platformer, so forth and so on.
The Oscars do this too. For example, they have awards for best documentary and best animated short. However, they also have a bunch of different awards for people’s roles in these genres, like voice acting in animated films. Heck, the Oscars have so many awards they aren’t even able to show them all.
I wonder, why don’t we do this? Why don’t we give awards like “best level designer,” “best sound designer,” and “best graphics designer” for our video game awards? I’m sure we won’t know who the nominees are, but most people don’t know who the nominees are at The Oscars when they announce the award for “best makeup design.”
I wonder too if this dehumanizes games to a certain extent? Perhaps we are more comfortable seeing games as these diversions that simply exist rather than as an artistic work created by people. Accepting a games creator means accepting that a game may have been influenced by that creator’s individual politics and views on the world, and there is certainly a push to keep games as apolitical as possible. Many acceptance speeches during the Oscars brought up some heavy political topics, even if the movies that won the award were not necessarily touching on those topics. I wonder if we, as the gaming community, would be comfortable if the same was done at our gaming awards?
But outside of politics, I wonder if we are comfortable with simply realizing the fact that games are made by people? Don’t get me wrong, we all know this. It’s not like anyone really thinks that games simply spring up out of nowhere. However, it’s not something we think about all that often. If I asked you to name your top five favorite game designers, you’d probably have to take a while to think about it and possibly even research who designed your favorite games, but if I asked you who your five favorite actors are, you might hesitate because too many names come to mind.
The men and women behind the games tend to take a back seat to the game itself, so much so that we use language that mentions game development studios before people. For example, we will say something like “Naughty Dog is looking to include a variety of different weapons in the next Uncharted.” But there is a person responsible for weapon design in the game, and we very rarely mention them by name. Meanwhile, when we write about movies we constantly talk about directors, writers, producers, and even sound specialists.
What do you think? Do you think we are more comfortable with game creators remaining in the background? Why do you think we never honor game creators in our awards ceremonies, but instead honor the games themselves? Let us know what you think in the comments.