It's Tak-o'Clock!
http://www.nintendoworldreport.com/rfn/73610/episode-956-every-day-is-nintendo-today
We've now reached a point where everyone feels the urge to produce a think-piece on the nature of The Game Awards. This puts us into an odd circumstance where there is this thing that everyone acknowledges feels wrong even if we aren't able to completely explain why, and yet we cannot stop it.
Generally, your gut is usually a pretty good indicator of things being "off." It's an evolutionary defense; our pre-historic ancestors navigating the high grasses of the savanna and the dark of ancient woods were utterly surrounded by ambush predators. Sometimes called a sixth sense, the ability to perceive that something is wrong was a prerequisite to stay alive.
That is to say The Game Awards is an anomaly.
If you are a believer in nominative determinism, you would be utterly bewildered by what the product is - roughly 8% of the runtime this year was devoted to the presentation of awards. That means if you turned it on at any given moment you were more likely to see the simulated sexual chemistry between Miss Piggy, a felt-covered anthropomorphic pig, and Geoff Keighley, a polyester-suited producer-nee games journalist, then you were actual awards.
I've been to many E3s, I legitimately cannot recall how many. I have lived through some absolute tragedies of stage presentations. Do you recall the famed Konami "press conferences" or Joel McHale was just taking the piss as Ubisoft's marketing department beclowned themselves?
None of these events felt of The Grim Obligation. On the show this week, I struggle to relate The Game Awards to famous Greek parables. I settle on a nightmarish hybrid of Sisyphus and Prometheus.
For years the entire thing has felt like a joyless march into the late night, and yet I watch this thing live because it happens at the same time we record RFN. News happens as we are trying to do the important business of talking about whatever stupid purchase Jon Lindemann has made this week. And the reality is, there usually is news that we should talk about.
It is met with the enthusiasm of "oh, that's nice"
It's a problem of the packaging. I'm not saying anything that's revolutionary here; as stated earlier, there's been a remarkable amount of discourse on how little of The Game Awards is award-focused. This doesn't explain why it feels like I'm preempting my inevitable time in purgatory just watching the damned thing. I think its reductionist to call it one long ad with ads, even if its accurate.
I think it's a flex. Expensive. Overly-long. Self-congratulatory.
Keighley has all these important players in an otherwise unstable industry putting on their best formal wear, paying untold fortunes to show their wares, and plastering on a fake smile when their category is relegated to a preshow host who couldn't be bothered to learn to pronounce the names of the games in the category she was about to present.
It's a simulacrum of an award show.
In a time where: a major console player seems to be slipping off into the sands, thousands of childhood dreams to make games for a living die every month, every project can feel at risk from ever-tightening budgets, and creativity is imperiled by the encroaching march of content recycler that is AI and investments from foreign powers who may not appreciate the vision of development teams, we construct this temple of excess. Cast in the celebratory color pallet of gloss black and.. also... matte black this gaudy exercise in indulgency has all the charm of a wake. The symbolism, accidental as it may be, is apt.
For ****'s sake, at least find a few other colors than black, black, and chrome. Video games can invent new colors and are world of imagination. We don't have to hew the entire damned colossus out of onyx.
My name is Ozymandias, King of KingsLook on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!
I am sure the winners feel pride in the recognition, but the show does not celebrate the industry. It's Keighley's other product, Summer Games Fest, wearing a mask. No one will remember these proceedings unless someone sneaks onto stage, or a winner goes completely off script and starts swearing. Previous years were remembered for the hosts inability to control how long people spoke for, then in subsequent years over-constraining the speech of the winners.
How many Tak games do you think were made?
This is an abrupt transition, but I'm still running away from the idea of a stone Miss Piggy degrading in the sands. This question was our escape rope out of the morass.
This week James got the NSO Expansion Pack ("with a C and a K") in order to play our RetroActive Soulcalibur II. He's spent the week trying the offerings of the service, such as the just-released Wario World. This somehow devolves into a long-form discussion of the Tak franchise. He then turns the show over to Jon, Gui, and Greg to talk Metroid Prime 4: Beyond.
After a break, we dive into a little bit of The Game Awards news and then a single Listener Mail question: kill a Nintendo series to save the world.
Our RetroActive is THIS WEEK, so get your comments in.
- (00:07:28) New Business - The NSO Expansion Pack. Wario World.
- (00:33:41) "Jon, how many Tak games do you think there are?".
- (00:51:03) Metroid Prime 4: Beyond.
- (01:36:17) The Game Awards newsbrief.
- (01:39:50) Listener Mail - Change one thing in history to prevent Nintendo's totalitarian power grab.
Topic: Episode 956: Every Day Is Nintendo Today (Read 17 times)
