The Game Developer’s Choice awards happened last night with mostly predictable results.

I’m very happy about the IGF selections, but I would probably have been pretty happy regardless of the choice as they are all quite amazing games. Special gratz out to Tom Fulp for bagging the Excellence in Visual Arts and the Audience awards for Castle Crashers.

However, I don’t feel the same love and reverie for the GDC awards. Don’t get me wrong, the nominees are all good games, and this award ceremony still holds far more of my respect than all the Spike TV awards in the world combined. Just this once, though, it feels that the forward thinking world of video game developers and press are lagging behind the mainstream now by what feels like at least a year plus.

I wholeheartedly agree with the choice to give Gears of War the Technology award. The game is basically a defining pinnacle of what can be done with the amazing Unreal Engine today. Best Visual Arts however feels like a disturbing category this year. What exactly is a point of “visual art goodness”? Number of simultaneous pixel shaders, poly count, or width of HDMI wang are technology elements, not art elements, in my opinion. Narrowing those out, you’re left with a number of things: animation quality, quality of shaders/rendering/models, lighting, expressiveness, realism, unrealism (pardon the pun).

Going down the list, Viva Piñata is gorgeous and expressive and it feels like it does so without a muddling amount of technowang. Oblivion certainly has impressive visuals, but not the best out of the bunch and most of the truly impressive elements about Oblivion’s visuals have come from mod tweaks and such and/or middleware drop ins. I do however find it more than mildly interesting that a multiplatform game such as Oblivion isn’t put up to the comparing table with a particular rendition in mind. How good would you say the Visual Art of Ultimate Marvel Alliance is? Are you sure? For asset ‘depth‘/’width‘ and pure artistic Volume (art cubed?), I would say Final Fantasy XII. The pixel and hardware limitations harm the presentation, but there is no denying the magnitude of visual art mastery. Okami is gorgeous by everyone’s standards, but how much of that score is a technical shader element? Can you split the technical shader score from an artistic shader score? Finally Gears of War, the actual inevitable champion. Much of the ‘visual arts‘ of Gears of War seems completely intertwined with its technology moreover than its ‘artistry‘.

There probably should also be some discussion amongst game developers as to whether we should reward inventiveness/artisticness/innovation(blech) or “quality” more. I’m personally under the opinion that an award amongst developers should be based on the advancement of the art and science of game development itself. Both in the public eye (games as art arguments), and in the eyes of other developers. A developer should basically award the thing that they wish to steal for their own game the most (inspiration). Along all these lines, I would completely give this award to Okami, as it is forging way ahead into new ground and it furthers ‘games as art’ by far the most.
This is a game that I have heard from many people (including the one living in my brain): “I want to hang this game on the wall, it’s so beautiful” and “I really wish more games looked like this“. We should be very careful to avoid confusing ‘award for X’ with ‘award for success at X’. Commercial success needs no real award, as it is its own success. How enjoyable would an awards ceremony be that displays the financial statements of the companies and puts the numbers in order and gives them a trophy? Recombining existing elements and polishing like hell (which CliffyB admits is the formula for Gears of War) does not strike me as a formula for advancement of a genre as much as it is a formula for raw commercial (and also ‘real‘) success.

You might be able to guess my opinion on the Game of the Year and the rest of the categories as well. This isn’t what concerns me though, as much as who DIDN’T win anything. Oblivion was nominated for 4 of the categories and won none. I don’t think this is wrong in the sense that Oblivion should’ve won or somesuch fanboisms. I think this is wrong in terms of both level playing field and why we are awarding in the first place.

And now I get full circle to mainstream’s lead on us as far as ‘innovation’ and all that bullbuzz. The Time person of the Year was “You“. Everyone in mainstream, sidestream and jetstream all agree that last year and moreso this year are the years of User Generated Content. So why is this not reflected in our pat-on-the-backs? Why is there no ‘best user toolset’ award? or ‘best community support’? Isn’t this a big part of being a game developer moving forward into the decade when content is no longer king but more the pawn that covers the whole board?

IN EVERY SINGLE CATEGORY THAT OBLIVION DIDN’T WIN, IT WAS COMPETING AGAINST GAMES THAT OFFER NO REAL ADD-ON OR USER CONTENT. It is the most extendable game by leagues above every other game nominated in the entire ceremony (including the ‘innovative’ IGF finalists). In terms of both ‘advancement of game development’ and in terms of ‘consumer appreciation’, this is a big deal. I would have approximately 1/3rd the appreciation for Oblivion without additional mods or content. The IGF has had a best user mod award for a while now, where is the award for letting this even happen? If Youtube and user-content is truly king of the new era, paramount to everything, a game should be measured by its footprint left on the world of video games.

I really hope there’s at least a few other people who feel this is as notable as I do. The only real reason I care is I feel this is the only award ceremony that should be ‘keeping it real’ and elevating the discussion. I guess now the E3 is closed we can expect more GDCE3 in the future and presswank.

Footnote: It’s really not fair to have an ‘Audio’ category and compare licensed music rhythm games with other games with original music. What is the point exactly? Proving that your game doesn’t have Metallica? That’s like comparing a commercial jet that burns fuel with a bunch of interesting hang gliders and airfoils for aerodynamics and concluding that the jet fuel way is the best. Or maybe more like giving the award for best ’soup and dessert utensil’ to the spoon, which focuses on little else.

Addendum: I’ve noticed that a prime problem with awards ceremonies (industry bullshit or not) is that people seem to have a serious problem intellectually separating aspects from a whole. Things are impressive because of their gestalt quality, and this spell tends to make the judge vote higher on all things related to this gestalt. More often than not it seems in awards ceremonies, one nominee walks away with the trophy for at least 1/3rd to 1/2 of all possible categories.

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