On December 7th, the ninth annual Game Awards passed me by without ceremony. 

It was the first time in five years that I had not watched the event live.

I assure you, reader, that I had every intention to watch it. Much though I bemoaned the event in my last year’s article about it, I admittedly teased a sequel, and had every intention of making good upon said implication.

This was, after all, the year games would be good again; the year of Starfield, a new Baldur’s Gate, a new Zelda, Diablo IV, Alan Wake II, and Final Fantasy XVI. 

2023 was a year full of big numbers, large promises, and consumer hopes and dreams on a scale to match. Few years can lay claim to a new Mario entry, a new Street Fighter, and a remaster each of perhaps the most respectively beloved Resident Evil and Metroid games.

This year should have been great. This year should have gripped me. Instead, scrolling through Google’s top search results for “video game 2023” I see only a list of things I haven’t touched, and wouldn’t care to were they given to me for free. 

I wonder why that is? 

Why is it that even though I played and liked Insomniac’s 2018 Spider-Man I hardly blinked when the much-awaited sequel released? Why is it that despite clocking several hundred hours in Genshin Impact last year, when publisher Hoyoverse’s Honkai Star Rail came out I let release day roll right on by? Why is it that, despite being presented the opportunity to whenever I visited my brother in Ottawa this summer, instead of playing the new Fire Emblem: Engage, I instead revisited digital comfort food in the forms of Three Houses and Three Hopes?

For the Honkai one at least, I know the answer—like hell am I being saddled with another gacha game—though for the others, I’m not so sure.

I suppose that is a rather financially prudent decision, so much so that I’ve barely spent money on literally any games this year. Besides a handful of now-defunct 3DS cartridges, the only video game I have spent money on in 2023 was Fortnite—certainly not something I ever expected to admit to in a public forum.

I know I’ve not been alone in this either. 

Video games are more expensive than ever. While the prices of other physical media like Blu-Ray plummet as the bottom continues to fall out of conventional film distribution, video games—despite using the exact same technology as Blu-Ray discs (with the exception  of Nintendo Switch cartridges)—have only soared to new heights of prohibitive cost.

A new release from a major publisher or studio in 2023 retails for $89.99 CAD, which—with 13% sales tax factored in—will set you back just over $101.60, or about the cost of eight months of Netflix, or half an especially good vibrator.

Now, seeing as I know a few people Not in Employment, Education, or Training, the sheer expense of keeping up with new releases in any meaningful way proves obstructive to anyone who isn’t a sugar baby, or has a particularly well-endowed RESP and no qualms about being audited.

To play every game nominated for a Game Awards category this year, discounting VR and mobile games, one would have to shell out $3030.53 CAD—that’s nearly $3500 with sales tax. 

Now, as apparently the only transgender woman whose job is not “Twitter,” the price wall is not a wholly insurmountable one. That said, it would require me to give up other such discretionary expenditures as rent, food, an inordinate amount of books I’ve yet to read, and a number of especially good vibrators, and quite frankly that’s not something I’ll stand for.

Even if you do manage to make yourself the exception to the rule and somehow find yourself with disposable income in this hellscape we call an “economy,” another teeny-tiny problem to the avid gamer presents itself.

Assuming an average retention rate of 40 hours for each of the 112 games nominated, one would need to devote 4480 hours to have a fulsome impression of every nominee this year—that’s more than half a year’s worth of time. 

In other words, you would have to spend more than 12 hours, every day, all year in order to play every game nominated for a Game Award, and this ignoring the fact that many of these games actually demand far more than 40 hours to complete their campaigns, let alone fully experience the myriad ancillary systems and multiplayer options on offer.

I recognize most people likely don’t have the ability or will to devote the requisite amount of time to such an undertaking, though for me especially this holds true. As I’ve settled into my nominally-part-but-functionally-full-time role here at Arthur, I put aside much of the time I would otherwise devote to multi-dozen hour long titles to instead write inane emails and stare at empty word documents.

While I can easily see how one might take this as a lament on my part, mark my words I insinuate no such thing. Make no mistake, I love my job, and as much as I love my job, it is also true that this year playing video games burned me out to the point where it felt like a chore. 

Where this leads me to, however, is the question of who exactly video games are meant to be for.

On the surface, the answer should be everyone; that is the message the games industry has been pushing—both implicitly and explicitly—through the plethora of female protagonists in recent years, the ever increasing emphasis on the seriousness of independent games about “girly” things like farming, mountaineering, and other feats of hard manual labour, and sweeping declarations of how far video games have come since Pac-Man.

However, something I can tell you from hours of (mostly involuntary) anthropological observation is that video games remain very much in the boy zone. The archetypal devoted gamer of today, in my experience, male, mostly nocturnal, generally unemployed, all by all accounts in sufficiently secure financial standing to routinely order Uber eats to their domicile instead of cooking.

Much though I profess to be somewhat of a girl gamer, my record looks pitiful in comparison to your roommate who plays Valorant. Not that playtime matters per se—it is, after all, what you do with it that counts—but even if I wanted to I’d hazard that I haven’t that much more free time outside of my beauty sleep I could devote to this  particularly time-consuming divertissement.

To return to the subject of the Game Awards, I find it illustrative exactly how few games in this year’s pool of nominees I—an employed woman in an accelerated Master’s degree program—found time to play this year.

The only game which I played this year that won anything in any category was Cyberpunk 2077, a game which came out in 2020—just under three years from the date of 2023’s awards ceremony. That fact aside, when your game only wins an award for having made it only marginally less shit three years out from its release, forgive me for hardly heralding such as the greatest of accomplishments.

By the time I did eventually finish Best-Ongoing-Game-of-the-year-Winner Cyberpunk 2077 in late spring of this year, it felt like I was doing so out of obligation more than anything else, and even then a very resentful obligation under duress.

Even though I’d had not the worst time ever with that admittedly stupid game up until that point, I did not particularly want to finish it. Moreover, as my player character bore down on the narrative point of no return, I resented my past self for having put sixty hours into the game in the first place. 

Sunk cost fallacy, is however, a very persuasive mistress and—being as I was some five hours away from completing the damn thing—I said to hell with it and dragged myself across the finish line.

Cyberpunk was the first of only five games I finished this year. 

The others I might elaborate upon more on some other occasion, in some other avenue, though suffice for the time being as placeholders.

I hate finishing games nowadays. 

I can never bring myself to finish much of anything.

I’m sure this says exactly all of the regular things about the degradation of our collective attention spans under late capitalism, though I think it’s also indicative of a wholly arbitrary though no less upsetting problem:

I think we have too much video games.

I stress that I don’t mean too many—I don’t mean that in the slightest.

There are too many of everything, and yet said superfluity remains wholly inconsequential regardless. There are too many books, too many movies, too many songs to ever hear all of them, but I would never go so far as to accuse any of them as being excessive in and of only themselves.

I will devour a thousand page novel—just watch me. I read The Brothers Karamazov in a week. I notoriously adore movies which are, by every metric for other people, intolerably long. One time I was at a rave from which I came back unfathomably high clutching a cornucopic amount of McDonald’s takeout, and immediately upon stepping through the door sat down and watched the entirety of The Fellowship of the Ring on my living room floor because my roommate had just put it on then.

I love fulsome things, and I love things fulsomely. 

Just not, perhaps, when it comes to video games. 

As the tendency in all entertainment forms except fiction prose that is not mostly pornography tends toward conspicuously ballooning length, I am generally more than happy to indulge in it. I’ll watch a thirteen-hour presitge TV series in a heartbeat. Hell, I’ll watch it twice if I like it!

The pedantic part of my brain loves completionism, and I will—against my better judgement—commit myself to reading a dozen books in a series even after beginning to dislike the third, or else do something as woefully misguided as watch all of Friday the 13th in a single, night-long sitting.

I regret barely any of my life which I’ve spent reading books. I’ve read The Hunger Games series three separate times, and I do not regret that even for how much I dislike those books individually and as a holistic product. 

While I can say the same of even my least favourite movies (I need to feed myself inspiration for my increasingly-sparodic film column somehow), I don’t extend the same courtesy to video games.

I’m going to level with you, I’m none too happy to have spent as much of my life playing Minecraft as I did (save the time spent on my ex-girlfriend’s erstwhile server, though that’s another story). In hindsight, the several hundred hours of Call of Duty: Warzone I clocked between fall of 2020 and summer 2021 is not exactly a point of pride.

I accept these as mistakes on my part and recognize my part in them, though nonetheless I think it begs questioning why increasingly I feel a sort of futiliy when playing video games.

I enjoy much of the time I spend playing video games. Some of the most affecting works of fiction I have ever consumed have themselves been video games. However, in recent years I’ve found these sorts of games to be much fewer and further between. Probably the best game I played this year was the Final Fantasy VII Remake, which is hardly saying anything considering it is a remake of a game first released in 1997 that just about everyone on the entire internet seems to consider inimpeachably fantastic.

I haven’t actually had strong opinions on the artistic merit of most any game since the release of The Last of Us Part II, though I’ve had extremely polarizing ones on exactly which ones I felt were undeserving of similar praise.

Maybe it’s just that they don’t make ‘em like they used to, and they used to make ‘em good, though I feel such an explanation overly reductive.

Life is a precious resource, and every year a lot of people work very hard to put a lot of effort into many, many video games. If games are suddenly less substantial, I don’t think it's attributable to some vague notion that everyone has lost the ability to create meaningful or engaging art in the time since the release of Chrono Trigger.

In this respect I find The Game Awards an effective demonstration of some of the issues with gaming from its very first principles. 

Despite being an event nominally intended to celebrate excellence in their relevant section of the entertainment industry, The Game Awards are functionally a three-hour slew of advertisements meant to appeal largely to lowest-common-denominatror neckbeards on Twitter.

Stop me if you think that you’ve heard this one before, but The Game Awards care less about the quality of games in themselves than they do about pumping out slop for the masses.

Sure, no other entertainment sector is exempt from this fact, though others do a better job at trying to cover it up (sometimes). While I might take ombrage with the jury’s decision to award Blue is the Warmest Colour the Palme d’or at Cannes 2015, I respect their decision to confer the honour to lead actress Léa Seydoux as well as the film’s (heterosexual male) director.

Cannes at least makes the pretense of still caring about film as an art form, though The Game Award’s privileging of game trailers nearly 2:1 in favour of actual awards amounts to saying the loud part quietly. The reality is that as prestige games have codified themselves as a veritable genre in the ten years since the release of the original The Last of Us, the writing of award-winning video games has not made especially huge leaps forward, whilst the gameplay has veritably stagnated. 

Sure, something like GOTY winner God of War (2018) feels exceptionally polished, though that’s all it really is—polish. Underneath all of the graphic design, single-take camera work, and air-tight combat engine, you’d be hard pressed to not feel as though you’re playing an M-rated Zelda-like. Just as even movies shot on film and colour graded to a tasteful sepia palette can still be stinkers, even the games with the biggest graphics and most Unreal game engines can still just not be very good.

Games are designed to monopolize attention, to maximize retention, to keep us hooked up to our screens just like everything else in this blasted world. While I understand where this impulsed stems from, I’m tempted to say that it might prove antithetical to innovation in the industry, and moreover to good game design.

The Game Awards privilege the tried and tested, the proven formula of big-budget prestige games with serious things to say about violence, and agency, and fatherhood. I’m not discounting that some of these games are legitimately good, but when you feel like every game you play is doing a bad job at copying Naughty Dog’s homework, it can begin to become more than a little grating. 

If we only tread the safe route in determining what constitutes entertainment excellence, we risk never exposing ourselves to the myriad fascinating and downright weird expressions of the interactive medium which populate the front page of such sites as Itch.io.

The Game Awards, to me, stand as perfect testament to the industry’s need for an enema. Overwatch, the 2016 Game of the Year winner, is no longer accessible to play on any major platform because of publisher Blizzard’s decision to permanently shutter its online servers upon the release of the game’s sequel. 

Many, many players devoted hundreds of hours to a game which no longer, in any meaningful sense, exists.

This is what I mean when I say “too much,”—it’s less a measure of quantity than it is an appraisal of volume. Video games each contain too much of themselves, so much that they become black holes of feedback loops and “content,” in which to lose ourselves in. As the industry reaches the point of perfecting this, it feels as though games have become absorbing to the point of our losing ourselves in them.

It has become hard for me to devote myself wholly to new games precisely because they threaten to devour so much of my time, hence why I found myself playing mostly dinky handheld games from a decade ago this year. It’s hardly a perfect solution, but it’s a start.

As a wise hedgehog once said, “I want shorter games with worse graphics made by people who are paid more to work less,” and I’m not, by any means, kidding. 

I think a fundamental part of making gaming a universally welcoming medium is meeting people where they’re at. If the only people who are able to get the most out of video games are those who treat them like a full-time job, it’s inevitable that you’re going to see fewer people outside of that privileged position having the ability to enjoy them.

So long as the industry keeps cranking out 80-hour third-person open-world action-roleplaying games, the barrier for entry—and for the average person’s enjoyment—is going to remain high.

If I, as someone who's been playing video games for the better part of my sapient life, can get burned out, I can only imagine how someone picking up Baldur’s Gate 3 for the very first time must feel.

This isn’t a problem that can be solved overnight—as I say, it is endemic to the games industry—but it is something that we can take steps against.

Much though I’ve struggled to get invested in the latest AAA publisher fare, I have never for a minute regretted a second I’ve played of indie games like Hades and Celeste. While I’m not a big believer in the power of voting with one’s dollar, I’d rather be putting my money in the pockets of devs making games I love than publishers who systemically mistreat their staff.

I’m not just saying that, either—I am a monthly contributor to multiple indie game developers on Patreon, money I have yet for one minute to regret spending.

So while we’re on the topic of resolutions, I’m going to articulate mine for this coming year a month early: I am going to make a point of playing every indie game I neglected to in favour of Cyberpunk 2077. 

As the arbiter of my own fate I choose to devote myself fulsomely to games like VA-11 Hall-A, SIGNALIS, and 2064: Read Only Memories because I’m my own woman, dammit, and I would rather spend my life playing gay little games about robot ladies than doing another fucking sidequest named after a Creed song. 

I don’t give a shit about the Jordan Peele x Hideo Kojima horror game. I don’t give a shit about Elder Scrolls VI. I don’t give a shit about the Game Awards, so it's about time I take it upon myself to stop talking about them.

Maybe next year video games will be good again but me, I have my doubts. In the meantime I’m more than happy to while away my time making good on good intentions while I wait for the release of the only good video game ever, Maddy Thorson’s Earthblade. 

Maddy, if you want me to interview you, my email address is listed prominently in my author page.

If that’s all, however, I’ll see you all next year—I’ve got to make some space on my hardrive for these robo-lesbos.