So little did I care about the Game Awards 2022, that I didn’t even know they were happening until two hours before their live broadcast. This pattern has repeated itself for the duration of my university tenure; December being the season of finals and exams, it’s easy to forget about such trivialities as an award show dedicated to celebrating video games. Even so, I’ve found myself year upon year cynically sitting down to watch a nearly-four hour live streamed event — with the companionship of my roommates or friends in a voice call on Discord, if I’m lucky — a pattern in which December 8th 2022 proved no different.

I say this as someone who ostensibly likes video games. 

Still, even amongst the drivel of awards season, The Game Awards does manage to distinguish itself in one principal way: by daring to ask the question; “what if the Academy Awards tried to sell you stuff?”

Having well and truly eclipsed the Electronic Entertainment Expo (or “E3” as “The Gamers™” like to call it) as the premier influential gaming event (which is to say it's something akin to the Met Gala for incels), The Game Awards has the unenviable job of not only awarding its series of pseudo-prestigious prizes, but also of marketing towards the world’s most vocally unhappy online community — gamers.

Let’s make one thing crystal clear, the Game Awards is not an awards show. I’d go so far as to posit that the Game Awards may never have been an award show. Instead, the Game Awards is a two-to-three hour livestream of what would normally be the advertising block of network TV, interspersed with brief (and I mean brief) awards announcements, where half the time they don’t even bother to properly introduce the nominees. 

However, this is what the Games Awards is, and to properly review the event one needs to take it on its own terms. Thus, with a heavy heart, I bring to you an honest appraisal of the night’s advertisements. 

The night started relatively strong with a lavish trailer from indie developer Motion Twin, announcing DLC (Downloadable Content) for their hit game Dead Cells. I failed to restrain myself from soypointing when Adrian “Alucard” Farenheit Ţepeș appeared on-screen, prompting me to scream “that’s my twink!” much to my roommates’ delight. The expansion, titled “Return to Castlevania” brings the eponymous bastion of Konami’s bitterly beloved franchise (specifically those of Castlevania: Rondo of Blood and Castlevania: Symphony of the Night for you freaks who care) to the world of Dead Cells, offering new weapons, two expansive new areas to explore, and (presumably) the inclusion of Richter Belmont and Alucard as playable characters and Vlad Dracula Ţepeș himself, who appears to be one of three new bosses. 

A subsequent trailer demonstrated the cinematically-gorgeous Replaced, a 2.5D platformer with a 16-bit ethos and a gorgeous diversity of dystopian 1980’s environments.

It’s worth noting that both these announcements came during the “pre-show” (which was ostentatiously called the “Opening Act”) as opposed to the “Big Show” itself. Confusingly, despite the Game Awards stream starting at 7:30 PM EST, they claim that the show itself starts at 8:00, despite them showcasing both awards and advertisements announcements during that time. The only real difference was the switching of pre-show host Sydnee Goodman (who wore a tragically hideous dress) for creator and regular host Geoff Keighley. 

Keighley is ostensibly a games journalist and freelance writer, and has hosted various gaming-related video programmes on top of being published in the likes of GameSpot (as well as the same Kotaku dot com as my journalistic idol Tim Rogers). Despite the relative prestige this portfolio would on its own afford him, Keighley is today mostly known as “the Game Awards guy,”. Having hosted the Spike Video Game Awards since 2006, Keighley split with the Paramount-owned company to establish The Game Awards, as he felt the event was becoming too commercialized. Oh, how the mighty fall. The Game Awards 2022 is arguably more commercial than anyone could have likely imagined when Keighley left Spike in 2013. Large companies such as Amazon-owned Twitch, and Valve-subsidiary Steam act as the event's primary sponsors, their branding, alongside that of countless other companies like Discord, IMAX, and Samsung splattered across myriad surfaces and screens.

Following Keighley’s introduction another series of commercials went by with lacklustre ceremony. 

In an unforeseen (mostly because of how truly weird a decision it was) Al Pacino, actor, showed up to announce the winner of Best Performance. Pacino has never been in a video game (bar his likeness in 2006’s Scarface: The World is Yours, albeit with a sound-alike in his stead) so the decision for him to be an announcer is odd, though  it fits well in a recent trend of the Game Awards getting whichever big names they can to appear in whatever capacity they’ll agree to — hence why Animal from the Muppets also showed up during this year’s proceedings. 

Pacino announced Christopher Judge as the winner of the award for his portrayal of Kratos in God of War: Ragnarok. Judge had lost out to Roger Clark in 2018 for his portrayal of Red Dead Redemption II’s Arthur Morgan, and despite God of War (2018) winning Game of the Year (“GOTY”), this would be the first time Judge’s remarkably understated performance was specifically recognized. By this time Twitch chat was furiously spamming “BOY,” both in reference to Kratos’ famously stiff fatherly-isms, as well as in acknowledgement of Sunny Suljic’s performance as said Spartan’s son, Atreus. 

Judge thanked his family, the crew at Sony Santa Monica, and his fellow castmates — at length — up until the Awards began playing badly-looped wrapped music in the hopes of shooing him off-stage.

Nintendo had a strong showing both for announcements and nominations, with Xenoblade Chronicles 3 being considered by some to be a dark horse to win GOTY. Bayonetta 3, which took the title for Best Action Game, was also announced to be receiving a new entry to its series in the form of prequel Bayonetta Origins: Cereza and the Lost Demon.

More fuel was poured on the fire stoked by Nintendo’s September 13th revelation of a new Fire Emblem entry in development titled Fire Emblem Engage. The already-controversial game was announced to feature DLC including, most notably, the three primary lords from most recent mainline entry Fire Emblem: Three Houses — a move which will likely only serve to further divide the already embittered Fire Emblem fanbase. That said, Fire Emblem fans possess a talent for masochism like no other, so it's not unlikely that the game will perform well regardless considering they’ll probably still buy it while complaining all the while. 

Ken “creator of Bioshock” Levine’s Ghost Story Studios revealed a first look at their debut, Judas which — to be extremely generous — looks exactly like Bioshock, only on a spaceship. I myself am mostly ambivalent towards the game which Tim Rogers once notoriously deemed “not art”. At the very least, this game feels like a safe bet from a new studio. 

“Safe” is a word which I might further extend to describe the Game Awards as a whole. The kind of games on display, and likewise the kind of games that tend to win awards, are rarely themselves challenging in their content or presentation. Departures from form like the interactive-movie Immortality are rarely given the time of day compared to their more traditional counterparts. Thus, the Game Awards as a whole begins to feel stagnant.

This is a theme we’ll no doubt come back to. 

Conversely, one of the most exciting announcements — for me, at least — came in the form of a new trailer from indie darling Supergiant Games. The sumptuously animated video revealed the official announcement to Hades 2, the follow-up to their 2019 tour-de-force Hades, and marking the first time the studio has ever produced a sequel. As a new Chthonic kid takes the helm of the God-like Rogue-like, so too do new Gods step up to aid her. The trailer teases Apollo and Nemesis, among others, to fill out the pantheon of those absent from the first entry. 

Shortly thereafter a new trailer was showcased from Extremely OK Games (EXOK), creators of 2018’s true game of the year Celeste for their upcoming title Earthblade. Drawing on the same entrancingly detailed sprite work as their aforementioned Celeste and debut Towerfall, Earthblade purports to be an “Explor-action platformer,” with the trailer showcasing a sprawling metroidvania-esque world filled with enemies, obstacles, and jaw-droppingly gorgeous pixel environments. The title drop at the end only cemented my excitement for this game, with the lettering and sword paying homage to the NES-era designs of Final Fantasy III logo or the English “Dragon Warrior” localization of Dragon Quest. Needless to say, the game looks superb, and Maddy Thorson could probably kick me in the balls and I’d thank her and tell her I was excited to see what she makes next.

I’ll afford the announcement of the Game Awards proper about as much time as the event itself provided. So it is that in the brevity of a single paragraph I’ll plainly inform you that God of War Ragnarok walked away with the most awards of the night, handily nabbing six of its eleven nominated categories. 

Sadly, while #EldenRingSweep would not come to fruition, the critically-acclaimed FromSoftware title did secure three commendable wins for best Game Direction, Best Roleplaying Game, and the coveted Game of the Year award. Perhaps with this, Arthur will finally see the publication of “Binary Sea” Part 2.

Immediately after Hidetaka Miyazaki’s heartfelt Game of the Year acceptance speech, some kid stepped boldly towards the mic and proudly declared: “real quick I want to thank everybody and say that I think I want to nominate this award to my reformed Orthodox Rabbi Bill Clinton.” He was quickly escorted offstage as the cameras cut away just as he managed to get out the words “thank you,”. Geoff Keighley would later tweet that the culprit had been arrested, and Twitter users soon figured out that he was, to few people’s surprise, a YouTuber. 

As the stream wound to a close, an all-too-familiar sinking feeling began to pit in my stomach, and seep into the wells of my limbs. For the first time in its history, The Game Awards lost viewership between 2021 and 2022. Each year there seems progressively less reason to watch the event. Sony promotes most of their first-party IPs at the annual PlayStation Experience conference. Other companies announce their games sporadically throughout the year. Nintendo’s semi-regular “Directs” are far more events in themselves than their minimal showcase at the Game Awards usually is. 

Here I think once again about how safe — how bland — this year’s event proved to be even relative to its predecessors. Despite being held during the height of the omicron variant’s rise, 2020’s Game Awards was buzzing with the recent release of dozens of hugely successful games like The Last of Us Part II, Ghost of Tsushima, Hades, and Final Fantasy VII Remake. Even the announcements — 2020’s Perfect Dark remake, 2021’s Alan Wake II, and both year’s Super Smash Bros. Ultimate reveals come to mind — far eclipsed the seeming weight of anything announced at 2022’s ceremony.

Even among these however, a pattern emerges. The vast majority of those announcements are for remakes of beloved games, reboots of franchises, or sequels or expansions to existing games. The Game Awards posit nothing new, only the recycling of the detritus of a creatively bankrupt industry. No other cultural sector has as quickly collapsed in on itself into self-congratulatory artifice as the interactive entertainment industry. If the Game Awards feels empty it is because it is. Despite being the shortest entry in the event’s history, this year’s outing still proves a vapid exercise in corporate pandering that less so congratulates game developers than it does the idea of earning publishers even more meteoric returns.

The fact that Activision-Blizzard was even allowed back despite their being embroiled in an ongoing sexual harrassment case is itself proof that cash is king at the Game Awards. Why should it matter that hundreds of women suffer in a systemically sexist work environment when Halsey can take the stage in a gaudily-orchestrated show of girlbossery to promote the new girl-powered tits-out Diablo villain to be sold as a sex object for the salivating gamers to consume? 

The Game Awards reveals all the worst tendencies of the industry it honours. The further irony that the event celebrating a fundamentally innovative, ever changing entertainment medium is one of the least original corporate cash-makers among any of the pantheon of award shows to which it postures is not lost on me, either. 

Down with the Game Awards says I. The whole institution is irrevocably poisoned beyond any potential salvation. Give it the E.T. treatment and throw it in the landfill where it belongs. 

No matter, I’m sure I’ll see you next year.