The creator of the Game Awards and presenter Geoff Keighley has spent his life close to the video game industry’s Hollywood inferiority complex. It involves strange collisions of gaming culture, pageantry and celebrity appearances is from Cybermania ’94 where at 15 he was an “interactive products specialist” and announced Jonathan Taylor Thomas Mortal Kombat as the winner of the best overall game.

Thirty years later, Keighley has managed to combine Oscar-like glitz, glamor and prestige to celebrate an entertainment medium that hasn’t quite grown up yet but is perhaps more comfortable in its uncomfortable skin. The show delivered laughs, heartfelt thanks, rousing remembrances and much more Lots of big new game reveals Most average people tune in, all without much hassle or anything collapsing under the exhausting weight of a nearly four-hour ceremony.

The only one who looked out of place on stage at the Peacock Theater in downtown LA last night was Harrison Ford, awkwardly sandwiched between his virtual Indiana Jones lookalike and the executive producer producing the hundred million dollar simulacrum of the action hero came to life. It was a reminder of that, just the same Indiana Jones and the Great Circle surpasses the most When it comes to embracing the potential absurdity of its immersive sim antics rather than the relative grace of its Spielbergian source material, gaming culture and the industry that produces it have long since emerged from the shadow of Hollywood, even if gaming is of that old Obsessed with rivalry still comes through every now and then.

Keighley launched the Game Awards back in 2014 after breaking with Spike TV and abandoning cable distribution in favor of the streaming revolution. The move followed the infamous 2013 VGX disaster in which Keighley hosted alongside a visibly bored and at times aggressively distant Joel McHale. “Spike’s VGX Awards are turning into a new kind of chaos,” read a Forbes headline from the day after.

After ditching the old format, the 2014 Game Awards were immediately relieved of the condescending antics of the old media trying to get regular people to care about games, and instead aimed more directly at the fans who already understood why they were cool, exciting and so popular on the cusp of a radical evolution (coincidentally, the show also contained references to this). The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, No man’s sky, The Witcher 3and other modern standard bearers).

But the modern Game Awards weren’t created in a day or even a year. The event changed and grew by leaps and bounds and gave us many beautiful but also many frightening moments. And the more gaming has matured, the more critical people have become exploitative industry practices and the toxic communities They occasionally play footsie with them. The Game Awards has struggled to adapt, walking a fine line between paying lip service to gullible critics and gristing for the companies that pay its bills and provide its world premiere trailer reveals.

Things came to a head last year when developers, facing a surge in layoffs as the gaming industry restructured in the wake of the coronavirus crisis, were told to “draw a line in the sand” with an event where It was primarily about celebrating people’s successes, and again came up with a list of sponsored games and game advertisements. The dissonance was best captured at the moment when Swen Vinckewho accepts the award for the best game of 2023 on behalf of Baldur’s Gate 3 team, was forced off the stage while attempts were made to dedicate the award to colleagues who had died during development.

Keighley is an insider who always carefully collects and curates surprise game announcements make sure people know that he could play, see or hear them months before anyone else. It’s a fanboy attitude that he cleverly transforms into authenticity. But the host also demonstrated tireless commitment Absorb feedback And criticismeven if his reactions sometimes sound strange in the moment deaf And irrelevant.

And just like the opening ceremony a decade ago, the 2024 Game Awards seemed partly a reaction to the previous year’s failures. The winners were given more time to talk, if only a little more. No one was visibly pushed off the stage. Even though half of the winners were announced in speedrun rounds between commercials for other games, many still had a chance to be seen accepting their awards. Getting the winners seen and celebrated is apparently what all awards shows are about anyway, even if it’s the bare minimum of what they can strive for.

Instead of protesting the video game industry’s greed and excess during one of the worst layoff years in the show’s (and the industry’s) history, Keighley gave the floor to Amir Satvata Development Director at Tencent Games to honor his personal contributions to his industry peers by tirelessly documenting industry layoffs, updating an extensive list of new job openings, and simply reminding other developers that their lives are being turned upside down, no matter how small Whatever project they were working on or how unknown the game studio that employed them is, there is someone there to witness and be willing to offer help. It wasn’t a radical call for unionization, but Keighley’s show comes closest to capturing the destructive side of the brands she idolizes.

And of course, the event brought with it the big announcements that fans had been eagerly waiting for. They got their first taste of it The Witcher 4 and a look at something The Last of Us The manufacturer Naughty Dog has been working on it for years. Legends Fumito Ueda (Ico, Shadow of the Colossus) and Hideki Kamiya (Devil May Cry, Bayonetta) revealed new projects. There was more Elden Ring (a three-player roguelike spin-off), border areas (a new trailer for Borderlands 4), And Helldivers 2 (a free update that adds an entirely new enemy faction).

I haven’t mentioned the actual winners of the awards themselves much because they never quite get to the point. Every nominated game was more than worthy. While a culture steeped in leaderboards and score-chasing loves a winner, the event is primarily about honoring games through the sheer power of spectacle. Video game music played in orchestra halls has more than a hint of the old video game inferiority complex at work, but it’s worth seeing Balatro Music played live on a stage in front of starving artists and CEOs is Still an incredible moment.

And with the introduction of the GOTY winner, catharsis indeed occurred. Vincke, who returned from last year’s win to present the award to this year’s winner while wearing a truce pin, explained the remarks he couldn’t quite make at last year’s show. In his preamble, he laid out his recipe for GOTY’s success in an industry with rising costs, insatiable profit motives, and endless incentives to copy other people’s homework rather than try something new.

The studios that developed games worthy of such an award “didn’t treat their developers like numbers on a spreadsheet,” he said. They didn’t treat their players as users to be exploited. And they didn’t make decisions they knew were short-sighted based on a bonus or political considerations. They knew that if the game and the team came first, the revenue would follow. They were driven by idealism and wanted players to have fun, and they realized that if the developers didn’t have fun, no one would have fun.”

This year was the best The Game Awards in a long time, if not the best it can be. Why is the accessibility award still limited to the pre-show? How come so many categories are still so confused? Why are actual awards still increasing? less than 10 percent the total running time of the show? How is it that the finances surrounding the show, unlike the voting process, are still so opaque? There’s always next year, because as viewership numbers continue to prove, we’ll all be watching when the circus returns to town next December.

My personal favorite part of the show was this recurring pieces by Muppets Statler and Waldorf. They essentially voiced the most common online jabs launched at Keighley in real time. The showman was always eager to please them, poking fun at them rather than undermining the humor with a witty retort. Maybe he’s learned that the best hosts are also willing to listen to everyone else’s complaints. And the gaming industry rightly has a lot of them.

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