Jeff's Thoughts On Those Spike TV Awards

I don't watch a lot of television. Oh, I certainly spend quite a bit of time staring at TVs, but the standard offering that comes in through my DirecTV dish doesn't really hold a lot of sway over my life. It used to not be this way, of course, but then, our choices for entertainment used to be a lot narrower. These days, I tend to spend that entertainment time in front of a computer screen, and the rise of Netflix's streaming service and DVRs means that I can afford to let people sort of "beta test" actual television and pick the best of it to watch later. Or, at least, that's the basic idea. In reality, I never actually get around to watching most of the shows that get recommended to me unless it's comedy written in a very specific style. I still haven't watched The Wire, for example, despite buying DVDs full of episodes. But after seeing one episode of it, I sought out, recorded, and watched as much Jon Benjamin Has a Van as the law would allow.

I suppose you could take that to mean that I have pretty specific tastes, but I'm really just taking the long way around to tell you that I don't have an especially high opinion of television programming. It's hard to describe that without sounding like I'm some sort of elitist snob, but I don't take too kindly to the way much of it is presented. If you'll allow me to further generalize, television feels like it's being presented to the lowest common denominator, with much of it being written by people who seem to have absolutely no respect for the people who might later go on to watch these shows. Parts of Spike TV Video Game Awards broadcast sort of reinforce my feelings on the medium, which is too bad, but ultimately I didn't really expect it to go much differently. The restrictions in place when producing a show like this almost ensure that, as one of those Internet-loving assholes who inherently distrusts marketing and finds most TV to be ironically enjoyable at best, the deck for liking such a show is sort of stacked against me.

Or to put it yet another way, did you really think that a show put together by the production company that brought you shit like Survivor, The Apprentice, and Are You Smarter Than A 5th Grader? was going to offer you a quiet, introspective look at video games and the creative minds behind them? Did you really think that a show built in that way would ever air on Spike TV?

Maybe I should add a bit more to that list of obvious questions. Like how about... do you really think that award shows are great to begin with? Because the quiet, respectful show that people seem to be begging for across the Internet this morning usually comes across as two things: BO and RIIIIIING. Back when I was living with a crew of college girls, I was induced into going to an Oscars Party. It was insane! They were dressing up all nice specifically to hang out in our living room and watch the Academy Awards! Afterwards we made it out to a bar and I think the night ended with a couple of us trying to eat a cake that had fallen on the floor. That's beside the point. My point is that traditional awards shows are unfuckingwatchable. The only awards broadcast I ever really connected with was MTV's Video Music Awards, which was fascinating when I was a kid, mostly because it was a weird chance to see modern pop stars of the 1980s mingling together, but really because it was a live broadcast and I was always interested in seeing people swear on live TV. Did the awards themselves matter back then? Not really. I mean, yes, they almost certainly mattered to the people winning them and, to some extent, the industry behind those people. But as a viewer, I was tuning in to see an entertaining show. This, as far as I can tell, is the blueprint that the VGAs are operating under. They probably want to produce an entertaining show that people will watch, and if they can celebrate games along the way, then great! Right?

The problem is that I just don't think they're executing well enough on the entertainment side.

I think most of the blame for that falls squarely in the laps of the people responsible for writing the show. The gags, some of which tried to trade off of standard gaming tropes like health meters and such, fell flat. It had a recurring bit about teabagging that wasn't funny the first time around, making all of the callbacks spread throughout the show almost painful. Some cursey YouTube guy got brought into the fold and turned into another lame bit where he sat next to some Spike executive. Am I supposed to know or care about who either one of those guys are? An award winner got teabagged. So irreverent, right? From a comedy perspective, the closest the entire production got to being on the pulse of gaming was when Daniel Kayser spit out the whole "arrow to the knee" thing before talking to Todd Howard during the preshow. Sadly, that whole thing seemed to have set some sort of record for fastest time from "this is funny" to "this is tired," so the reference ended up being like two days too late or something insane like that. Then again, the Internet continually proves that it's mostly good at complaining about things, so I guess that shouldn't be used as a barometer.

The "talent" side of things didn't really help, either. You know... I'm sure getting Charlie Sheen to show up seemed like a really fun idea six months ago. But wow, could there have been a more miscalculated choice? At least his obligatory "games are awesome" bit wasn't as embarrassing as Will.i.am's, who sounded like he was trying to justify his presence with every word out of his mouth. Here's a tip on that front: games are huge. Billion-dollar huge. Going out of your way to talk about how much you play them--and this extends to the host being consistently billed as a "huge gamer," too--makes you look like you've never played one in your life. Or, at best, it makes you look like one of those "well, I really like the Call of Duty and the Madden" types, which is probably worse if you're trying to get actual game aficionados on-board. Obviously, this is a pretty hard problem to fix because finding an array of people that actually connect with the gaming audience is tough, especially when said people need to be big enough stars to hopefully draw in a wide enough viewing audience to make the whole show worth doing to begin with.

With better writing, I think the rest of the show absolutely falls in line, though I tend to agree that not enough time was given to the awards themselves. That's probably a pretty tough thing to balance out. Also, this is probably the part where I should state that I'm one of the judges that helps pick nominees and winners for many of the award categories, so perhaps I have some sort of hidden interest in seeing my contributions get more airtime or something. But if you're going to put "Video Game Awards" right in the title, burning through the bulk of them in a quick montage seems completely disingenuous. But I suppose it's harder to get people on-board if you were to title the show "World Exclusive Mania: Game Trailers You Ain't Seen Before: The TV Show." It's telling that the online-only pre-show did much better at giving out awards and letting developers speak for a bit than the entire two-hour TV broadcast.

That leaves the exclusive trailers, weirdly enough, as the part of this show that absolutely shines. Say what you will about the advertising-like nature of releasing a bunch of trailers and giving them better placement than the actual awards, but it gives the VGA broadcast some actual content--some actual news is made at the show every year. That doesn't happen at other awards shows. As someone who professionally talks about the video games, it's nice to actually have something new to discuss in December, which is usually pretty dead. Without this award show, that wouldn't happen, and games like Command & Conquer: Generals 2 would probably go on to get lost amid a sea of bigger announcements at E3. And Tony Hawk HD would get announced in a press release, at best. This show is a good platform for those announcements. It just needs to be better balanced with the actual awards.

It's the morning after the live broadcast, and I'm sure that the people that watched last night's show are full of wide-eyed, unrealistic ideas about how they would "fix" the show. I've offered mine, and I think the people behind the scenes really do get closer to finding the right balance every year. But maybe the right approach for those of you who seem to get filled with total outrage over all this is to stop treating this awards show like it's the only game in town and remember that this is an industry where every individual publication offers their own version of the year's best games and the industry itself has places like GDC and DICE where the speeches run wonderfully long and the jokes are 100% inside. There's room for all of it. Hell, if anything, there are probably too many different sets of awards out there! But I guess my point is that you shouldn't expect an increasingly dated medium like television and its desire to speak to the wide, mainstream audience that is slowly blinking out of existence to provide a good home for this idyllic awards show you've cooked up in your head. Because they've got soft drinks (FOR MEN ONLY) to sell.

I don't watch a lot of television. Oh, I certainly spend quite a bit of time staring at TVs, but the standard offering that comes in through my DirecTV dish doesn't really hold a lot of sway over my life. It used to not be this way, of course, but then, our choices for entertainment used to be a lot narrower. These days, I tend to spend that entertainment time in front of a computer screen, and the rise of Netflix's streaming service and DVRs means that I can afford to let people sort of "beta test" actual television and pick the best of it to watch later. Or, at least, that's the basic idea. In reality, I never actually get around to watching most of the shows that get recommended to me unless it's comedy written in a very specific style. I still haven't watched The Wire, for example, despite buying DVDs full of episodes. But after seeing one episode of it, I sought out, recorded, and watched as much Jon Benjamin Has a Van as the law would allow.

I suppose you could take that to mean that I have pretty specific tastes, but I'm really just taking the long way around to tell you that I don't have an especially high opinion of television programming. It's hard to describe that without sounding like I'm some sort of elitist snob, but I don't take too kindly to the way much of it is presented. If you'll allow me to further generalize, television feels like it's being presented to the lowest common denominator, with much of it being written by people who seem to have absolutely no respect for the people who might later go on to watch these shows. Parts of Spike TV Video Game Awards broadcast sort of reinforce my feelings on the medium, which is too bad, but ultimately I didn't really expect it to go much differently. The restrictions in place when producing a show like this almost ensure that, as one of those Internet-loving assholes who inherently distrusts marketing and finds most TV to be ironically enjoyable at best, the deck for liking such a show is sort of stacked against me.

Or to put it yet another way, did you really think that a show put together by the production company that brought you shit like Survivor, The Apprentice, and Are You Smarter Than A 5th Grader? was going to offer you a quiet, introspective look at video games and the creative minds behind them? Did you really think that a show built in that way would ever air on Spike TV?

Maybe I should add a bit more to that list of obvious questions. Like how about... do you really think that award shows are great to begin with? Because the quiet, respectful show that people seem to be begging for across the Internet this morning usually comes across as two things: BO and RIIIIIING. Back when I was living with a crew of college girls, I was induced into going to an Oscars Party. It was insane! They were dressing up all nice specifically to hang out in our living room and watch the Academy Awards! Afterwards we made it out to a bar and I think the night ended with a couple of us trying to eat a cake that had fallen on the floor. That's beside the point. My point is that traditional awards shows are unfuckingwatchable. The only awards broadcast I ever really connected with was MTV's Video Music Awards, which was fascinating when I was a kid, mostly because it was a weird chance to see modern pop stars of the 1980s mingling together, but really because it was a live broadcast and I was always interested in seeing people swear on live TV. Did the awards themselves matter back then? Not really. I mean, yes, they almost certainly mattered to the people winning them and, to some extent, the industry behind those people. But as a viewer, I was tuning in to see an entertaining show. This, as far as I can tell, is the blueprint that the VGAs are operating under. They probably want to produce an entertaining show that people will watch, and if they can celebrate games along the way, then great! Right?

The problem is that I just don't think they're executing well enough on the entertainment side.

I think most of the blame for that falls squarely in the laps of the people responsible for writing the show. The gags, some of which tried to trade off of standard gaming tropes like health meters and such, fell flat. It had a recurring bit about teabagging that wasn't funny the first time around, making all of the callbacks spread throughout the show almost painful. Some cursey YouTube guy got brought into the fold and turned into another lame bit where he sat next to some Spike executive. Am I supposed to know or care about who either one of those guys are? An award winner got teabagged. So irreverent, right? From a comedy perspective, the closest the entire production got to being on the pulse of gaming was when Daniel Kayser spit out the whole "arrow to the knee" thing before talking to Todd Howard during the preshow. Sadly, that whole thing seemed to have set some sort of record for fastest time from "this is funny" to "this is tired," so the reference ended up being like two days too late or something insane like that. Then again, the Internet continually proves that it's mostly good at complaining about things, so I guess that shouldn't be used as a barometer.

The "talent" side of things didn't really help, either. You know... I'm sure getting Charlie Sheen to show up seemed like a really fun idea six months ago. But wow, could there have been a more miscalculated choice? At least his obligatory "games are awesome" bit wasn't as embarrassing as Will.i.am's, who sounded like he was trying to justify his presence with every word out of his mouth. Here's a tip on that front: games are huge. Billion-dollar huge. Going out of your way to talk about how much you play them--and this extends to the host being consistently billed as a "huge gamer," too--makes you look like you've never played one in your life. Or, at best, it makes you look like one of those "well, I really like the Call of Duty and the Madden" types, which is probably worse if you're trying to get actual game aficionados on-board. Obviously, this is a pretty hard problem to fix because finding an array of people that actually connect with the gaming audience is tough, especially when said people need to be big enough stars to hopefully draw in a wide enough viewing audience to make the whole show worth doing to begin with.

With better writing, I think the rest of the show absolutely falls in line, though I tend to agree that not enough time was given to the awards themselves. That's probably a pretty tough thing to balance out. Also, this is probably the part where I should state that I'm one of the judges that helps pick nominees and winners for many of the award categories, so perhaps I have some sort of hidden interest in seeing my contributions get more airtime or something. But if you're going to put "Video Game Awards" right in the title, burning through the bulk of them in a quick montage seems completely disingenuous. But I suppose it's harder to get people on-board if you were to title the show "World Exclusive Mania: Game Trailers You Ain't Seen Before: The TV Show." It's telling that the online-only pre-show did much better at giving out awards and letting developers speak for a bit than the entire two-hour TV broadcast.

That leaves the exclusive trailers, weirdly enough, as the part of this show that absolutely shines. Say what you will about the advertising-like nature of releasing a bunch of trailers and giving them better placement than the actual awards, but it gives the VGA broadcast some actual content--some actual news is made at the show every year. That doesn't happen at other awards shows. As someone who professionally talks about the video games, it's nice to actually have something new to discuss in December, which is usually pretty dead. Without this award show, that wouldn't happen, and games like Command & Conquer: Generals 2 would probably go on to get lost amid a sea of bigger announcements at E3. And Tony Hawk HD would get announced in a press release, at best. This show is a good platform for those announcements. It just needs to be better balanced with the actual awards.

It's the morning after the live broadcast, and I'm sure that the people that watched last night's show are full of wide-eyed, unrealistic ideas about how they would "fix" the show. I've offered mine, and I think the people behind the scenes really do get closer to finding the right balance every year. But maybe the right approach for those of you who seem to get filled with total outrage over all this is to stop treating this awards show like it's the only game in town and remember that this is an industry where every individual publication offers their own version of the year's best games and the industry itself has places like GDC and DICE where the speeches run wonderfully long and the jokes are 100% inside. There's room for all of it. Hell, if anything, there are probably too many different sets of awards out there! But I guess my point is that you shouldn't expect an increasingly dated medium like television and its desire to speak to the wide, mainstream audience that is slowly blinking out of existence to provide a good home for this idyllic awards show you've cooked up in your head. Because they've got soft drinks (FOR MEN ONLY) to sell.

The Last of Us made it worth watching.

Spin one Bird Man

That show was just awful.

these should just forgo the awards have have trailer mania: the future becasue that is the direction they are going. Just becasue it is on tv does not mean it has to be a shitshow automatically but with spike tv at the helm the bar is set really low. DICE and GDC should broadcast these awards(or make them available) because it is something i would love to see instead of 4 douches making dick jokes.

I don't even bother watching the VGAs anymore. I just watch the new trailers on youtube.

okay.

I don't watch award shows in general, or much T.V. anymore.

I don't care how much they try and make excuses, NOTHING can excuse the lack of time spent actually handing out awards! Did you know Bastion won 3 awards while watch the show, cause I sure as shit only found out afterwards. Even people there like Mark Hamill was waiting for his Voice Actor category and they had already presented it in the fucking pre-show. It's a fucking joke.

The three highlights of the night were, Rocksteady talking, Blizzard talking and Bethesda talking. COME. THE. FUCK. ON.

Great post. I totally agree on all fronts.

I complained about the show, but I went out of the way to not watch it. You kinda can't complain if you're feeding the machine yourself. It's the only thing like this out there for games.

The show isn't celebrating games and the developers. Unfortunately, it never will. It's an excuse to sell products related to the game industry (and new games themselves). The show isn't for us anymore. It's become the MTV Awards for dudebros. You know it, I know it.

That "for men only" commercial really is terrible.

yes they show sucks but look at those tits. good job jeff!

Just like Call of Duty, I seem to have outgrown award shows.

DVR'd it and just watched all the trailer.

I would watch a video game awards show that was serious, contained discussion and speech, and was aimed more at professionals over 25. I will never watch this 16 year old marketing gimmick for Dr. Pepper.

That all said, I COMPLETELY understand that there are less of me than there are of them, and more to the point advertisers want them and not me, and I don't expect to get my way. The people who annoy me when they comment on these shows are the ones who expect their niche tastes to be catered to on primetime TV. Move on and seek out what you do enjoy, I promise you there is plenty of it.

I think i would have rather watch the deliberation process on why the panel selected the games they did, though i assume it was an easy choice for GOTY this year.

I don't agree that there couldn't be a serious awards show about games. It just can't air on live TV. An awards show hosted by someone from the games industry would be watchable by people who legitimately care about games beyond seeing robots explode. I think such an awards show could be done with a little bit of class would be worth while to do. Maybe a live stream of some kind?

I mean how many people listen to the Bombcast's GOTY discussions? That's audio for god's sake! It has NO exclusive trailers or Charlie Sheen appearances. You guys are pretty lighthearted, but there are some serious discussions about what makes games great, and we eat it up.

The Miyamoto moment put a huge smile on my face and in my head I thought that, while rough around the edges, the show was alright. Than we get to see Felicia Day cut fruit and eat cupcakes while some guys tea bag the award winners for taking to long and I was reminded that the show is and always will be garbage.

Don't watch the VGAs, problem solved.

Great article Jeff. I think alot of people forget also that a few years ago G4 started airing the DICE awards. The problem (and why they stopped) where exactly what you said. It was boring as shit and no one cared. So now these same people are crying about the VGA's, but when someone actually showed the "respectable" awards show no one cared.

With better writing and more exposure for the people who actually make these goddamn video games (I mean, this show is "all about them," right?), it could be a decent show. I'm with Jeff that this doesn't have to be some dry, fancy, straight-forward award show, but what they delivered last night was just awful and demeaning in my opinion.

I agree with everything said here but, the show is still terrible. There has to be a way of showing the mainstream audience that, even if you don't like games, everyone can get behind a show where they portray the winners being super passionate about what they do.

Not exactly related but, so many people watch Starcraft not because they enjoy the intricacies of the game, but because the players and the casters put on a tournament that clearly shows so much heart. To the point where you can't be against it.

The solution is broadcast the GDC or DICE awards over the internet. Then people who want those Award shows can ignore the VGAs... um but you need some kind of no advertisements and celebrity type clause in there so it does not... damn thats not going to happen. PR can be a bitch sometimes.

The VGAs don't have to be the Oscars. But when you present FOUR awards on your broadcast and one ends with the winner being teabagged, that's fucking bullshit and something we should never just accept as "oh, well, it's on TV. What do you expect?" Sorry but I have a little too much respect for the people that make these games to say that.

You can have your dumb comedy bits and useless celebrities. They need that and I understand. But that doesn't mean you can't give more than a couple developers some time on stage without the fear of having some asshole shove their balls in their mouth.

They should've got some community favourite entertainers to perform, like Anamanaguchi or Nathan Barnett

I think that's fair.

I don't understand why anyone would expect anything to come out of VGA's that's anywhere near watchable. Is it just hope?

There is a strange, misguided sentiment that all award shows are bad, so should we really expect anything better?

Come on now. Jeff, do you know why you didn't connect with the Academy Awards? Because you don't like movies or TV shows that much. And do you know why your female roommates absolutely nerded out over it? Because they like movies and TV shows.

So, take that logic to the next plausible step: people who like things want to see an award show about things they like. That's it! That's why people are demanding a better VGA, because god damn, we gamers might not like the Academy Awards or the Grammys or anything else out there, but we fucking LOVE video games, so we want to see a decent award show.

There's another, far more dangerous argument out there that we should just ignore it if we don't like it. You know, like if you shut your eyes you become invisible.

The VGAs sucked, the VGAs have always sucked, and Spike TV is awful. But...the VGAs are what we have. There are lots of internet-based award shows and developer-focused award shows, but they are small fish compared to the VGAs (which is a molecular fish when compared to the other award shows, but whatever). They are the most wide-reaching and well known award show for our medium, and until that changes, they need to be the target of our arguments.

These "it's not for you" and "well the production company made bad shows so don't criticize too much when their other shows are bad" arguments feel like huge copouts.

The overwhelming bulk of complaints have been about the lack of entertainment value and the shafting of developers in favor of Z-listers and has-beens getting up on stage to pretend they know what video games are.

Nobody expected a quiet, thoughtful, and respectful show on interactive entertainment's artistic merits (even if Keighley was trying to sell it like that), so get right out with that strawman. People should expect a mix of awards and marketing, a developer giving a speech about how proud his team is followed up by Corporation X Presents 2012 Game Trailer. This year was almost entirely Column B. Asking for them to actually consider Column A a little is not pie-in-the-sky idealism, it's perfectly reasonable.

Greg Kasavin, Super Giant, and Bastion's three awards got cast off to a preshow interview and a mention in a 30 second montage. Nominees for any category other than Best Character or GOTY got no mention at all. That's just plain disrespectful to the hard working people in this industry, dumb skits or no. Acting like giving them their recognition is "BOO" "RIIIING" seems really lame coming from you, Jeff.

Didn't bother to watch. Honestly, game announcements and trailers are the only things about the show that I've ever given a shit about, and those will get talked about and posted here, a place with content that I actually enjoy consuming, a short time later anyway.

Wait, what? "Back when I was living with a crew of college girls..."

Read Alex's article on the VGA first, and with Jeff's, this serves as a good look on the whole thing.

Eh, I watch a lot of TV shows, so I can't really get on board with this. The suggestion that television is being presented to the lowest common denominator would be a little insulting to me if it had come from someone I wasn't already familiar with. I know Jeff is not a snob.

(Also, I watch Survivor religiously.)

but call of duty bro! I mean come on I tried that skyrim bro that shit was stanky!

Shows like this give games -- and humanity in general, a bad name.

We'll probably see "The Real Housewives of De Moine" host next year.

I'd reduce the comedy bits, keep or reduce the acceptance speeches, and increase the reveals. The people asking for more acceptance speeches are just trying to find a way to justify their hobbies to their parents. Do you really need to know whether or not Todd Howard is proud of everyone who worked on Skyrim? Hell, you can tweet him and he'll probably say exactly as much.

@SirPenguin said:

There is a strange, misguided sentiment that all award shows are bad, so should we really expect anything better?

Come on now. Jeff, do you know why you didn't connect with the Academy Awards? Because you don't like movies or TV shows that much. And do you know why your female roommates absolutely nerded out over it? Because they like movies and TV shows.

So, take that logic to the next plausible step: people who like things want to see an award show about things they like. That's it! That's why people are demanding a better VGA, because god damn, we gamers might not like the Academy Awards or the Grammys or anything else out there, but we fucking LOVE video games, so we want to see a decent award show.

nailed it, just because you dont care about movies are tv does not mean other don't as well. the fact hat d-list celebrities got more screen time than developers is crazy. You could not give as peech because you would be tebagged is insane. Also there is a ton of tv that is not aimed at the lowest common denominator. It's not crazt to ask an award show to have a modicum of decency or have standards

I don't watch awards shows. But I realize I'm a hipster of most media I consume and they are thus irrelevant to me. Do video games even want a show? We hear about Oscar bait films but never GOTY bait games.

I think my only issue with the show is that gaming has no other real public outlet to really showcase what games really are. The VGAs do not provide any insight into the artistic endeavor or the passion that goes into making games and it helps further the naysayers (Ebert) argument's that games aren't to be taken seriously and that all that hard work and imagination that went into the final product has no meaning.

The VGAs makes us passionate gamers and the developers themselves seem like ADD lowlife failures to the general crowd. That is my only concern. I mean fine, it doesn't really matter what the public sees in the consumer, but I think gaming and the creators deserve to be treated properly in the public eye. This show just perpetuates that almost dead stigma that gaming is solely for hot head adolescents to get their fill.

I know it is a giant money marketing tool and is no different from MTV awards, but I feel ashamed about the MTV awards too.

I'm fairly sure the VGAs are intentionally bad, created by television people who hate and are threatened by video games. The first one was so god awful, the fact they are still making them is even more proof they are trying to make gaming look bad.

The industry deserves something better than Spike and Burnett, but that's who they're supporting. They're their own problem.

Great.  
Glad to see somebody make fun of the "Not For Women" thing.

SHUT THE FRONT DOOR, you're telling me people actually watched this show at one point!

@SirPenguin: @Crushed:You guys nailed it. The lack of actual awards on the show, the disrespectful treatment of the talent behind the games (seeing Mark Hamill tweeting, confused about the award he was nominated for that was fucking awarded in the preshow was really a sad reflection of this) is awful. We absolutely can and should demand better.

But to bring up something that hasn't really been touched on, I think the whole thing of "We're going to air some exclusive new trailers and then turn right around and give awards to the people behind said trailers" is fucking gross too. The whole show is just another cog in the PR machine. You don't see hot new trailers at the Oscars. Because the Academy is an independent body. And ostensibly, the panel of judges behind these awards is too. But the show itself sure fucking isn't.