Well everybody, it’s time once again to ruthlessly pick and choose which video game that came out at some point in 2021, or late 2020 is fine too I guess, is the best video game of the year. Geoff Keighley’s Geoff Keighley Awards Hosted By Geoff Keighley has released its list of nominees, and I’ll tell you what, we’re not taking it super well on the good ol’ internet.
The way that voting ostensibly works is that certain outlets appoint judges who choose from a long list of games which ones they want to nominate for particular categories. That long list is thus whittled down into the short lists we, the consumptive public, are shown and subsequently debate over heavily on Twitter until we all get sick.
Of course this is presented as a perfectly objective and normal process and nobody should really look into it much further, much like how nobody questions who the judges are for the Oscars or the Grammys or whatever, or why they’re all old white men with little to do with the culture itself. So questions like “which outlets got to appoint judges,” and “who are these judges” don’t really get asked all that often. Maybe we should? At least we should have a better understanding for why and how certain outlets are chosen. Maybe? Anyway. The nominees are here! And we should all be so lucky that our favorite games even got looked at.
For Game of the Year, The Video Game Press has chosen the following six games:
- Deathloop (Arkane)
- It Takes Two (Hazelight Studios)
- Metroid Dread (MercurySteam)
- Psychonauts 2 (Double Fine)
- Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart (Insomniac)
- Resident Evil: Village (Capcom)
For Best Game Direction, it’s the list above minus Metroid Dread and Resident Evil: Village, and add Returnal (Housemarque).
For Best Narrative, it once again falls to Deathloop, It Takes Two, Psychonauts 2, now just remove Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart and Returnal and add Life is Strange: True Colors (Deck Nine) and Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy (Eidos-Montréal). And it goes on like this for something like 27 other categories. I’ve named three categories and nine separate games. A true sicko would gather up all the nominations into a spreadsheet just to see how few games actually got a nod, but that sicko is not me.
There are some weird choices, some disappointing choices, and some combination of the two among this list of games that we swear are the best of the best, but the most bizarre category was, for me, the Best Role Playing category.
A Dismal Display
I’m by no means an RPG expert. In fact after recent play sessions I’m not even sure if I like the genre? But for some reason, I keep up with it reasonably well. Here are the nominees:
- Cyberpunk 2077 (CDProjekt Red)
- Monster Hunter Rise (Capcom)
- Scarlet Nexus (Bandai Namco)
- Shin Megami Tensei V (Atlus)
- Tales of Arise (Bandai Namco)
Aside from the inclusion of the trashbag from CDPR I guess you can call this a list of RPGs that came out this year, even a couple good ones like Scarlet Nexus or SMTV. But looking at this list you’d be forgiven for thinking this year was kind of light on RPGs as a whole when the opposite is true, in fact.
Square-Enix released a lot of them – Bravely Default II, NEO: The World Ends with You, Voice of Cards: The Isle Dragon Roars (and that one’s a Yoko Taro New IP, even! With music by fellow Nier collaborator Keiichi Okabe!!) and Dungeon Encounters, a minimalist dungeon-crawling RPG by Hiroyuki Ito (Final Fantasy VI, IX, XII) – but there were other choices from elsewhere! Like Wildermyth, by Wildwalker Games, or Cris Tales by Colombian devs Dreams Uncorporated and Syck. Disco Elysium: The Final Cut came out in 2021, as did Hironobu Sakaguchi’s Apple Arcade project with Mistwalker Studios, FANTASIAN. Hell, even Persona 5 Strikers would be a better addition to this list than Cyberpunk 2077.
Indies Get Ignored
These kinds of baffling choices are everywhere on the The Game Awards nominee lists, but the Indie section is where I think a few absolutely stellar games legitimately got screwed.
There are three-ish sections of nominees where Indies are most likely to be nominated: Best Indie (obviously), Games for Impact and Best Debut Indie. Here are the nominees for all three categories:
Best Indie:
- 12 Minutes (Luis Antonio) (Annapurna)
- Death’s Door (Acid Nerve) (Devolver)
- Inscryption (Daniel Mullins Games) (Devolver)
- Kena: Bridge of Spirits (Ember Lab)
- Loop Hero (Four Quarters) (Devolver)
Games for Impact:
- Before Your Eyes (Goodbyeworld Games)
- Boyfriend Dungeon (Kitfox Games)
- Chicory: A Colorful Tale (Greg Lebanon, Alexis Dean-Jones, Lena Raine, Madeline Berger, A Shell in the Pit)
- Life is Strange: True Colors (Deck Nine)
- No Longer Home (Humble Grove, Hana Lee, Cel Davison, Adrienne Lombardo, Eli Rainsberry)
Best Debut Indie:
- The Artful Escape (Beethoven & Dinosaur) (Annapurna)
- The Forgotten City (Modern Storyteller)
- Kena: Bridge of Spirits (Ember Lab)
- Sable (Shedworks)
- Valheim (Iron Gate Studio)
Why was Sable snubbed so bad? Where are its art or music nominations? Same goes for Chicory, a game that literally has players interact with the world through explicit artistic actions! What about Hitchhiker or Cozy Grove? or NUTS? or fucking Alba: A Wildlife Adventure? Even if we must necessarily foreclose the possibility of the most niche indie games being “allowed to speak” for these brazen displays of nonsense this whole enterprise is not even close to representative of what came out in the indie sphere this year.
Where is Genesis Noir? A game that seamlessly incorporated Jazz into its game mechanics and generated a really neat myth of creation and destruction? What about Cruelty Squad? That game had the games press talking for days, if not weeks, about its grossout factor and its macabre charm. Where are the Puppet Combo games, or any of the new games associated with the Haunted PS1 crew? Where are the bevy of visual novels that came out this year? or even just Get in the Car, Loser?
Where the fuck is The Great Ace Attorney? I know that’s not an indie game but holy shit it didn’t get anything?
We Don’t Need The Game Awards
Deep breaths.
At its core, Geoff Keighley’s Geoff Keighleys are attempting to do two things: shape the ongoing conversation about what our favorite games were and which of them affected us the most profoundly over the past year, and lend video games – as an industry, as a cultural niche – an air of legitimacy it neither needs or has particularly earned. It is clear from the way the Game Awards is presented that their importance is supposed to be like that of the Academy Awards or the Grammys – deeply flawed and incomplete awards ceremonies in their own right, but we can’t get into that here.
As such, it is very easy to get upset at which games get chosen and which don’t. The thing is, for all of the pomp and circumstance, for all of the production value, for all of the fake mystery around the games’ selection process, behind it all is a simple fact: The Game Awards are one guy’s crowdsourced GOTY list and getting mad at it lends it an air of legitimacy and worth it does not actually have.
Like the myth of the objective video game review, the idea of a definitive game of the year list is goofy as hell and not actually based in reality. Every GOTY list worth anything is by definition incomplete, a thin slice of the games someone played throughout a given year, but its value comes from the personal reasons why the writer liked the games they’re recommending so much. You can go around to each and every major outlet and get a hundred different lists; there might be some overlap but the chance of you finding some hidden gems among each of them is worth that amount of work. Even where there might be critical consensus on a game or set of games, where the Venn diagram doesn’t overlap can be just as interesting. We don’t need to hinge our opinions – or the conversation at large – on an awards show whose origins lie in that one satellite channel that decided women were getting too loud on television.
More than any of that, I feel like especially this year the last thing I really want to do is celebrate the “games industry” as it’s defined by the directors and publishing executives and studio heads. The Yves Guillemots and Bobby Koticks and Adam Kicińskis of this industry don’t need a night for them or their creations. I don’t really want to give any shoutouts to “auteurs” who rely on incest twists to punch their time loop narratives up this year, I think – nor do I want to lend any speaking space to “NFT gaming” or “metaverse” grifters, for that matter. If we’re not raising the voices of the employees at companies like Quantic Dream, Activision-Blizzard-King, Ubisoft, CDProjekt Red, Rockstar Games, and the list goes on, who are trying to unionize, to walk out or strike for better conditions and pay, or at the least get their managers to stop fucking harassing them – well, I don’t really want much to do with any celebration of this industry that doesn’t, at bare fucking minimum, even acknowledge that. (oh and don’t think y’all are off the hook, indie scene. I know full well y’all aren’t any better about treating people like shit – you’re just smaller.)
No Escape does not do game of the year lists for these reasons and more, speaking frankly. Maybe that will change if this industry and cultural niche ever gets its shit together, but I’m not holding my breath so long as the structures that hold abusers and grifters up remain in place and uncontested.