Member-only story
The gaming industry is now bigger than it’s ever been–as of 2019, it was worth more than music and film combined, making it the most lucrative player in entertainment. It was then only a matter of time before the spectacle of the Oscars and Grammys would find itself an analogue in the gaming space–with its seventh iteration now however, the industry’s commercial interests are making themselves more loudly-known, leaving players ever-reticent to fully embrace the ceremony as a genuine display of what gaming has best to offer.
This is ironic considering that the show’s spiritual predecessor — the Spike Video Game Awards — was more of an interesting relic of media anthropology than it ever was a serious player in the critical space. It is comical the degree to which celebrity appearances played a greater role in the awards than the games themselves, but such was the state of games media in the early aughts. By 2013 and after Geoff Keighley’s untimely departure from Spike TV, he had ambitions of freeing the show from the confines of traditional media, hosting it on players’ natural habitat, which was and still is the internet–the transition to digital was smooth enough, but not without its curses to follow.
