The trouble with mirrors.

Writer’s note: I have been writing this piece in my head for years, but was recently inspired to put it to digital paper after reading Joshua Rivera’s excellent “but the games were good.” This piece would not exist without that one. Please read it first, and then come back here. I’ll wait.

I went to The Game Awards this year, and the year before that, and the year before that (the only time I have been in the arena itself), and I have watched them, in some form or another, since their inception, long before I had any sort of voice in this industry, long before they mattered to me professionally. It’s always made me feel dirty.

This year, I did not watch the show itself, though I attended a watch party and saw, in passing, some awards presented and trailers revealed. It was an excuse to see friends who work in both the games press and games PR, and speak in person, something we rarely get to do in an industry where much of the press and PR operate remotely. If The Game Awards has an upside, it is that it gives all of us a reason to share a physical space. It is a powerful, often literally intoxicating thing. We like to feel good at the end of a long year, and video games excel at nothing else as well as making us feel good.

We are addicted to it in games: feeling good. We need it, perhaps more than we need air. And despite how much we bitch and moan and complain and mock and turn up our noses at The Game Awards, it persists because of that need. That is an indictment of the industry, Geoff Keighley’s favorite term, and an indictment of us. None of us are innocent, myself least of all. This piece will, God willing, be the first, last, and only word I write on the matter. And it will, if things continue as I think they must, be relevant for a very long time. I’d love to be wrong about that. I don’t think I am.

I haven’t called The Game Awards The Game Awards privately for a very long time. Instead, they were “Commercials Masquerading as an Awards Show,” “The Keighleys,” and, my personal favorite, “The Geoff Keighley Charitable Organization to Enrich Geoff Keighley.” It is impossible to divorce Keighley from the show because he has literally willed them into existence. He is billed as the Creator of the Game Awards, he hosts the show, and he has, as Joshua so aptly pointed out, had a theme song composed for himself. 

The show is possible because Keighley’s parents were executives at IMAX and he himself has IMAX money and because he has connections in the industry and because he is friends with Hideo Kojima, among other industry luminaries who are often invited on stage so that Geoff can introduce them as “my friend.” It is not the product of an organizational body like the Oscars, which is produced by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, or the Grammys, which is produced by The Recording Academy. It is the product of a single man whose wealth and power have bent the gaming world to his whims, and who has used that wealth and power to create an award show that centers himself at every turn, whether he is bragging about having been shown the new game you’re about to see years ago and is happy he can bring it to you, or whether the Muppets are there for a sketch that informs us that he has known Miss Piggy biblically. It is an act of monumental arrogance in the same way that Quentin Tarantino casting himself in his own films is an act of monumental arrogance; the difference is that Tarantino has never (yet) given himself the starring role. There is no comparison for what The Keighleys are in any other industry.

Years ago, I remarked that video games are the only artistic medium that is designed to be replaced, to be consumed, discarded, and supplanted by next year’s model. That went over about as well as you’d expect, but it’s true. Games are defined, in pop culture, not by what is or what was, but what will be, what’s coming around the pike, the eternal present as a moment of anticipation. Go to a press event for a game that hasn’t even been released, and you’ll see developers fielding questions about post-launch support and DLC. The old is worthless, subject to articles about falling concurrent player counts. “Dead game,” the comments invariably claim, as though a game’s worth was dependent on how many people were playing it at the same time. Developers, to their credit, tend to be more thoughtful. They are, first and foremost, artists. But many of the people who consume games (and I use that verb intentionally) are not. And they have more say in the public perception of a game once it is released into the world.

Even the classics aren’t immune to this hunt for the new. How many times have you heard someone say “Man, I wish they’d remake that with modern graphics/controls/voice acting/gameplay.” There is no understanding, no attempt to reach across time to connect with something beyond the now. The past and present exist only as fodder for the remasters, sequels, remakes, and reboots of tomorrow. Can you believe Resident Evil 4 doesn’t let you move and shoot? Man, I wish someone would remake it as a modern game. I wish Final Fantasy VII had better graphics. I’d kill for a sequel to X, a reboot of Y, a remaster of Z so I could play it on modern hardware without all the jank. And so it was. 

And the remake, the remaster, the yearly sequel, the reboot… it is almost never there to add to, to supplement. It is there to replace, to supplant. There are exceptions. Final Fantasy VII Remake and Rebirth have more in common with Rebuild of Evangelion than they do with Gus Van Sant’s Psycho. They are sequels challenging our ideas of what remakes can be, what they can do, the kinds of stories they can tell. But these exceptions (and there are others; see also: Xenoblade) are both exceedingly rare and often limited to games developed in Japan. I think this is partially because many long-running Japanese franchises are anthologies rather than a series of direct sequels, and because Japanese dev houses are both less averse to remaking old games and generally more willing to take risks when doing so. 

But this is not the norm. Older versions of games are delisted from stores, relegated to bargain bins, disappear entirely, and this is by design. The only thing allowed to remain is the new because the new will make more money. What’s current, what’s coming, what we haven’t finished consuming yet. That’s what excites. Even the people in charge of the companies who make them feel this way. We are all former PlayStation CEO Jim Ryan sitting in front of the old Gran Turismo games. “They looked ancient,” he said. “Why would anybody play this?”.

Can you imagine if we talked about Alien this way? Casablanca? Moby-Dick? MacBeth? The Sopranos? The Wire? People were furious when George Lucas messed with the original Star Wars films and refused to give people a way to experience the original cuts. In games, we’d sell that as an enhancement. “Thank God,” someone would say. “They brought them up to a modern standard.”

You see it in the press, too. I can’t tell you how many people I’ve seen complain they aren’t getting a code for X game or don’t have time to cover Y or need to finish Z so they can move onto A. Trophy lists have to be maxed out; true endings must be attained; and on and on it goes. The eternal search for more, for the next thing. If you can’t sell a piece within two weeks of a game’s release, you might as well not bother. It’s better still if you already have a code and you’re pitching before it comes out. A week later, the industry will have moved on. Sorry; you’ll have to be faster than that.

I’m privileged, as far as games press goes. I largely get to work on what I want, and I’m not worried about the compulsion to be current, about having the most comprehensive list at the end of the year, about seeing everything notable. I can take my time, go back to older stuff, enjoy myself. Most aren’t so lucky. You know that image from Sabrina the Teenage Witch where she’s trying to eat from a dozen different plates of pancakes? It’s like that, except all the time. You’ll see that image a lot in the space, with the titles of games superimposed over the pancakes. And not just from the press. From enthusiasts trying to stay current. “How are we supposed to keep pace?” is the unasked question. There’s so much.

What’s lost is the context. In that episode, Sabrina is quite literally addicted to pancakes. She can’t help herself. But no one is making us play games like this. No one has a gun to our head. We’re doing it to ourselves.

Earlier this year, I reviewed Ninja Gaiden Ragebound for IGN. I’m pretty proud of that review, happy that the IGN editorial let me use “bounce on it!” as a way to describe Ragebound’s gameplay because, well… that’s what you do. Then I tried discussing the game with other people who had played it. The criticisms were many, but almost none of them had anything to do with faults with the game. Instead, it was about how Ragebound wasn’t catering to them. One person complained that failing certain optional challenges would require you to restart the level from scratch instead of from a checkpoint. How were they supposed to get all the optional challenges if they had to play the levels over and over again? When I pointed out that was likely so people couldn’t simply practice those segments and would have to work for the optional challenges, the response was “that’s annoying.” 

I insisted that friction was good, that games should not cater to you at every moment. “Hard disagree lol” was the response. I said that I thought “thing doesn’t do exactly what I think it should/make it easy to do what I want the way I wanna do it, so that’s bad” was poor criticism. Skybox’s Lucas White noted that history matters, and that Ninja Gaiden has a history of and an identity built around being difficult. Our peers were unmoved. “God forbid some people don’t wanna game to be super challenging,” one said. “If you didn’t want a hard game, why are you playing Ninja Gaiden” I asked? “Maybe some people just like ninjas and aren’t familiar with them?” was the response from a third voice.

It’s not enough that the games be modern, not enough that they’re new. They have to be for you, center you at every moment. They cannot risk asking more than you might want to give, cannot risk frustrating you, pushing you. Then you might stop playing. And so our mindset becomes one of being catered to, appeased at every moment, because the games we play are, in many cases, training us to act this way. We’re #1 on the depth chart at Mommy’s Special Boy; the world spins just for us.

Everyone involved in that discussion about Ragebound has worked as a professional game critic. This is how we talk about games.

This is the world in which The Game Awards exists, the world it has helped, over the course of the last decade, create. This is how we talk about games. This is how we experience games. We consume, discard, and then look for something else to consume, a plague of locusts feasting on an art form, gorging ourselves on the labor of folks we can barely be bothered to acknowledge. Who cares that Rockstar engaged in union busting, someone said on social media. Just give me GTA VI.

Is it any wonder that we’re like this, both the press and the video game enthusiast, given the industry itself? The industry is a ravenous beast that cannot be satisfied, a business that consumes people and studios and money in the ever-expanding quest for more, a business where the layoffs from the last few years have to be counted in the tens of thousands, a business where executives regularly extoll the ever-churning slop machine that is generative AI and seem eager to use it to put more artists and writers and programmers and testers and designers out of work. It’s inevitable, they tell us. It’s what’s next. Why aren’t we excited about what’s next? This is what we’ve been trained to want.

Good is never enough. Profitable is never enough. There must always be more. We exist in a machine that grinds through lives and occasionally produces a video game. Sometimes, games even do well enough that you can play them for more than a couple weeks before some accountant decide that they haven’t done enough to continue existing and the studio that made them is shut down, its workers fighting for ever fewer jobs. And we are, all of us – press, bloggers, enthusiasts, critics, every piece of the audience – expected to pivot to whatever else is coming down the pipe. “Thank you,” the business says as it chews through millions of dollars and untold lives are upended by an unceasing, monstrous hunger. “What’s next?”

Is it any wonder that The Game Awards reflects the business that built it? That Geoff Keighley cannot or will not bring himself to talk about rampant consolidation, the importance of human creatives, mass layoffs, Microsoft’s complicity in Israel’s genocide in Gaza, the people protesting outside his front door, any of it? That would mean acknowledging that something might be wrong, that the world outside the arena is on fire, and that, once the show is over, we will exit back into the flames. But The Games Awards doesn’t want that. We don’t want that. We are content with a soothing opiate, happy to pass the pipe. We want to feel good. More damningly, we want to feel good about feeling good. This is the world video games have trained us to desire, the Skinner Box all of us are trapped in. Press the button, rat, and get your reward. As much as you want. All you can eat. And we like it.

Is it surprising that The Game Awards treated the Future Class like a trailer, something to be shown off for clout, and dropped once they were people with a voice and demands, were no longer the future but the present, no longer a prop, no longer something for Keighley to stand on stage and reveal? Is it any wonder that so many awards are presented in the pre-show or in rapid-fire succession, the camera fixed on Keighley’s excited eyes and toothy smile, the winners never invited on stage, the pause between a winner given and a category announced just long enough for the raucous cheers and applause of those in the arena? Does it shock us that more time will be spent on having the cast of the upcoming Street Fighter film come on stage and flatter the audience than announcing several awards combined? That there is an award called “Most Anticipated Game” to tell us what we should be most excited for next?

Some will argue, still, that this is fixable. More time on the winners and nominees, less on the trailer, less on the pageantry, more on what matters: the people who made the games we play. Last year, before my wife and I bought our house, we looked at a gorgeous place. You wouldn’t have believed the pictures. It was on a flood plain, the foundation sinking into the ground, patches in the basement to mask the water damage. The owners, of course, failed to disclose this. We pretend The Game Awards is fixable, some touch up paint away from respectability, from what we imagine it could be. But its bones are rotten. Raise the foundation all you want. It still sits on a flood plain. One day, the water will come back.

And this is what we show up for, what occupies so much time, so much energy, so much money. Without us, these streams wouldn’t garner millions of hits on YouTube. Publishers wouldn’t line up to show their trailers here, we wouldn’t hold our breath for the now tired “we have one more thing to show you.” The cheering when a game we like wins wouldn’t be so goddamn loud. In the arena, it’s deafening. The Game Awards will continue as it is because this is what we want. This is the industry we’ve built, one where we talked about E3 as Christmas Day. Because to gamers, Christmas isn’t the joy of getting a thoughtful gift from a friend and especially not the joy of giving something to someone we love and seeing their eyes light up because, in that moment, we made them feel seen. No, it’s in the anticipation of what’s next, what else we can consume. Christmas Day is a parade of commercials beamed straight to our eyeballs. A million mouths screaming for more. 

This is what we’ve asked for. We’re getting what we want. What we deserve.

We want to be catered to. We want to feel good about where we are and what’s coming and what we like and we want to feel good about feeling good. The Game Awards loves to make us feel good. We love seeing our favorite games win awards and sometimes seeing developers talk about how much those awards mean to them. We love it because it means that we were right to like those games and that studio, something so many folks who are seriously into games base their self-worth on. We like to see the musical performances and the production values and people who know coming on stage to announce what they’re working on. We love seeing trailers for old favorites and surprise resurrections and exciting new things. We pretend that Keighley has, through sheer doggedness and money and power of will, fashioned a show that doesn’t really matter, that people don’t really care about. But deep down, we all know that’s a lie. We’re still watching, still cheering, still getting excited, still getting on planes. We are not immune to propaganda. No amount of money and influence and power can fashion something that lasts if it’s playing to an empty room.

The Game Awards bothers us not because it’s empty and vapid and not what it should be. It bothers us because it’s a mirror. It shows us who we are, what this industry is. Most of the time, we can avoid it, rationalize it, brush it aside, cage it in the back of our minds. Yeah, everything’s bad, but at least the games were good. I’m not like those people. The ones who don’t care about the BDS boycott, who claim they support indies and don’t play them, who talk about games like they’re products and swallow them whole before moving onto the next thing, who get too into their Platinum trophies and achievement scores, who get excited about commercials, who write off the use of generative AI in general, or make excuses for the studio if it happened in a game they like. Not me. I’m different. I know better. These are the things we tell ourselves. Sometimes, they’re true, or at least cloaked in truth, and we wear these justifications, these rationalizations, like armor so the things we don’t like about the industry, about ourselves and our role in shaping it, can’t hurt us. The most powerful, convincing lies are always somewhat true.

The Game Awards obliterates those defenses. Mirrors don’t lie, no matter how much we hate what they show us. They just reflect what’s there. The Game Awards is honest about what it is. And we hate it, dismiss it, mock it, scoff at it because it shows us what the industry is and who we are. A monument to all our sins, all in one place, all in one night. Geoff Keighley isn’t an award show host; he’s a sin-eater. He invites us to project all of the industry’s flaws, our flaws, all of it, onto him, and in doing so, absolve ourselves. Keighley’s motives are not so selfless, of course. I genuinely believe that he loves games; but I think he just loves money more. 

Either way, the result is the same, the illusion maintained for our benefit. We are not the problem. We were made this way. Keighley, and all he represents… those are our ills. “That’s right,” Keighley offers – an echo of Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain’s final, deleted cutscene – each time he walks on stage, hands spread wide, a circus master standing in the center ring, in front of a crowd of insatiable maws, eager to give us exactly what we’re there for. “Don’t blame yourself. Blame me.” Hideo Kojima would be proud. And we do, because it feels good. And we are desperate to feel good amid so much bad, so desperate we’ll do anything for it, no matter how much it hurts. We love how it feels, how video games, how the industry itself, has trained us to feel. After all, it’s not our fault. This is what they molded us to be. This is about him. Not us. Right?

I imagine The Game Awards as an incredibly expensive restaurant. Keighley is the owner, our host, our waiter, the one who pours our drinks. He can describe, in great detail, every item on the menu, knows each chef personally. Sometimes, we might even see them, but their proximity to us is only ever in relation to their proximity to him. He determines who we see, when, and why. Who speaks, and how long they occupy our attention.

I imagine finishing my meal, stuffed full, satisfied. All my friends are here. Inside the restaurant, I can pretend things aren’t quite so bad. I can’t see the fire through the windows. In here, I am safe. I can feel good about feeling good. And then, without warning, Keighley is at my table again, a new menu in hand. Deserts. After-dinner drinks. There’s always something to offer. Always another course. He knows what I want, or thinks he does, but whatever I choose, how much I eat, is up to me. How long do I want to stay here, safe, protected from the fire? How long do I want to feel good?

“Can I get you something else?” he asks, leaning in, like my answer, like the ask itself, is our little secret. “Aren’t you hungry?”