windjamm | Meta: Game of the Year as a Concept (Reply)

With the year drawing to a close I thought I'd take a moment to look back, as is custom.

In 2012 (I DID say look back), The Walking Dead Game Season 1 (TWDG S1) dropped. I was a couple of years out of high school and my ability to write regularly outshined the work of my peers. It was something I did brag about, but ultimately it really hampered me getting a lot of formal education on the craft and critical analysis. When you can bullshit better than your fellow bullshitters, no one pulls you aside to say, "hey by the way, this is how it's done."

And so I spent a lot of time thinking I was hot shit while simultaneously being unable to do anything but regurgitate the things I heard about work I enjoyed and plating it prettily.

And then I played the final episode of TWDG S1 and got really and truly shattered. I remember I started to cry and felt so overwhelmed I went and closed my bedroom door, despite being home alone, and just bawling. It was so sudden and complete that I searched voraciously for reasons. Other people cried, sure. Other people enjoyed the storytelling. But nothing felt sufficient in all the streams, videos, and different forum posts I tried to search.

I came to Giantbomb's podcast The Bombcast because the description mentioned talking about TWDG on the newest episode and I heard Patrick Klepek talk about the game and the way it ruined him. I don't remember the exact words and I'm sure returning to that moment now would be like seeing a haunted house in the daylight, but something about the way he and the others spoke caught in my mind and I sat down and listened.

I listened to over two hundred episodes (they had been going weekly for four years), over 400 hours of podcasts while I did something menial (grinding in FF14 or god knows what). It changed my brain chemistry. I modeled the way I thought about games after the way they talked. I still cared deeply about how they felt about games I cared about, but I was able to talk about them in ways that felt like filing more of the numbers off of someone else's work and, eventually, starting to think about what I wanted out of games. How did my opinion differ from Jeff Gerstmann's? From Vinny's? From Patrick's?

And then I started getting into their Game of the Year podcasts. Every November the whole cast got together in the studio and grinded out hours and hours of podcast. They discussed to completion which games every year deserved to be in categories like best music, best looking games, best styyyyyyle [sic], and ultimately the ranked Top 10 Giantbomb Game of the Year games. This was grueling. They all released during Christmas week, one 3-5 hour episode per day for five days while the site took a two week holiday over the holidays.

It was also a fascinating look into how Game of the Year deliberations are done at different sites. This was a protocol they took from their shared history at Gamespot, where they also did this yearly albeit unrecorded. It was the only time of year where differing editorial opinions went up against one another. Oh sure, there would be bouts throughout the year where someone would say a rude thing about a game someone else liked, but they agreed to go their separate ways after a few minutes typically. Here the conflict was the actual point. It helped me to get an understanding of how to push the parts of games that I loved forward, while also appreciating that they could be flawed and that sometimes exemplary elements were worth more than the sum of their parts or an average assessment of individual strengths.

I've come a long way since then. I don't know that I got a lot out of their Game of the Year discussions there at the end. They're still running, but all the old staff is now gone, no one there having been there longer than six years and most of them having been added in the last two. (I know this sounds like a long time and it IS, but you have to understand I listened to the four founding members of the site for 11 years, so having them all basically leave at once means that's not my ship of theseus anymore.) And this year I saw that they're holding their game of the year discussion live. That is to say, Live in a theater experience not just streamed on twitch. It's a lot. It's baffling and understandable considering the new era of Giantbomb is largely based on spectacle and audience engagement. It's clever to do and if the old staff had done it, I'd seriously consider going.

However, instead I'm left with a kind of nostalgia.

It's funny sometimes, isn't it? How much a little thing can change the scope of your life. All my friends know I care a lot about games. Many of them have heard me wax poetic about games I love and why. I'm a trusted opinion on games for many and that's just fascinating to me considering how much time I spent hearing other people talk about games. How little I spend doing that these days.

I'm also considering what I want to do for Game of the Year. I've played over 100 games this year. I do want to give some love to the things I've loved this year. It would be fun to do a video series, but I know how much work that takes and I have many things that I would like to do at the end of this year, so. It may just be a written exercise.

We'll see.