Opposable Thumbs / Gaming & Entertainment

Why are gaming’s academy awards such a non-event?

Unlike the Oscars or the Grammies, the video game academy's Interactive …

While Jay Mohr's bad jokes certainly didn't help, they're probably not the main reason no one pays much attention to gaming's academy awards.
Photograph by AIAS

When major entertainment industries host their annual awards, it's usually a major cultural milestone, with highly rated telecasts and breathless pre- and post-show coverage from the press. When gaming's Academy of Interactive Arts and Sciences hosted its Interactive Achievement Awards last Thursday, the event warranted cursory coverage from most of the press and ignorance or indifference from most gamers.

It's not as if there isn't a market for recognizing the year's greatest games—any member of the press will tell you that holiday season "best games of the year" lists are some of their biggest traffic generators. Yet, even though the ceremony is in its 15th year, the Interactive Achievement Awards still struggle to achieve the modicum of relevance earned by Spike TV's annual Video Game Awards telecast, a trailer-filled, pop culture explosion of a show that attracted a paltry 627,000 viewers in 2010.

Is there something about video games as an industry that makes their academy awards show less important or attractive than others? Are gamers just not as interested in the kind of official, peer-based recognition that's granted by an aloof academy? Do competing awards and reviews already serve the same function better?

Gaming's lack of "face power"

"It's a relatively young industry," AIAS President Martin Rae told Ars Technica by way of explanation for the awards' undersized impact. "There's a maturing process... As games have migrated to mobile and handheld platforms and social games have taken off, everybody now is a game player. They might not be a 'gamer,' but they're a game player."

Even though Rae says that video games are now "the biggest entertainment industry on the planet," he acknowledges that they're at a disadvantage when it comes to getting attention for an awards show. "Film and TV, they have face power," he explained. "A lot of the great game creators are behind the scenes."

But that situation is changing, he said. "I'll use [Bethesda executive producer] Todd Howard as an example... Todd Howard, to the people who play Skyrim, is a rock star, and as the Internet allows more of that to be hosted and disseminated and spread, those followers will know who he is not just from a credit in a game but 'I've heard him speak, I've seen him talk, I feel like I know the guy.' It becomes personal."

TV or not TV

As more game creators get this sort of deep press exposure and become household names among the gaming set, Rae said their profile, and that of the awards that honor them, will increase. But that profile might not be measured in the traditional form of TV ratings, he clarified. While G4 broadcast a taped, heavily edited version of last year's IAAs, this year's show was not available on TV. Instead, it was streamed live through media partner Gamespot. (Syndicated show Reviews on the Run will feature snippets from the awards and the surrounding DICE Summit in coming weeks).

"Our consumers are Internet consumers, they're not necessarily TV consumers," Rae said. "I don't think [TV ratings] are where the future is... You're going to consume it in bits and bites, and you're going to consume it in an interactive way on the Internet... It's coming sooner than you think."

There might be something to that idea—when I covered the show live through a flurry of tweets from my seat in the IAA audience, I was rewarded with a bumper crop of replies, retweets, and new followers, most of whom were following along with the livestream at home. True, many of those viewers seemed to be reveling in the atrociously bad hosting job delivered by comedian Jay Mohr (whose extended riff on Alanis Morissette made it seem like he was actually hosting the 1996 Grammy Awards). But those viewers and followers still got exposed to what the game industry considered the best games of the year. They also saw thoughtful video retrospectives on the work of Epic Games founder Tim Sweeney and Asteroids and Gauntlet creator Ed Logg, both of whom won career-recognition awards at the show.

Marketing muscle

The real indication that the IAAs have made it, though, will come when games and studios are proudly proclaiming their wins in marketing and packaging materials, and seeing a sales boost from the recognition. But that's not such an easy thing to achieve, Rae says, partially because of the nature of the video game market.

"It's an interesting dilemma," he said. "Film can get longer play... people consume film longer, the shelf life for a game is shorter, and people are going to play it really, really hard for three or four months and they're going to move on to a different game—that's the whole retail phenomenon." In other words, the five awards Skyrim won last week, including Game of the Year, aren't going to convince many people that haven't already bought the game.

But Rae sees the awards as potentially changing the trajectory of future sales. "A game maker that made X game that won two IAAs, and this is his next game, that's going to mean something when you rent a game, when you buy a game. ... As we get a little more digital download capabilities and that sort of thing, I think that changes a little. For example, I do believe that, if those games started to become branded [as award winners], that will make the difference. As soon as it makes a difference in sales, then publishers look at it and go, 'Shit, I'm gonna stamp it on the box, I'm gonna do PR around it.'"

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