Award-worthiness with Kat Brewster
God of War (Sony)
So, here’s a thing that may scare you or delight you.
Great.
I wrote questions.
I love it.
MUSIC
Welcome to Talking Simulator, a series of short conversations about video games with interesting people who play them. I’m Jordan Erica Webber, and in this episode I discuss the BAFTA Games Awards with my guest Kat Brewster.
I am Kat Brewster. I’m a PhD student and researcher at the University of California, Irvine. I like to say that I have professional opinions on video games, because I’ve been paid for them for the past four years, and that’s almost like getting a degree in something in the United States, which is where I live now.
Off the back of the 2019 BAFTA Games Awards, I wanted to talk about how video games are tackled by this venerable British institution. Kat, who is not British and also hasn’t played any of the winning games, was obviously the perfect person with whom to have this conversation.
This episode contains minor spoilers for the beginning of God of War, the beginning of Life is Strange 2, and the Assassin’s Creed Odyssey DLC “Bloodline”. We also hate on Red Dead Redemption 2.
I didn’t play Red Dead 2 on principle.
I also didn’t play Red Dead 2 on principle.
Incredible.
I’m very glad that it didn’t win any awards.
Yeah, me too. Solidarity. I didn’t play God of War, also on principle.
What’s wrong with God of War?
There are a couple of things that I feel weird about with God of War. Its lack of any discernible women really bothers me. There’s, you know, the mom, but she is dead.
What I think is really funny is that I think her corpse is, like, on the kitchen table at the beginning of the table, presumably because they hadn’t invented fridges yet and they needed to refrigerate this woman so they were like, ‘We’ll just do the closest next thing.’
They couldn’t literally fridge her. They had to kitchen table her. God. Yeah, so that bothers me, and also I feel since Red Dead’s sort of-, or Rockstar’s blow-up with crunch and-, no AAA studio is free from sin, you know? And so I just think that if a game isn’t accounting for its labour practices, or it’s not unionised and it’s not, like, trying to fix itself, and it’s making a game that, like, isn’t trying to do anything radical or new in terms of, like, a social landscape, I don’t know that-, like, everyone was so excited about God of War, and I’m just like, ‘I can be excited about other things.’
I did want to ask you, and I think this is an interesting question for you because you’re not from the UK, so you don’t have this kind of-, everyone here in the UK games industry is very pleased that BAFTA is giving us their time and kind of respecting the industry, and all the, you know, five awards going to God of War made me wonder: are these awards doing a good thing? And do we need them?
It’s difficult, right, because-, I say this to my students a lot, which is that very often it can feel really difficult to criticise things that are happening, like, within the games industry, because within the public sphere it can often feel like we’re fighting a much larger battle. We feel like we’re still trying to convince people that video games don’t cause violence, that video games don’t cause antisocial behaviour, that video games don’t have inherently addictive properties. And so when we’re saying things like, ‘Are awards doing good?’, like awards on a stage as big as the BAFTAs, it’s tough because it can say to certain audiences, ‘Video games are high culture, and they deserve to be respected and critiqued and viewed at a similar level as, like, film,’ and within the games industry I often feel like games resents cinema and resents film for always being held as this barometer for, like, what is high art.
And questions about who can judge what video games are better than other video games. And these are the same conversations that happen in any awards circuit. Like, what are the politics of awarding a game to a certain person or certain studio based on who those judges are, right? There are so many problems within, for example, the Academy Awards, you know, #OscarsSoWhite and all of these sorts of problems, that we are experiencing the same problems that any awards circuit is going to have, and any benefits that we as an industry get from being held to this standard, I don’t know, I think we could get in other places. But who doesn’t love a big shiny statue of someone’s face?
Of some guy’s face, in gold.
Some guy’s face, yeah. And it is a shortcut to being able to say, for example, to a lawyer or to someone who’s never seen a video game before, to say, like, ‘Oh, well, games get BAFTAs.’ And people are like, ‘Oh.’ It either ruins the standards of the BAFTAs or it lifts up the quality of games.
I got invited onto Front Row on Radio 4 right after the BAFTAs happened to talk about it, and ended up having a really unsatisfying conversation about the awards where I said something about the fact that God of War got five awards, and what does that mean about where games currently are at. And I was talking about how we are so wedded to particular kinds of games and genres, like we love big-budget action stuff so much, and we’re trying to tell new stories within those genres but we’re still wedded to those genres. So it means that sometimes we end up giving five awards to a game that is horrifically violent, and then people outside of games go, ‘Well, the games that people in the games industry like are ones that are horrifically violent.’ And I was talking to people about the BAFTAs and they were saying it’s a shame that God of War got so many, maybe some indie studio would have deserved to win an award instead. What do you think it says about the current gaming culture that we gave five gold man’s heads to God of War?
To say that a game that is free from violence is somehow more deserving than a game that has huge explosions in it, I don’t know that that statement inherently has weight. Schindler’s List is all about horrific acts of violence, and yet it’s the upper echelons of cinema. At the same time, Avengers, blowing up New York City left and right, you know, and that’s horrific.
But something that I like to talk about a lot, especially when it comes to video games, any fiction frankly, is what makes a good story is conflict, right? And so how do you visualise conflict except for things literally kind of-, I’m, sorry, hitting my fists against each other. Things that are literally coming against each other.
And so often times in games we use abstractions of violence, of things running into each other, things exploding, shooting other things with lasers, in order to, like, really visualise what it is that conflict looks like. And how do you create mechanically, in between-, if your game is set up in such a way that it’s, like, cut scene, interactive space, cut scene, interactive space, how do you continue that throughline of conflict in a space that is mechanically driven? And very often we’re using violence, because it is this abstraction of conflict, in order to talk about it.
But it could be a block puzzle, I don’t know, like, coming up against things. I would love to see God of War where all violent fighting interactions are replaced with block puzzles, like Kratos has to push a block around. That would be very funny to me. And I wonder if it would tell the same story, or if it would change the way that we’re talking about it.
There are some years where we’re gonna give the huge awards to the games that have the most explosions, and then there are some years that we’re gonna give it to Rocket League, you know, where there are no humans. Cars are bumping into each other. What does it mean about the state of the motor vehicle industry?
And last year the Best Game award went to What Remains of Edith Finch, right, a game I guess with a lot of death in it, by its very nature, but you wouldn’t call it a violent game.
Psychologically violent, maybe, you know. Painful. But no, I wouldn’t call it violent. And is it cliche to say something like, ‘Maybe we should be examining the state of the world before we examine the fiction which reflects it?’
I think what I said was, ‘I mean, it’s a game about the god of war… so…’
I would love to see a game about, like, the goddess of love. Give me Aphrodite yelling, ‘Boy,’ I don’t know.
That would be an excellent game.
MUSIC
You were talking about, you know, cinema and comparisons to cinema, and how games are always being compared to cinema, and how films get awards, and also a lot of films have a lot of violence in them like how a lot of games do. And I wonder if maybe the reason God of War won so many of these shiny awards is because it’s a very, very filmic game. I mean, look at the categories that it won. It didn’t win Design or Innovation or anything like that. It won Best Game, Best Narrative, which, let’s face it, is just Best Game for a narrative game, and then it won three audio awards. It won Voice Actor, Audio Achievement, and Soundtrack or Music. So I wonder if you think, basically, people just played it and thought, ‘Oh, this is a lot like a film. Let’s give it a load of awards.’
Yeah, I mean, I think it’s definitely something that we as an industry use as a shortcut to talk about what is success. And it’s hard to break free of that, right? Like, Hollywood is such an overwhelming industry, and any time you have any media which exists primarily on a screen you’re being held up to the standards of other media that is on primarily a screen. And we are raised on cinema. We’re raised on television as well. We use it as shortcuts to talk about other things all the time.
And so it doesn’t surprise me that games gets held up to-, I mean, not held up to but held against, like, the successes of cinema. But it also has created a lot of failings within video games, I think, that some studios are trying to mimic the successes of cinema. Very cinematic games are not always the most playable.
MUSIC
I do want to talk about one of the games that won a BAFTA, or two BAFTAs actually, and that’s Return of the Obra Dinn, which you still haven’t played.
I know. I haven’t opened-, and this is true of many-, I haven’t ‘opened’ the game. I own it. It’s downloaded. It’s on my computer. Return of the Obra Dinn and Into the Breach are two games that I want to play so bad, but I know myself, and I know that while I have a PhD to do I can’t double click on that icon, you know? Because I have time that I have to partition for other things, and I know that Obra Dinn is gonna absolutely suck me in. And I have seen enough gameplay of it to know that I can’t open it until I have enough things checked off of my to-do list.
So it won Best Design. The other games in the category were God of War, again. Astrobot, which is a VR game, a platformer that people have loved, you know, it’s their favourite VR game. Celeste, this incredibly difficult platformer that tells a story about mental health struggles. Into the Breach. And Minit, which, if I was going to guess which one you would have voted for probably would be Minit, I think.
Yeah. Well, I don’t think I would have been able to because I have friends who were on that dev team.
Oh yeah, fair enough.
I love Minit. I think Minit is so clever. It’s so clever. And it’s so punishing. It’s so frustrating. It reminds me so much of Queers in Love at the End of the World.
Oh, because of the time limit?
Because of the time limit, yeah. And people get very angry when they can’t finish something in a time limit, which is understandable, right, like, you know, you’ve been given a task to do, you want to finish it. When I play Overcooked I’m very, ‘I’ve got to get these burgers out!’
The problem with Overcooked is that you’re never finished. There are always more hungry people.
There are always more hungry people, and the people that you’re playing this game with are never fast enough. It’s always their fault, and never yours.
Minit is so immediately frustrating, in this way that I think is also very forgiving, right? It’s just over and over and over and over and over again, and each failure is recontextualised in this, like, you’re going to have to finish in a hard reset anyway. And so it reminds me of Celeste in this way, where Celeste is very punishingly difficult, right, and it tells you, ‘Persevere,’ and, ‘Carry on,’ and I think Minit has a very similar sort of vibe.
But then there are also conversations to be had about, like, well which is more difficult, and do we want to talk about, like, difficulty and difficulty in games, which has been a really hot topic ever since From Software’s Sekiro came out, which, you know, brings up all these conversations about what is fair in a difficult game, right? And especially when we’re talking about awards for games, are we talking about the entire game? Or are we talking about one specific portion of this game where its design was so impressive?
Yeah, with these awards I wonder if the judges on this particular panel really liked Return of the Obra Dinn and gave it the award for the same reasons I did, which is that this is a completable logic puzzle where all I have to do is tick all the right boxes and then I have 100%-ed this game.
Did you beat Return of the Obra Dinn?
Yeah, finished it. I played it with something else, I think over a weekend. We just played it all weekend. Because I knew that it was finishable.
Beautiful.
Whereas with Minit there are secrets to uncover, and you can finish the game but you haven’t unlocked everything, and I finished it and I thought, ‘That’ll do, because I’ll just frustrate myself otherwise.’ And I wonder if the judges felt the same way? Maybe they thought, ‘Return of the Obra Dinn is such a nice package.’ You know, and sometimes the judges on these panels are not necessarily people who are very ‘good at playing video games’. They’re people with good taste, obviously, but not necessarily people who are like, ‘I’m going to give this award to the game that challenged me the most.’
Yeah. I mean, I’m a huge proponent of, like, play your games on easy. Look up a walkthrough. If your experience with a game has become negative because you can’t get past something, why would you punish yourself? Like, the world is hard enough.
I know. And we have so many games to play! Why would you make it take longer?
There are so many.
MUSIC
I have a question for you in particular about Return of the Obra Dinn and the other award that it won, which is Artistic Achievement. So, the other games in the category were Detroit: Become Human, Red Dead Redemption 2, God of War, Spider-Man, and then Gris.
Is that how you say it?
Apparently. So, if it was French it would be Gris [gree], but I think it might be a different language. I’ve heard other people talking about it on other podcasts, and they’ve said Gris [greece], so that’s what I’m going to go with. But the other games, apart from Spider-Man, which I guess kind of cartoony, Detroit: Become Human, Red Dead Redemption 2, God of War are all going for, I guess, a more realistic visual style, and that often seems to be the thing that is lauded in video games. Like, ‘Oh, wow, this is so visually impressive. There are so many pixels in this and so many colours.’ But the award went to Return of the Obra Dinn, a game which is black and white and made to look like a kind of Apple II game, I think. So what does Artistic Achievement mean? You’re an arts scholar. You have a master’s in this, right? What is Artistic Achievement?
That’s a great question. And I think some people would say that what I view as artistic achievement isn’t the same as what other people think is artistic achievement. There are some people who would say, ‘Oh, artistic achievement to me should showcase a lot of technical skill. And a game or a piece of art which showcases perhaps some other kind of artistic skill, like conceptually artistic, mechanically artistic.’
But then you get into questions about, like, well, what is artistic achievement and what is an achievement in design? Can a mechanic be artistic? Are the mechanics in Return of the Obra Dinn artistically compelling? Are they artful? I would say yes, but then you get into questions about, like, ‘Well, Spider-Man had shaders, you know?’
Detroit: Become Human had people putting all those dots on them.
Mocap.
Yeah, mocap, that’s what it’s called.
If you say a game that is the most interesting to look at, Obra Dinn is very interesting to look at. It shows a real attention to what does colour mean, what can I do if I take that away from someone who can see in colour, right? And what does it say about this space?
I think also a lot about how Robert Yang talks about hyperrealism in games, as a designer and a developer who explicitly makes explicit games about gay masculine male sexual interactions. And people have asked him, like, ‘Why are you so interested in making games that are hyperreal? Couldn’t you tell this same story about gay sex using abstracted visuals?’ And he says-, you know, I’m going to paraphrase him here, but he says something to the effect of, ‘I want to take back hyperrealism from this heteronormative hyperreal masculine space, and I want to say-, I want to have sex with a man with big oily realistic-looking muscles.’ Like, that’s what you can do in a Robert Yang game. And that is an artful intention with graphics, right? Return of the Obra Dinn and having this in black and white I think is an artful intention with graphics.
And we wouldn’t necessarily want to fall into the trap of saying, ‘Oh, photorealistic games can’t win Artistic Achievement because that’s not an artistic statement,’ because in some cases it is.
Yeah. For the past, like, eight months or whatever I’ve been playing Assassin’s Creed Odyssey, and I’ll just, like, walk around, because it’s beautiful to look at, because it looks pretty in a photorealistic way, and I can be like, ‘Oh, I’m lazing on the white sands and the blue waters of these Grecian islands.’ But Jordan, is that beauty? Jordan, what’s beauty?
I mean, it’s a game that enables you to visit a place you will never actually be able to go, and in that sense it helps that it is aiming at photorealism, because that’s the point of that game, right? The point of Assassin’s Creed is to take you on a journey somewhere that you cannot go because it no longer exists.
MUSIC
What does it mean to give an award to a game that constantly changes, even if it is an award for being a game that constantly changes? Fortnite, it won Best Evolving Game, a game that surely has been around for much much longer than a year, although I guess only technically came out of early access in 2018, but people have been playing it for such a long time.
The way that games operate right now, on this changing landscape of early access, of patches, of how a game can, I guess, evolve, I guess ‘evolve’ is the active word here, over time.
Right, like Sea of Thieves.
Yeah, people hated Sea of Thieves. I mean, I think it’s fair to say that people hated Sea of Thieves when it came out. Because there were so many different conflicting feelings about what that game was supposed to be, you know? Is it a game about being out on the high seas with your pals, or is it a game about, like, plundering and fighting everybody else?
I love Fortnite. I’m gonna be honest. I think that Fortnite is so fun. And I think it’s so fun because of its social corollaries, right? I think it’s so fun because of what it does culturally, that it is a language and a landscape for youths who play video games. And I think it is so fascinating, the way that it has become a space. And, like, I think our mutual friend Keith Stuart wrote a piece about this on Medium where I’m quoted. So I don’t know how much clearer I can be about-, it’s just so-,
And is that what an evolving game is? Is it a game that has had a social impact because of the space that it creates for players? It’s so interesting. And I don’t know. I hate saying things like, ‘Video games are still a nascent medium,’ because I don’t think that they are.
No, they’ve been around for, like, 50 years.
Yeah. You know, and then people are like, ‘Oh, but film has been around since-,’ are video games in their teenage years? Is it youthful to think about games in this way when there are so many things going into them at an accelerated pace that wasn’t possible for many other mediums?
So, like, what does it mean that games-, and again I’m gonna hold it against cinema here, because, I mean, I guess we’re talking about the BAFTAs. Movies, they don’t change. They are what they-, they’re in a static space. And video games-, ‘Oh, the BAFTA is given to God of War patch version 1.004.06.’
Which version of the game did the jury have, and what is it like now?
Great question! I mean, journalists are expected to review a game for popular consumption and sale, you know, to say whether or not someone should buy a game, based on the state of completion. You know, you and I have both received games to review, where people have said to us, like, ‘The following things are going to be different on release,’ right?
‘Don’t do this, it’s broken.’
Right. Oh yeah. ‘Don’t do this, it’s broken,’ yeah. Or, ‘Email us if something happens and the game breaks.’ And to be fair, I mean, that’s before the game is actually released. We’ve been given early access, in a way.
But then games change after release, as well. So I was thinking about, like, Mass Effect 3, right? The classic example. Imagine if that had won a BAFTA for Best Narrative and then they’d gone and changed the ending. Would that have still stood? Would they have taken their BAFTA away?
Huge question. Huge question. Yeah. I mean, I’ve got Odyssey on the blame. Like, to have this DLC which forces your character into a heterosexual or reproductive relationship, a relationship where you can have children and indeed you must have children, does that nullify a queer romance option, or a LGBT, potentially, romance option, right? Or there’s a question about, like, trans reproductive futurity within that space, and there’s so many things tangled up in that.
And is that an evolving game? You know, it went out and then it came back because of this social landscape. Is it responsible to give awards at all when things change all the time, Jordan? Everything’s in flux. We’re all gonna die. What’s the point of getting an award in the first place?
I feel like I should just cross all these other questions off my list and just finish it there.
MUSIC
I want to ask about the Game Beyond Entertainment category, the one that I judged last year. So, here’s the description that I’ve got on the BAFTA rulebook for 2019. It says, ‘For the best game that capitalises on the unique and maturing medium of video games to deliver a transformational experience beyond pure entertainment, whether that is to raise awareness through empathy and emotional impact, to engage with real-world problems, or to make the world a better place. Entries will be judged solely on content, its emotional impact, thematic fit, and innovative use of the medium.’
It’s so hard! Everything is so hard!
Yeah, I wondered if you thought that category was well defined or not.
Oh man. Jordan. Well, also I need to say that, like, my brain sort of stops. ‘The award for this category will be given to the game which capitalises-,’ and I was like, ‘Agh!’
You heard the word ‘capital’ and immediately shut down.
I did, and I was like, ‘Oh no! What are we talking about?’ This game has social capital? Does it have empathetic capital? Can you have a capital of empathy? That’s terrifying. But let’s carry on.
The nominees this year were 11-11 Memories Retold, a game about World War 1. Celeste. Florence, a game that tells the story of a young couple. Life is Strange 2, an unfinished game, so far, episodic game. But also, I think, Life is Strange 2, I guess, in the first episode of the new series some children of an immigrant parent see their parent being shot by police, so possibly that is the-, spoilers.
[Laughter]
It happens very early on in the episode.
I think I’m reacting less about spoilers and more about that that’s harrowing. That’s horrific. I’ve got indigestion and sweaty palms now.
I’m sorry. So the winner was My Child Lebensborn, which is a game about the children of Nazi occupiers of countries during World War 2. And Nintendo Labo, which-, entirely separate conversation that I wanted to have but I guess we can have at the same time. We don’t want to be the people saying, ‘That’s not a game,’ but Labo is not a game.
Yeah, I mean. Isn’t it a game, Jordan? Isn’t life a game? Yeah, oh, it’s so tough, because we want to have these poststructural, ‘What’s a sandwich?’, you know, kind of conversations about games, and especially in a category that’s like, ‘Oh, we want to break these barriers of what a video game can be and what it can’t be. Video games can be sad and fun can be upsetting.’
So is Nintendo Labo doing these things? My partner said to me, ‘Oh, I really want to get this Nintendo Labo setup but I won’t because then we’ll have cardboard all over the house and I know that that will stress you out.’ So in that way, Nintendo Labo might make me sad.
Nintendo does sell a Nintendo Labo box. It’s made of cardboard, of course. That you can build and then store all your other Nintendo Labo inside.
I also have a cat who, like, loves to be in cardboard boxes. So she would love Nintendo Labo.
So, two drastically different questions here, right? But I think they come from the same space. Like, what is a game beyond entertaining? Which already presupposes that games must be classically or traditionally entertaining, which I guess says to us, ‘Games are understood to be fun objects.’ I don’t know that that’s true. Games are difficult and upsetting in micro interactions and in small ways.
A lot of people-, I hate to bring up Dark Souls. People are always so tired of conversations about, like, what Dark Souls does, what Dark Souls doesn’t do. But is that game enjoyable to play? Like, after a hard day do you want to come home and play Dark Souls? I don’t know. I know some people would say, ‘Oh, I can forget about all of my troubles at work, my difficulties at the office, and sort of funnel it all into my experiences in this game. Because it’s so difficult and punishing and distracting in this way, I’m going to enjoy it more.’ But then there are other people who might say, like, ‘I can’t play that game because it just makes me too angry, and it’s an upsetting interaction with that game.’
But the category here says this is only about content. And then you have this other question about, like, are a game’s mechanics its content or is its narrative its content? And by content do we mean, like, the thing that is experienced by an end user, or what designers put into it? And that is always going to be a really complicated conversation when talking about video games, which are an evolving medium, whether or not they’re in their adolescence or their nascent years or they’re baby boomers.
We’re still figuring it out, I think, and I think that’s true of every medium. And maybe because there is a reader across so many different people it’s difficult to say, like, what is an empathetic impact. Even when I say I love Fortnite and I think Fortnite is such a beautiful landscape for social interaction, as if there’s no bullying on Fortnite. As if there aren’t people out there who have had a really really negative experience with Fortnite. Or to say that a AAA game that has ruined families through development cycles is ‘beyond’-,
It sure did more than entertain!
Yeah, God.
MUSIC
Speaking of games that ruin families, Red Dead Redemption 2 won no awards at all at the BAFTAs, which we’re obviously both very pleased about, but I wonder if you think that that is because it was a bad game, or because the industry knows that it has this bad rep for crunch and awful working practices, and the people on the panel maybe thought, ‘Best not to give that one an award.’
I want to be clear that there is no AAA game that is made right now that has transparent labour practices in its studio, that I know of. Maybe I’m missing some studio that bills itself as making AAA games that has a transparent work relationship with its employees that is healthy. I don’t think that there is, none come to mind, and if people feel otherwise I’d be happy to hear.
But Rockstar had a blow up because of an interview with its head honcho, whose specific role eludes me, which specifically called out this practice as not only normal but expected and what made the game so good, right. And so when we’re saying God of War won so many awards and we feel ambivalent about that, but this Rockstar game didn’t win awards that’s good, but nowhere is going to have a good labour policy unless they make it explicit to the public.
So do I feel good that Red Dead 2 didn’t win any awards? I don’t really care. I mean, I don’t know that it’s gonna have any impact on-, unless the Academy or BAFTA came out and said, ‘We are not gonna award games to a studio that has obfuscated labour practices, or that does not employ union workers.’
Which could happen, right? I mean, these awards are so important to the games industry that it’s feasible that BAFTA could say, ‘Unless you unionise, you can’t have an award from us.’
You’re not eligible for a BAFTA. Yeah. I wish I knew more about labour organising, and I wish I knew more about unionising in game development. I’m a huge advocate for it. I think that unions are so important for protecting employees who make the thing that is what people are paying money for. And whether or not that’s a solid system to begin with is questionable too.
I can’t have a satisfying answer here, because I feel like the information that is available isn’t satisfying. But I will say that studios which operate as collectives and do so transparently are always gonna get my money for as long as money is valuable, and my accolades.
Maybe we can make a gold your face trophy and give it to games that came from good labour practices.
That would be horrifying and I would hate that.
I think Game Workers Unite is thinking about giving some kind of badge to studios that have good labour practices.
Yeah, that would be great.
MUSIC
I have one more award to ask you about. Florence, another game you haven’t played, even though it would only take you about 45 minutes.
Yeah, I’m sure it would.
It was nominated for Narrative and for Music, both of which were won by God of War, but it won Best Mobile Game. And I was talking to some people after the awards who said they were very happy that Florence won an award, but it seems like mobile games find it very difficult to break out of that mobile game mould. Do you think that we will see a day where a mobile game will win Best Game? The closest thing I can think of is Monument Valley won Best Mobile Game and it won Best British Game, but it didn’t win Best Game or Best Design or anything like that, and I wonder if there is something about the mobile platform, even though it’s now so prevalent and the number one way that most people play video games, that stops people from thinking, ‘Oh, this is award worthy.’
Yeah. That’s a really good question, Jordan. Well written.
Thanks.
I hope so. I hope that a mobile game could win Best Game. I think that that would be great, really shake up the industry. And this is another thing that’s very interesting, and another reason why I think it’s so dangerous to compare video games against cinema or other media, is that people often talk about, ‘Okay, well games you have to interact with in order to complete,’ sure. Games can be difficult. You can’t get to the middle of a song and be like, ‘Oh no, I can’t hear the rest of it because it’s hard,’ given that you can hear.
And games often require specific hardware in order to play them. And not only specific hardware but, like, up to date hardware. It’s difficult to, like, go to an arcade and play the latest releases. You need, like, beefy processors and, ‘Ooh, it’s console exclusive.’ And I wonder if the reason that mobile games can be kind of denigrated is because it’s a democratised form of access to games. If there is not scarcity and if there is not a degree of gatekeeping to a game’s ‘goodness’, is it good?
Is this like how someone was saying we shouldn’t give Oscars to films that come out on Netflix, we should restrict them only to films that come out in the cinema? Maybe a similar kind of thing, we should only give BAFTAs to games that run on expensive hardware and take eighteen hours to play.
I mean, there are, I’m sure, parameters that I don’t understand about how award systems work and what is-, in terms of, like, what’s required of a film that is to be released in a cinema that Netflix perhaps can cut corners on because they are an online distribution model. Is there something that’s different there in the way that those politics operate that perhaps is not very well known to the public?
Are there certain requirements, and I’m sure that there are, that are about being released on, for example, the Apple Store or Google Play, which are not the same requirements for releasing on a console? You know, and there are so many. And so what are they? And is that something to keep in mind? And does that impact whether or not a game is worthy of accolade?
And I think very specifically in games where so much emphasis is put on playability and so much emphasis is put on the power of the player, which I think is a really dangerous mindset, that impacts award categories because of the unique characteristics of this medium. And then if that’s the case, then am I saying that a game should only be awarded based on its content as determined by a panel of judges? I don’t think that that’s what I want to say. You know, there should be some conversation between public reception and a group of people who are experts in their field, peer reviewing some object.
I wish that I had some kind of answer in a way that would be really satisfying. Maybe I can get together a big group of BAFTA judges and get them all to sign NDAs and then we’ll talk about how to improve the process, get a focus group together and run a couple of surveys and practices. It’d be great.
This can be your new PhD thesis.
God, no.
[Laughter]
Awesome. Thank you so much for answering a gajillion questions about an award ceremony that you had no involvement with, hadn’t played any of the games, did not watch. You had excellent things to say.
Thank you so much. It was a pleasure to be interviewed by you.
MUSIC
Talking Simulator is brand new, so we’re still figuring some things out. But you can watch our progress by subscribing to the show in your favourite podcast app. You can also follow us on Twitter @talkingsimpod. I’m @jericawebber, and Kat is @katbamkapow. Our music was made by Jazz Mickle. You can find her @jazzmickle. Talking Simulator is edited by Leamington’s loveliest audio person, Dan Parkes. If you need to make something sound good, you can find him at @dancparkes. I’m Jordan Erica Webber. Talk again soon.
This is so, like, academic scholarly wishy-washy to be like, ‘Mm, but what are these categories really saying?’
That’s exactly what I wanted.
‘Mm, but what is a category truly?’
