The Game Awards Sucks 2023 Edition, or Geoff Keighley in: The Warlock of Wimbledon
Sick of expending energy on this guy, including the possibility of having to come up with article names about his garbage. In lieu of a descriptive title, I have included the subject followed by the name of a random Scooby-Doo episode to hopefully entice browsing readers. Did the titular Warlock of Wimbledon appear at The Game Awards this year? Read below and find out!
What is there left to say about Geoff Keighley or his stupid circus project? The answer is “very little,” so I’ll try not to waste too much of your time. Every year it seems like the show gets, against all odds, a little bit more farcical and numbing and spineless. Less time for game developers, less time for anything of serious real world concern inside the industry or out —Israel and its Western backers continue to carry out a genocide in Palestine—less time to give a shit about anything relating to video games as art created by human beings instead of cynical studio products.
Such time is instead portioned in accordance to the whims of host/producer Geoff Keighley and the show’s “Advisory Board,” which includes figures like Microsoft Gaming CEO Phil Spencer, Electronic Arts President Laura Miele, Nintendo President Doug Bowser, and entire companies ranging from Rockstar Games to Sony Interactive Entertainment; I encourage you to read the whole list here. We are assured the purpose of the Advisory Board is to “guide and advance the mission of The Game Awards” which is the kind of non-statement Keighley and his ilk specialize in.
What is the purpose of The Game Awards? Official sources will say that it “recognizes and upholds creative and technical excellence in the global video game industry” which wraps us around to the titular Awards in question. I’m not focusing on them much. How the show doles out perceived medium merits is an entirely different discussion about the way the AAA video game industry, as a collection of consistent and known offenders, is a creatively bankrupt worker abuse machine that constantly pats itself on the back while occasionally bothering to put on a performative sob about How We Can All Strive To Do Better. They can fuck off on the horse they rode in on.
What the awards represent for TGA is a justification for the show’s existence. This seems obvious, but it would be a mistake to say that the show exists for the awards. Keighley’s show is a vessel for non-messages which are the kind of propaganda that ultimately subtracts from reality: the unconcerned, uncomplicated, unpoliticized consumption of big-budget entertainment candied with the notion that any of this is a net good for culture or art or artists. It is good solely for the executives and money men of the video game industry; it is good, critically, for everyone who profits off The Game Awards.
What would you call the primary business concern of the McDonalds fast food chain? You would expect to say… food. But the actual business of McDonalds is real estate. Their franchise model positions them as the automatic landlord for any location that isn’t directly operated by the company, which includes over 80% of all restaurants. They essentially charge the owners of these establishments for royalties and rent. Higher royalties means that location is making more money, which means the price of rent goes up. All of this keeps the money printer running smoothly.
The burgers aren’t unimportant, but aren’t important in the way you’d expect them to be. They just exist to rationalize the existence of a McDonalds location, whose owner will continue to make some modicum of profit while their corporate overseer sucks up most of the cash. McDonalds only cares that a location remains profitable insofar as it keeps the building open and justifies their ability to charge more for it. For McDonalds, serving food is only ancillary to serving leases.
The Game Awards exists in a similar position: the awards are glorified McDoubles that exist to build hype and get viewers watching in order to maintain the actual value of the broadcast, which is airing space for commercials. But the beautiful thing for them is that, unlike traditional commercials (which they also air), the video game commercials are themselves a reason for people to tune in. These include new trailers, world premieres, and any other number of marketing flourishes. The folks behind these advertisements generally pay big bucks to appear, which gives more people a reason to be watching, which makes the advertising space increasingly valuable and therefore allows it to be sold at higher costs, etc. You get the idea.
And yes, video game trailers and reveals and everything associated with them are commercials. It’s marketing, and marketing is commercials. People are increasingly weird and precious about this, because “commercial” has an aura of insincerity that they interpret as an insult towards whatever piece of media the trailer is trying to sell. But these are categories of things, not inherent insults; commercials can still be cool or interesting, but they will always exist to sell you something.
That being said, when I say The Game Awards is “a collection of video game commercials,” I do mean that as an insult. It’s a version of Super Bowl ads so unconcerned with the part where everyone plays football that the sport may as well stop existing. It is a cynical, money-hungry venture fronted by a man who was born to two corporate stooges in the media industry and who has, presumably, never known much except money and the detached treatment of art and artists as a source of said money. We all learn from somewhere!
Keighley has famously been in the advertising game from the beginning, working to court corporate sponsors and little else. The Game Awards is the culmination of that decade-long project, which does not exist to celebrate video games so much as it exists to find the most efficient way to hold the medium upside down and shake it, collecting all the little coins that fall out of its pocket until they can replenish for the next cash harvest.
So this is my main point: The Game Awards is a glorified digital billboard wearing the skin of the arts like a comfortably bewildered Leatherface – who, unlike the aforementioned slasher, can do nothing but make a halfhearted effort at claiming themselves as a “victim” of circumstances they have willfully, gleefully engineered. It is an advertisement space that, like many ambitious advertisement spaces, exists to be perceived as valuably by other corporations as possible by presenting increasingly large viewer numbers in order to make more revenue by attracting sponsors and by, not to sound like a broken record, running commercials.
This is their business; it is their only business concern. The rest is a distraction.
This is the primary lens through which to understand the show and everyone running it. It is why I am not suggesting this specific event can be better — a video game awards show dedicated to celebrating the people who create things could be better, and likely would be by default, but that show will never be this one. You can rehabilitate some things, but there is ultimately no point to rehabilitating the image of a commercial.
My conclusion is that The Game Awards simply should not exist, and we should not support its existence or the continued prosperity of anyone responsible for overseeing it. It is a waste of money, time, and energy. It is morally bankrupt. It is a thing which actively strives to embolden the worst of an industry already dominated by suits whose modus operandi is to keep the human mulching machine of the AAA industry running, at least until such a point when they can hand off the reins to another merciless and soulless fuckhead, comfortably retire, and watch the world burn.
I am already sick of writing about this, and can’t really be concerned with properly leading into any further points beyond the primary one I’ve already made. I could go on, from discussing the shafting of the Innovation in Accessibility award to the absurd lack of care indicated by refusing to acknowledge that Dave the Diver is not an indie game to many, many others. Addressing how The Game Awards handles these topics in detail would require further energy and care available in my brain for talking about the show, and I simply don’t have any in me anymore. I have decided to be kind to myself and you, the reader, and leave that writing for other folks.
But I knew there were at least three specific, important problems I wanted to highlight in greater detail. Thus, in no particular order of importance, and with knowing omissions, here are Some Specific Shitty Things About The Game Awards This Year:
Shitty Thing #1 — Developers have been prioritized less and less every year, culminating in an aggressive prompter that serves to rush award recipients off the stage as quickly as possible, giving them a maximum of thirty seconds to rattle some names off and scramble away. I’m not sure how poorly this has worked by comparison in shows prior, but it was pretty evident this year that actual video game developers (with some notable exceptions) are considered third-class attendants at The Game Awards.
This culminated in Sam Lake, one of the directors of Alan Wake II (which was nominated for Game of the Year among other categories), being essentially played off the stage in the middle of his speech. It would be easy to fall for the claim that such restrictions exist to make sure everyone gets an equal amount of time, but this is a lie — they exist to keep the show flowing in a scheduled manner so ad breaks run as planned.
Last year, Christopher Judge gave a nine minute speech after winning the Best Performance award for his work as Kratos in God of War Ragnarök, which I assume was the catalyst for what felt like an increasingly stringent rush to get people on and off the podium in 2023. This speech was the result of mockery and some amount of contempt, including several subsequent barbs from Keighley during the rest of the show, with many claiming Judge was selfish to hog so much time and subsequently derail the planned festivities (to reiterate: mostly commercials).
And you know what? I’m glad he talked for nine minutes. I wish he’d talked longer, and I wish everyone did. These are the people whom The Game Awards states they exist to celebrate, and they shouldn’t be drowned out by music and ushered off the stage like some kind of fucking household pest. To make room for advertisers. What the fuck is wrong with you?
Judge spoke with heartfelt compassion, sincerity, and an immense passion for his field. Every word mattered more than half the slop that followed it. Judge is only an outlier because most winners don’t feel comfortable being scorned for “wasting” time, which Judge proves isn’t an unwarranted fear. This is a talented artist who did incredible work allowing himself, the folks who worked alongside him, and the people close to him to force the show to stop for a single fucking second and recognize an achievement. This is what The Game Awards is for… until it actually happens.
Shitty Thing #2 — If priority time is given to advertisers, the folks on the rung below can only be described as bizarre fixations or conflicts of interest.
The former belongs to the inclusion of an extended skit between Keighley and the Muppets character Gonzo, which took up about three minutes. I like the Muppets! I watched Muppets from Space as a kid and thought it was kino. I am not, however, particularly interested in hearing Gonzo’s 77 year old handler struggle to pretend he’s actually played Tears of the Kingdom or has any idea what that is. Three minutes isn’t a lot — I wouldn’t care if the show wasn’t already rushing people off the stage to talk about Samsung Gaming or whatever. But since it is, I have to ask: why do they think this is more important than letting a game developer talk?
What the fuck is with Keighley and puppets, anyway? I know this doesn’t really matter, but I feel like nobody is talking about it. There’s been a Muppet at almost every show since 2018, all of which seem to symbolize whether The Game Awards is a worthwhile enough venture to justify Kermit bicycling in; the answer so far, by the way, is no.
But it doesn’t even stop with the Muppets: fucking ALF had an extended segment a few years ago at Keighley’s side gig, Summer Games Fest. There is no easy explanation for this. Like, you could argue that The Muppets are a strong enough cultural symbol to give The Game Awards a few extra grains of prestige, which would make a weird sort of sense. But Geoff inviting ALF from the 1986 TV sitcom ALF only generates a cacophony of discordant tones. What’s his game? Does he have one?
The only explanation I’ve been able to draft up is that Keighley, in a rare but genuine show of personality, just… likes puppets. Near Gonzo, he appears suddenly animated in an almost unsettling way, like a cardboard cutout with bones and skin. He probably grew up watching Muppet Treasure Island or something, and has a truly pure love for anything that wanders around the vicinity of Jim Henson’s Creature Shop. You’d get blank stares if you asked what his game of the year was, but I bet he’d grow suddenly enthused if you asked him about The Dark Crystal.
It would appear to be his only eccentric, potentially endearing trait. That it seems to come at the slight suffering of everyone invited to the show is beyond parody.
Well, almost everybody.
Geoff Keighley does not have many actual friends in the video game industry, and consequently has very little personal stake in any of the things surrounding him — it’s part of why he doesn’t care about calling out corporate malpractice or abuse or rampant sexual misconduct or anything of the sort, because he has business relations among industry CEOs and no personal reason to care for anyone under them.
An exception has always been Hideo Kojima, whose work Keighley seems to revere and who would probably be one of the few game developers he considers a genuine pal. They are constantly seen in pictures together, Keighley has an elaborate cameo in Death Stranding, and Kojima is appointed to the aforementioned TGA Advisory Board where he is enabled to participate in whatever weird bullshit is going on there.
It has been a joke to point out that Keighley rarely seems happier than when he’s talking to Kojima, making The Game Awards by any extension a really, really expensive excuse for them to hang out. Kojima might feel the same level of respect for Keighley, and he might not. Either way, it’s hard to complain when your friend can pull strings for you at The Biggest Night In Gaming.
So while every other developer was rushed around between faux ceremonies, Kojima got eight minutes of air and an elaborate set of festivities bent exclusively around announcing and discussing his newest game. What he said or announced isn’t important here. What is important is that he remained uncontested by the format surrounding him, having been allotted heaps of time and focus and support by organizers like Keighley. No other video game developer was given this kind of respect or leeway, and typically never is. Unless, of course, you’re a personal friend of Geoff’s.
This is nepotism. There is really no other way to call it out. Keighey has a history of this, particularly with Hideo Kojima: At 2015’s TGA, he publicly ridiculed Konami for not allowing Kojima to appear at the show, speaking with more genuine care and emotion than he has ever given a single other subject relating to a video game corporation mistreating someone under their employ. This shows that he can use TGA as a platform to shine a spotlight on important topics, and can do so effectively when he chooses to actually exercise that power (which will be important in a second). It also shows that he will usually not do this, with the notable exception of responding to people in positions of corprorate power who have personally wronged someone close to him.
It’s easy to fixate on Keighley in a way that potentially obfuscates the actual problems surrounding him, but he is nonetheless the organizer of the show and, among the things he 100% controls, time and the words he decides to speak aloud rank highly. It is clear, then, that people like Hideo Kojima are getting special treatment as card-carrying Friends of Keighley, which is fucking gross. It’s a specific, visible conflict of interest that exists to the detriment of every other developer who attends. These are embarrassingly obvious grade school shenanigans and should be called out as such.
Stuff like this is proof that Keighley has always been able to do better, but considers his care and concern a privilege instead of an expectation. It is something he clearly intends to do until enough people notice and force him to stop. When he does, don’t expect everyone to get Kojima treatment — expect eight minutes of Kojima to turn into two minutes of Kojima and six more minutes of commercials.
Shitty Thing #3—This is the big one. The elephant in the room was not his foot cast, as celebrity guest Simu Liu seemed to believe, but the ongoing genocide being carried out in Palestine. There are no words to truly encapsulate the extent of the horrors being manufactured in that region by Israel and the financial and political supporters it has aboard, except that they are the most sustained, inhumane acts I have ever witnessed in my lived years as a human being.
Since the recent conflict and at the time of writing (December 8th, 2023), 17,000+ Palestinians are dead (over 7,000 of which are children) and 46,000+ are wounded, with hundreds of thousands more displaced and/or actively suffering, with estimates rising dramatically by the day. These are the best numbers you can get on a whim; the real totals, including the deaths we currently don’t know about or cannot properly count, are much higher. The total numbers, encompassing every Palestinian killed by Israel since they began killing Palestinians, are significantly larger. These losses are incalculable and will continue to rise until there is not a Palestine left to save. This is the explicit, stated goal of Israel, who are using a conflict born out of a situation they created to fulfill a goal they have been explicitly realizing since long before I was born: to inflict injustice, harm, and death upon the people of Palestine until Palestinians and their country no longer exist.
Israel is doing this in front of everyone, has been doing it for decades, and will continue to do it with the explicit support and tacit approval of entities like the United States until people in positions of power are dragged out of their cubbyholes and forced by citizens, through increased awareness and threat of action, to intervene.
This is not to convince anybody who thinks that Israel is in the right; who thinks that refusing to tolerate Zionism is anti-semitic; who believes that Palestinians have zero right to live in peace and safety and prosperity on their own land, and should be wiped out until they fall in line. If you believe any of these things, I believe your heart is empty and would refuse to spit in your direction. Do not try to talk to me about it. Go away.
What Keighley had a responsibility to do is use the “biggest night in gaming” as a platform to acknowledge, and condemn, the ongoing genocide of Palestinians. For all the disgusting motherfuckers who would’ve scorned those words, either as supporters of Israel or as tacit enablers (stupid assholes who believe that “politics” are an incursion on their fantasyland), the net good of them would’ve been meaningfully important and it would have made a positive difference. It would set a specific standard in the very large, culturally powerful industry the event inhabits: if fucking Geoff Keighley can show support for Palestine, why can’t you?
Many people wanted Keighley to do just that, including numerous “Future Class” individuals the event nominated — folks who represent the “bright, bold, and inclusive future of video games.” They published an open letter collecting signatures from people who believed, like they did, that the event had a moral responsibility to bring some amount of attention to these horrors, condemn their perpetrators, and make at least some vague effort to show support for the people of Palestine. Not because we care what Keighley or his stooges think about it – “they do not” is the likeliest answer – but because their words, however shallow, would hold immense meaning for the millions of viewers the event garners.
It would be a chance to use the immense and otherwise vapid platform Keighley had cultivated for something, anything of real value. He has always failed, or has otherwise embarrassingly fumbled mandated attempts to acknowledge and lay blame on the corruption and abuse his industry is rife with. But this was a trial by fire: prove us wrong for less than thirty seconds, even if it means cutting into Gonzo the Muppet’s time, and we’ll watch your fucking commercials.
The open letter received nearly 3000 signatures. The Game Awards, obviously, did not bite. The reasons why are not terribly interesting at this point, being potential advertiser concerns or creating an onus to comment on real events etc. Keighley accidentally sent two seconds of silence as a voice message in the Future Class Discord server where the open letter was being discussed, so we know he saw it. His response is interpreted as literal dead air, which is a pretty fitting way to close the book on the whole charade his bullshit circus embodies. Geoff Keighley and his Advisory Board do not care about brightness or boldness or inclusivity, but we know that by now. They only care about paying basic lip service to these ideas, sticking their fingers in their ears if they get called upon to do much else.
This is more important than video games or the industry surrounding them, which are already festering with horrible shit that Keighley has always failed to properly call out, even when strung up by his ankles and forced to try. He does not try because, as with everything else, he does not care. It doesn’t affect him, and so it doesn’t exist as anything more than a small bullet point in his world.
This effectively demonstrates all the (intentionally designed) problems innate to the way The Game Awards is configured. It cannot celebrate game developers; it cannot call attention to their exploitation; it cannot point out injustice in the world surrounding them; it can do little more than what it always does: run some ads and send their mealy-mouthed voicebox out to distract the crowd with some meaningless baby sensory jangling key misery like “Games… games. They make us feel… like we are truly connected.”
The Game Awards makes you feel ashamed for being remotely adjacent to it, and immensely ashamed for actually watching it. It sucks, Geoff Keighley sucks, and everyone on the Advisory Board (available here!) sucks to the fucking moon. It is a greedy, gormless, craven clown show that has proven, like many bad institutions, that it will only become more like itself.
All I can do, personally, is write an article like this and decide to stop watching it. I’ve spent years convincing myself that tuning in is somehow important, at least on some social level. But I hate this shit, so why keep torturing myself with it? After publishing this, no further insight will be gained by watching The Game Awards, and so I won’t. It will feel a bit bad, but so does quitting an addiction, and these shows increasingly feel like getting a crude high off something you are not supposed to be inhaling.
I can suggest you quit too, reminding you that you can watch all the trailers elsewhere immediately after they air, and that you can get the results of the awards, if you care about them more than Geoff, by just checking Twitter or whatever. Better yet, you can just look at that stuff later; it isn’t going anywhere. Instead of hatewatching a spineless corporate ad reel masquerading as a curator of the arts, we can just… do something else for that amount of time. Whatever we want!
Next year, on December 12th, I will regain three or four hours of my day. I’m not sure what I’ll do with it yet. Maybe I’ll write a story, or watch a good movie, or go for a lovely walk. If I’m not feeling too ambitious, I can also celebrate the Biggest Night In Gaming by just playing one, and then tell whoever made it that they created something that made me smile, or made me cry, or gave me something to think about, or made me appreciate something more, or any number of good things. These awards, I find, are the nicest of all.
Whatever happens in my life instead of The Game Awards, I think its absence will create a kinder day.
But it’s important to reiterate that, if events like The Game Awards will continually refuse to talk about anything important, we need to do our best to fill the void. That means putting a spotlight on the exploitation of workers in the video game industry, from layoffs to crunch to the rampant mistreatment and outright sexual assault of women. We need to recognize that these things occur principally at the hands of specific companies whose names, from Activision Blizzard to Embracer Group, are as readily available as the names of the people hiding behind them. We need to continue refusing to stand for it, and do so harder than ever before. If powerful people will watch their suffering idly, we cannot — when there are opportunities to help directly, we need to take them, even if all we can do most of the time is draw attention to it by screaming in horror.
And when it comes to horrible acts committed in the wider world, know that you have to say it, and say it loud, since many never will until it’s too late: Free Palestine from Israel’s apartheid. It is our responsibility as people to highlight settler colonialism and genocide, and to do everything we can to force those in power to stop it.
From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.
The following is a poem from Palestinian writer and activist Refaat Alareer, who was murdered along with his family by an Israeli airstrike on December 7th, 2023. I reprint this poem in his memory and in the memory of his family. May they rest in power, and may his words reach a future where Palestine is finally free:
If I must die,
you must live
to tell my story
to sell my things
to buy a piece of cloth
and some strings,
(make it white with a long tail)
so that a child, somewhere in Gaza
while looking heaven in the eye
awaiting his dad who left in a blaze–
and bid no one farewell
not even to his flesh
not even to himself–
sees the kite, my kite you made, flying up above
and thinks for a moment an angel is there
bringing back love
If I must die
let it bring hope
let it be a tale
