Finally, the most pretentious Gaming-related event of the year is over.
Unlike E3, Gamescom or the Tokyo Game Show, the Spike Video Game Awards are that kind of event that does not contribute anything to Gaming as a whole, but only bloats those already bloated even more.
We've certainly learned that "teabagging" isn't only a Xbox Live Call of Duty thing, but is also popular amongst scripted acts of immaturity at Gaming Awards.
Now we're all a bit smarter since we've learned that rubbing a medikit on your shirt might make you feel less retarded than before - if only for a second.
And who would have thought? Standing around, talking about mostly unrelated crap and unfunny jokes seems to be horribly exhausting, and Charlie Sheen actually got onto the stage mostly sober once again - even though we have no definite proof for that yet.
One thing we definitely should memorize is that the Spike VGAs are one simple thing: Clusterfuck.
The "Host", Sheen, Jimbo and Stifler as well as quite a few others have offered us enough reasons to openly "WTF" and question even our slightest hope that the show would be even mildly entertaining on this very night.
Anyone who's been watching the show via livestream (which, if I might add, was regionally restricted, annoying a myriad of Gamers around the globe) should know by now that we've been fed more commercials, idiocy and, simply put, bullshit than gaming-relevant information.
The few exclusive Debut trailers we've seen were either very short (Command & Conquer: Generals 2), didn't tell anything about the gameplay (Spider-man, Transformers) or were only nice to look at without presenting more than a rather generic basic scenario (Last of Us). The best part of the evening probably was Hideo Kojima, shyly announcing the (already leaked) new Metal Gear Rising trailer, which was actually quite exciting.
 |
| Well, there's the dragon... |
The buggiest and most unpolished game I've seen since the Magicka launch - Skyrim. How else could it have went?
The only nominated game that runs actually worse on PCs and got onto that list was Batman: Arkham City (which celebrates its first patch, which didn't even fix most issues),
and Zelda: Skyward Sword fails brilliantly in the eyes of longtime fans (Nobody plays the Wii these days anyway, from what I've heard).
Uncharted 3, exclusive to the PS3, never even stood a chance - it might be a huge blockbuster and take the console to its maximum, but it simply did not have the amount of media exposure and glorifications since it has been announced that The Elder Scrolls V had.
Last but first on the ladder of objectivity we have Portal 2. A game that excells in testing your braincells, offering snarky humor, accessability and a lot of coop fun as well as free updates and additional content being released over time. Also, Cave Johnson.
Sadly, Portal 2 did not win the GotY award, but to quote good ol' Cave on the topic of metaphorical lemons:
When life gives you lemons, don't make lemonade. Make life take the lemons back. GET MAD! I DON'T WANT YOUR DAMN LEMONS! WHAT AM I SUPPOSED TO DO WITH THESE?!
That's to say that the awards have been just as fake as every year, and neither Cave, GLaDOS or Gabe Newell should have even accepted this award in any case.
Speaking of Fake - did you hear about that Youtube-fellow who got so pissed about the VGAs last time? Yeah, he got onto the stage this time, the bribe worked well enough for him to swallow his pride. Also, Jonas Brothers, speeding through most awards to make more room for Kraft: Maccaroni and Cheese and Mission Impossible, a made-up award for Blizzard, who didn't even release a single game, expansion or even Beta this year (nope, closed Diablo 3 beta does not count) and more stupid comments by our dear host.
People who most likely have never even been considered to be somehow "important, "cool" or even "likeable" by the wider gaming community presented video game awards or trailers, took more time looking stupid than doing their job - presenting the games (even though, admittedly, looking stupid IS part of what they signed up for).
 |
| B-Bioshock! |
Felicia Day. Who was that girl? Is she important? Did she brainstorm some popular games' plot? Did she give birth to a handheld device?
None of the above, it seems. She's an actress, I was told. After she personally replied to me and M0zilla on twitter, I found out about her being somehow involved in Dragon Age 2, which sure is something to be proud of ***.
However, none of the people I've asked who she even was knew an answer, the only one I got was "an actress", but nothing gaming-related at all.
Moral of the story: Don't look at your smartphone's twitter client after having had a more or less embarrassing performance on stage and search for your name. You might find people who didn't like you. This time, we were those people. Get used to it.
So, to round this post up at last,
here's a link to kotaku, who listed all the awards given.
Portal 2 got 5 awards (Best Actors of both genders, Best Multiplayer, Best PC Game, Best DLC), and those were actually quite something.
Bastion got 3 Awards, and thus is amongst the very very few nominees who got what they deserved rather than what bribes could buy.
Minecraft Best Indie Game and the rest was rather dull and for the most part undeserved.
Call of Duty MW3 seems to be this year's Best Shooter, which I have no issue disagreeing with (Played it, was a bad mix of explosions and mindless gunning and bad hollywood scenes), and even though I was glad they didn't pick RAGE, it leaves a sour taste.
Skyrim wouldn't even be able to apply for an event like this in my book, since products that buggy and unpolished shouldn't be allowed to enter. Then again, they even nominated RAGE, and we all know about RAGE...
A game which looks a hundred times better using the Community's mods, all forged in the few weeks since released, looks bad from the angle of a Gamer with standards, especially when its advertised at $60. But oh well, how to defy the brainless gloryfication? We didn't even get to figure that out since christianity came around...
I guess that's it - the 2011 Spike VGAs. An event with Wikipedia coverage since 2003 but still laking a "Criticism"-section like most other things already had in 2005. And believe me, the criticism has landed heavy hits this year once again...
*** I've used italics to mark the part where I broke out in laughter. If you've done the same, facepalmed or otherwise made fun of that point, good job, you won a cookie. Or lemon, in case you want to throw it against EA's heads.
23 Comments:
People like you are the problem with the internet. You could argue that I'm no better, but that's another discussion.
Wha'ts the point of this blog post? To shit all over good games and cool people? Keep your counter-culture, better-than-you bullshit to yourself.
Hey, let's Google the terms "Felicia Day" and "gaming" and see if anything comes up...oh, 2.3 million hits! How about that!
To recap the pretentious event that is the VGAs. And you know what, people actually agree a lot with this post and the statements in general.
If I kept it to myself, hundreds of people would have found wanting these past 10 hours.
Saying "People like me are the problem with the internet" without giving a proper reason is also quite... odd of a statement, one could argue.
But hey, welcome and thanks for reading, I suppose =)
Let's make an experiment.
Google for the Terms "Lemons" and "Gaming".
240.000.000 results. Felicia Day got 1.690.000, quite a difference.
Are Lemons the messiah of Gaming?
Felicia Day created a web series called "The Guild" about a group of online gamers who play a game similar to WoW. She still writes it and stars in it as well. She also wrote, produced, and starred in a online series for Bioware for the DragonAge universe called "DragonAge: Redemption." Bioware then made downloadable content that she did motion capture and voice acting for called "DragonAge: Mark of the Assassin."
She also voiced Veronica in Fallout: New Vegas and she's voicing a character in the new Guild Wars. She has gaming cred. She's also an unbelievably nice person and one of the hardest working people I've met.
See? THAT's what I call an enlightening comment!
An actual reply trying to explain who the hell she is, rather than "hurr durr you're what's wrong with the internet".
Never heard of "The Guild" until now, Dragon Age died for me with the 2nd game, hence I did never care about its DLC, and Bethesda games are something I try to avoid as much as possible (especially since they're hardly ever great games without a huge pack of mods).
Guild Wars 2 will probably the first time I EVER get to "notice" her in a video game.
But yeah, none of these things actually /matter/ in the wider sense, don't you think? She's not a big deal in the gaming "scene", but more like a niche product, apparently. Those who got aware of her obviously like her enough to stand up for her, which certainly is a thing to be proud of, but not something you would expect people around the world to know or even care about.
If they had invited Steve Blum onto the stage, I'd have gone all
"Hurray!" in no time, but as its "just" Felicia Day... well, you see the
picture...
...and then you inspect the content of a sampling of those links...I was suggesting that with the slightest bit of effort you could figure out exactly how connected Felicia Day is connected to gaming (very, as it turns out.)
You're the one who doubted she had anything to do with gaming, or even played games. Presumably because she's female and cute?
She's a committed gamer, creates a popular and award-winning web series about gaming, and appears in games. Sounds like a good choice to host a gaming awards show, yes?
"very" connected in her specific niche, and you most definitely have to do some research to even get such an answer. The list of people that don't know her at all grows over here, so she can't be that much of a big deal either.
...you don't know anything about her, and assume she doesn't know anything about gaming. What led to that assumption? And there's no such thing as "barging in" on Twitter. Twitter isn't private.
I don't assume Charlie Sheen or Jim and Stifler know much about gaming either, and they don't have any kind of role in the gaming world to be acknowledged for.
So why would I assume that Felicia Day has been anything more than a female selling point for something like Spike?
And you're damn right Twitter's not private, but guess how it comes along if you go off the stage, check your iphone and reply to someone who doesn't know you in such a manner? Smart move?
See above, she's a girl on a widely commercially motivated event that shows ads for Kraft: Mac & Cheese and invites a sober Charlie Sheen to present Shooters.
There's been no indication for me to even consider Felicia Day as anything else than the (excuse my wording) "dumb little girl to attract attention", like it is with the myriad of other weird "awards" or game shows. Yes, they can read some cards out loud or announce something, but are they really at home in that area?
It's just mostly a negative post. You give a pat on the back to like, Bastion. And that's mostly it.
You probably just hit a nerve talking about Felicia. I've been a fan of hers for years, and like the dude said earlier, a simple google search would show you pretty quickly that she's a legitimate gamer who has a lot of prescence in the industry.
Maybe the problem with the Internet is the limited ability to show actual meaning?
XD
Well, let's ignore Felicia for a second and think about what's been positive about this year's VGAs, what comes to mind?
The jokes were bad, Awards were getting hardly any screentime, Charlie Sheen...
Only nice things were that some few Games got awards they actually deserved, not because they were paying for the ads and acted as sponsors.
Most of the people involved in the gaming industry or serious journalists are already complaining about how bad it makes games and gamers look once again, and it's been made obvious enough that there wasn't half as much interest in the games and/or awards as necessary.
I really liked that Open Letter over here, it sums it up in a less Rant-y post:
http://jasonschreier.com/2011/12/11/spike-vgas/
To come back to Felicia, well, I don't know her, none of the people in my reach do, I've never even read about her on the net before last night. Thus my "ignorance" on Twitter.
However, I wouldn't even know what the Jonas Brothers look like if it weren't for South Park...
I appreciate it if Felicia herself is a proud gamer (and I don't know if her reply was more out of hurt pride in her gaming love, or rather because we didn't know her at all), and she sure seems to have quite a few fans, but I don't see the necessity in knowing her, even recognizing her name and the likes. Maybe I'm simply the wrong target audience.
(On another note, I could have googled or wiki'd her, sure, but I was kinda watching the stream on my full browser window with a twitter client in the bottom right corner, shooting off thoughts about the bad show at the time)
Well, maybe its also a thing about her being supposedly smart and nice like the comments on here say, but also starrs on Spike, despite being a proud gamer. Spike'd need to pay me a damn lot of cash just to swallow my pride for a minute and make a stand for them...
I recently found DarkChaplain's blog (I dont remember how) and come here sometimes to read music related posts and whatnot, but at times his ranting and bashing gets to bore me to the bones at the point it makes me imagine him like a fat antisocial nerd in his 30's living in a basement with nothing to do except for playing many games all day.
But I really don't know him so I cannot speak about. I hope he is a totally different person just giving the wrong impression.
Now I am here to defend what he thinks about VGA and Felicia, because despite his ranting flavor, he's right:
VGA awards are the biggest bullshit in the gaming world. Period. They are made just for paid plain publicity. And anyone that really like videogames should not take the event to seriously.
Now about Felicia, she's pretty, she's intelligent, but she's not a gamer. She's just trying to hard to sell that "pretty&wise-gamer-girl" shit to their fans that it is really so sad to watch.
True story of Felicia: Never played videogames but like everyone else she know about them, then she meets World of Warcraft at some boring time of her life, get addicted and decides to make a nerd web series about it. Thanks to her looks and some contacts she gets a lot of faithfull fanboys. End of story.
She's like that chick whatshisname at IGN that become kind of famous around the gaming world just for licking a psp. LAME.
For what I know about Felicia IN REAL LIFE she is a nice and a very interesting person. But everything else about her gamer breed are just fat lies with so much hype behind. Truth be told.
Everyone here defending her gamer side is just a fanboy that really dont know shit about her.
You didn't know who Felicia Day is?
Turn in your gamer card now. Poser.
Yeah casue your a well know internet celeb. Oh wait your a nobdy Ive never heard of bar a link on Destructoid pointing out your a nobody :D
I wonder where you got the feeling that I was seeing or presenting myself as a "well known internet celeb" or anything of the sort.
If you think Felicia Day is that relevant to the gaming world then odds are your "gamer card" was found inside a cereal box and you are the real poser.
Lame ass. Who the fuck doesn't know who Felicia Day is?
From the dozen I asked while the VGAs were running? 11. The last one knew her as an actor, thats it.
Every single person aside from that returned the question "Who?" when I asked them for Felicia.
Dunno, maybe its a regional thing, who knows.
After last year's VGA, I don't even bother watching it anymore... You should do the same, too.
Well it helps if you don't ask the people in the Geriatric Old Folk's home down the street! Perhaps if you ask anyone who actually know's the first thing about video games you would have been surprised to realize she has done more for the industry then you and your silly blog!
Post a Comment