[from My Gaming Diary: Gamedate 78744.2]
I have some very austere philosophies on the Game of The Year discussion. First and foremost of which is that no one should be having this conversation until December of the release calendar. Amongst other reasons why, I feel it is actually denigrating and demeaning to the creatives and to the devs of studios whose games have yet to actually even come out yet.
But on Friday, Polygon decided they needed to be one who fired first. And there seems to have been a host of several articles across the internets concerning “what are your current picks for GoTY”?
We need to give games room to breathe. And to live in their own space. We’re not all game reviewers and we do not need to process the impact of games on us in the same 1 to 2-week crucible of crunch trying to meet a deadline.
Drinking deeply of games should be in the same manner in which you try to imbibe a good wine. You’ll never be able to tell whether there are hints of chocolates, citrus, oak, and other flavors unless you hold the game in your mouth, let it splash over all parts of your tongue, give yourself time for the flavors to hit and change and change you as it is ingested.
Too often we allow our commentary on games to be encapsulated in the social media cycle of clout chasing and the need to be seen instead of saying what we really think and feel. Games will hit you once upon the experience and then that experience will change and shift over time as you get further from it, as you take more things into consideration in interpreting its experience as you allow yourself time to think about it from all sides. I’m not saying you need to wait two decades until you’ve had more life experiences to be able to speak on how you felt about a game when it came out vs when you are an older, different being.
Those conversations are important ones to have too. Ones that we also do not allow enough space for in the gaming community. But by pushing the narrative of “what is my GoTY right now/so far”, we actually eke value out of the term.
And it should mean something. In our effort to “take back GoTY” from the media, we’ve already bastardized a once vaunted label and diluted it to just mean “my favorite game of the year”. In the application of the GoTY label, I feel we are often trying to overly laude a game’s merits by bestowing on it some transitory label, that is also simply transactional; because most pundits and influencers who use it are just trading a disingenuous critical opinion for attention. It is a transaction that is both fleeting and inconsequential. It means nothing until a game is actually held in regard in comparison to that year’s graduating class of games, and so nominating it to that year’s Hall of Fame means little when the full competitive field has not been delivered yet.
You can fully say that a game is your favorite so far this year. That makes sense. And it makes sense when something comes out that supersedes it. GoTY should be a gem held in reverence. It should also be possible for you to intellectually separate the notion of GoTY as a matter of critical acclaim from “favorite game of the year”, or “most fun game of the year”, as is our Superlative category on E2KG. Because sometimes we have more fun playing a game, and there is game with high replayability, a gaming world that we live in, a do-loop that is so satisfactory to us, that that may exceed what we want to anoint as the critical darling of Game of the Year.
Simply put, GoTY has become a label that has become weaponized. Either in the platform war, the dogmatic war between AAA, AA, and indie games, the design war of Western v Eastern, the genre war, or any other minor skirmish or regional Low-Intensity Conflict that dusts up in the ongoing battle of gamer hypocrisy and disingenuity. The guerrilla tactic of declaring an interstitial GoTY every time a major release drops, every month, every quarter…the engagement farming tactic of an influencer asking “what is your game of the year so far?”…is just that. Efforts to spool people up, invite either outrage or hyperbolic game-gushing for the sake of fanning flames.
Just play games. Imbibe them. Live them. Drink deeply of them. Breathe them in. And isolate the conversation that makes you choose one above all to the only time in which it is warranted for such a conversation to exist. Once. At the end of the year. Anything else is just super-lame.
Rounding Off Infinity 