Game of the year, eh? Says who? Q takes the various Game of the Year awards to task for their seemingly arbitrary system of grading, and asks the obvious question most relevant to all of us.
A new year is upon us and that means the gaming press at large are releasing their "coveted" Game of the Year (GotY) awards. Regardless of the different formats used by the various websites, blogs and podcasts, as I read and listen I find myself getting more and more frustrated by the odd parameters games must meet to be considered for this trivial honor. They ask questions like:
What game play modes did it have?
How long was the campaign?
Did it have leaderboards?
Was it innovative?
How was the play time to dollar ratio?
What was its metacritic?
Often they forget to ask the single most important question, the one we have all been able to answer since we first picked up a controller or pushed an arrow key ... was it fun?
How is it that fun has taken a back seat to the minutia and over-analysis of every aspect of a game? I can see the value in discussing graphics, music, controls, level design and the other pieces of a game, but those are parts of a whole; and, in my opinion, they should only be figured into formulating the answer to the question of whether or not a game is fun.
I don't like giving a game a score whether it's on a 10-point scale, a letter grade or out of five stars. Mostly because it encourages you to break a game down into those individual parts and then weigh those against each other. Since there is no hard and fast rule on how to weigh those parts, you can't assign a relevant score.
Even if there was a rule for weighing these parts, who would make that determination? Are graphics more important than music? Is level design more important than graphics? Are controls the more important than level design? Its a veritable rock, paper, scissors, lizard, Spock conundrum.
All game reviews are subjective anyway so why give it the facade of scientific method? All I want to know is whether a game is fun or not. Did it cause you to stay up until 4 AM? Did it make you want to call in sick? Did you think about playing the game when you were sitting at your desk pretending to check email? If so, then despite the game running at 30 FPS instead of 60 FPS, you were probably having fun. Have we become so jaded and cynical as gamers we have lost site of the big picture and would rather pick at every little detail than admit we are having fun?
My GotY 2007 was CoD4: MW. My GotY for 2008 was Left 4 Dead. My GotY for 2009 is CoD: MW2. Why? Simple ... they were the games I had the most fun playing. When I found time to play a game, these were the ones that I found myself wanting to go back to over and over. I never got overly frustrated (even on the ferris wheel level of CoD4), and always had fun in the end.
Sure these are all AAA titles, but that doesn't mean that casual and smaller games didn't make my short list. Peggle, Battlefield 1943, Plants vs. Zombies, Shadow Complex, PuzzleQuest, Portal ... those are all games I considered over the last few years. How did I make a determination on what I would call my GotY? I didn't pull out an abacus or consult a complex algorithm. Rather I sat back and thought about what game I had the most fun playing. In my case it may be because the AAA titles gave me more play time than the smaller games, hence more fun. I don't really know because it doesn't matter. It's subjective because it's based on an opinion. As long as I can present a coherent explanation on why the game was fun to me, that's all that matters.
In a perfect gaming world, metacritic would die and the press would move from a scoring system to a more ambiguous system like "Buy, Rent, Avoid." Then they would present their impressions of the game in the body of a review and let us know whether or not the game was fun enough to recommend. As for GotY awards, everyone would have their own with an explanation. There wouldn't be a need to create lists and formulate weighting systems to come up with a singular, all powerful GotY because it just doesn't work.
I can argue all day why I chose my specific GotY over someone else's choice but that doesn't mean they are wrong. Fun is determined by the individual based on many personal factors they experience while playing a game. Some people may think my choice of CoD: MW2 is a crazy choice over games like Batman: Arkham Asylum or Assassin's Creed 2, but that's their opinion, and we all know what opinions are like.
So as the various websites and podcasts reveal their GotY winners, read and listen closely to try and determine why, because the why is so much more important than the what. Especially if the what turns out to be Assassin's Creed 2. Damn, what a steaming pile of over-hyped shit that turned out to be. Smell that opinion?
