Credit to Lennon Sharp

This year’s annual video game award ceremony will be available to watch on Dec. 12 at 6:30 p.m. CST, and will be on Twitch and YouTube. The award show is a showcase of people’s favorite games and the most impressive games that have been released the past year, and serves to give the developers of said games recognition for their achievements. People have various franchises, developers and other things they would like to see addressed this time around, and there are many reasons players would like to see these developers congratulated.

The more time someone spends playing a game, naturally the more they will become enveloped in the story, gameplay, atmosphere and world that it presents you and games with that much playtime takes lots of work to make.

“I would like to see ‘Elden Ring: Shadow of the Erdtree’ win the game awards because it’s good and I put a lot of time in it, I like that developers get to see the work they did pay off,” sophomore Ryan Walker said.

Some people are also frustrated with the lack of attention that the Game Awards receive, due to both the audience and the people in charge of producing and running the show, and wish the environment surrounding the show was far more fun.

“I think the hype around the overall game awards needs to be improved, nothing else, it’s just there’s no fun environment surrounding it man, when it comes to the impact of the game awards there’s not much nobody really cares about the game awards I barely look at them” sophomore Lain Fyle said.

The video game awards isn’t all just about the big companies that make games, as some smaller independently made projects also often make their way into the nominees, and it can be a great way to shine a light and give more attention to what creative individuals have made.

“[Awards are given to] mostly Triple A devs, but sometimes I’m really surprised by little indie projects getting so big as to win awards, it’s cool to see little studios getting the spotlight,” sophomore John Evans said.

For those not familiar with the game awards, in the early 2000s, video game journalist Geoff Keighley was working for the channel Spike TV to help them produce their video game award ceremony. However, in 2013, Spike began to lose interest in hosting the game awards, due to creative differences between the channel and television networks. Due to the failure of the show in 2013, Spike TV opted to ditch their live show and continue to host the show through streaming media instead of broadcast, and they would later ditch the show altogether. This is when Keighley decided to ask for the financial aid from several large companies in the video game industry to back a new show with Spike’s permission, creating the modern day video game awards. No matter the issues some may have with the game awards, it’s safe to say that at the end of the day, talented people getting recognized for all the backbreaking work, extreme effort and insane talent they’ve put into creating these games is a great thing.

“They’re fun to watch and see if my favorite games got nominated for anything or even won awards,” Evans said.