SpikeTV, upon its creation, was supposed to appeal to the young male, hence The First Network for Men slogan. Trying to do what Lifetime did for women, Spike aimed its sights on bringing to the TV reruns of great shows (Star Trek: The Next Generation), awesome movies (Bond), and original programming that was suppose to solidify its position as one of the cable channels to watch, along with FX. But the original programming has been less than watch-able, and aside from the excellently written Stripperella, nostalgia influence Ren & Stimpy, and zany Most Extreme Elimination Challenge everything else has purely sucked.
Finally someone came to the realization that young males, again, Spike’s target demographic, played videogames, and what better way to bring them to the airwaves and sell ads to advertisers than to hold a video games award show?
Last week Spike aired the first ever VGAs, the Video Game Awards, and if this year's telecast was any indication, we can only hope it is a one time event. To say I was under-whelmed and unimpressed would be an understatement. Everything about the show seemed shallow and thrown together only as a ploy to make money off of millions of hapless video gamers. The “big name stars” that they talked about amounted to Pamela Anderson and some muscle-clad bimbos from the WWE. If it wasn’t for Ray Liotta’s (Tommy Vercetti in GTA: Vice City) appearance the show would be completely devoid of anyone who remotely has anything to do with video games.
The whole show seems more like a sham than anything else. I was one of the lucky (?) journalists that was responsible for the nominations in each category, but looking at my nomination form, a handful of the games weren’t even released at the time we nominated them for an award. Spike may have been betting on higher paid editors who actually get preview builds of games time and time again, but the smaller sites have to fend for ourselves. In at least one occasion a game that hadn’t been released when I nominated my choices won it’s category, but did they actually win anything?
I think the idea of a Video Games Award show is an excellent idea, but I would have loved to see it done right the first time. It seems Spike’s hard work to make the show as anti-mainstream as possible backfired. Video games are entering the mainstream more and more each day, and what better way to show politicians and parents that they are more than brain-rotting, mindless blood-fests than to have an actual award show, devoid of scantily clad DOA girls and dim-witted wrestlers? The no nomination, no acceptance speech, no red carpet format just doesn’t work in an industry that is trying to be acknowledged as an art, rather than some distraction from school.
Instead of presenters and getting to actually hear from the winners we get “performances,” and I use that term loosely, by DMX, Kelis, and Bubba Sparxxx. Where were the legends like Will Wright, Peter Molyneux, Sid Meier, and Shigeru Miyamoto? These people brought video games into this world and are responsible for the biggest selling series of all time, how could they be left out of such a “groundbreaking” moment as this? If the musical acts weren't bad enough we had to listen to Funkmaster Flex “talk,” and I use that term very loosely, about who the hell knows what. Someone should get that guy a dictionary and a circa 1980’s typewriter and put him to work in the backroom of some warehouse. Maybe in 100 years he might actually be able to say something meaningful. Adding to the joke was David Spade as the host-who-spends-the-least-time-on-stage or better yet, host-who-sees-his-career-in-the-crapper.
Some excellent games won on the awards show, and they where picked by us, the gamers, but does all that really matter when the outcome is presented in such a way that I actually cringed several times because I couldn’t believe this was actually filmed and printed to tape, let alone shown on national television. There was also some questionable games winning awards, but I already got into that.
After the telecast was over I was somewhat relieved that I had to turn down my invitation to attend the awards ceremony on December 2nd. It would have been nice to be a part of video game history, but if the industry as whole is wise, this is one moment we may like to forget.
