Move along, folks; nothing to see in 2011, Kotaku writer says

Asked to select the best game of 2011, Kotaku blogger Owen Good voted “none of the above.” Though he enjoyed THE ELDER SCROLLS V: SKYRIM (pictured above) and other releases this year, he argues that no game “was the best at what it did.” Blah.

When I was a junior in college, one of my journalism professors organized an entire lesson plan around the Pulitzer Board’s decision in 2004 to award no prize for feature writing. The submissions that year were so derivative and so dull, she said, that the Pulitzer people, rather than honor the best of a mediocre crop of stories, chose to make a statement about the supposedly sorry state of literary journalism.

Tom Kearney, then the executive editor of The Keene Sentinel in New Hampshire and a Pulitzer juror that year (and not to be confused with York County’s district attorney), later wrote that nearly all of the 162 feature-writing entries in 2004 were “terrific,” and that the board’s inability to select a winner came down to a battle of constituencies and 10-ton opinions.

I mention all of this because of an awful year-end roundtable published Wednesday at gaming blog Kotaku, capping a year of generally good but often embarrassing writing (see their “Gut Check” feature) at the Gawker site. In this particular item, blogger Owen Good votes that Kotaku withhold its award for game of the year, on the basis that nothing in 2011 was of “GOTY timber.” Despite a calendar year stuffed with enjoyable titles, nothing struck Good as “the best at what it did.”

The roundtable proceeds with a gaggle of Kotaku writers playfully berating Good for being so elitist (“Nothing? NOTHING?!” Brian Ashcraft asked), and by the end of the piece, it’s clear that Good’s the only one who feels quite like this.

But Kotaku posted the discussion anyway. The result is 1,800 words of confusing, contradictory navel-gazing led by a guy who wants to turn a yearly pageant into a historical document.

Yuck.

In the games-as-art debate, I sit comfortably on the fence. A game like PORTAL 2 absolutely is art, marrying puzzles to top-notch humor with genuinely moving results. But something like last year’s VANQUISH, which boasted one of the most dramatically impotent stories in the history of video games, was its own kind of art. The thrill of rocketing to cover between the legs of a five-story robot, then pirouetting to safety in slow-motion before venting the heat that’s accumulated in your space-age exoskeleton, is something that a book or movie simply can’t reproduce.

For as long as we insist on playing both kinds of games — and we ought to insist on that — we have to allow our hobby to straddle the line between toys and culture. That means giving year-end awards the respect they deserve, which is practically nil. (See Giant Bomb’s best-of-2011 series, which features prizes in award categories like “Best Sky Game,” “Best Use of 3,” “Eastern Bloc Game of the Year” and “Best Use of Nolan North,” for examples of how to do year-end awards properly).

There’s a reason people throw around words like “film snob.” Homo sapiens is an instinctually tribal creature, after all, and professional critics, like any other subset of the species, have a mammalian tendency to group and to stake out territory. They gather in Circles and Boards to throw Film Festivals and hand out Awards, and we’re supposed to coo at the sheer credibility of it all when we see their names over laurels in movie trailers and for-your-consideration ads.

It’s a nauseating thing, but at least there’s precedent for it. The politics of game criticism are much more delicate, unfortunately, and they don’t leave much room for this sort of pedantic posturing.

Don’t believe in game-of-the-year awards? That’s fine! You’re not alone. But do your readers the favor of bowing out of the discussion before you become the gaming press’ Armond White. If you’re so burnt out that you can’t remember how English superlatives work, hang it up for a few weeks and take a deep breath.