I’m going to blame it on some kind of virus induced delirium, but last night I sat on my couch nursing a cold, sipping a hot tea, and watching the Game Awards. Mind you I never watch the game awards. I think the judging is biased and the host(s) usually find some way to make some horribly offensive comments. But last night it was on my mind, perhaps because Patrick Klepek suggested that our own Bianca would make a good judge for the game of the year award because the current panel that they were running with was comprised of 28 men and 2 women (and the eSports Panel and Advisory Board of “industry leaders” were all men).
And while I agree that Bianca is brilliant and would make a great judge, I also think that the panels need to include more Other folks (think underrepresented minorities and trans folks), but all of this points to the larger problem. The judges are being pulled from mainstream games media outlets and they are overwhelmingly staffed by white, cis-male writers. So while I think that they should be picking judges from sites like Offworld and NYMG so that they get games critics who have different and differing perspectives and expertises so that we can (perhaps) start to see some diversity in the titles chosen for the categories and the awards bestowed, seeing that diversity in games media in general could also have a great impact on expanding critical perspectives overall.
More obvious than the absence of women on the judging panel (which involved some quick research) was the absence of women on the stage of the awards show last night. Anecdotally, I counted 3 women on stage for the whole of the show last night (singer Lauren Mayberry of Chvrches, Her Story voice actress Viva Seifert, and game developer Jade Raymond) and this absence was palpable. So much so that when Raymond took the stage 1 hour and 45 minutes into the show I messaged a bunch of NYMG staffers this:
2015 Game Awards Show = Dicks on Parade
Yep, that’s right I said it. Two hours of a games award show and the only three women who cross the stage are a musician, a voice actor, and a single game designer. (And one Black person performing? But that’s another story) Because there are no women who design games and who were available to present or talk about their upcoming games? Women working in the industry need to be front and center at the awards shows and not added as an afterthought.
We need to have an awards show that not only more accurately represents the industry, but the consumers of the media that they produce. So while having a more diverse judging pools in absolutely necessary, it is not sufficient. We need to see better representation across the board. With this representation we would (hopefully) see some nominations (and awards being won) of some of the amazing independent (or non-shooter) games that are released during the year. While we did see some of these games, like Undertale, Her Story, and Cibele, being nominated they were mostly in marginalized categories like Games for Impact, Best Art Design, etc and not for major categories like Game of the Year. What we did see was games like Metal Gear Solid: Phantom Pain and The Witcher 3 running off with all of the major categories (The Witcher 3 won 3 of the polygonal boobs angel trophies) as problematic as these games were in terms of women and people of color, but that is not apparent in the choices made by the dicks on parade crowd.
So the pragmatic question here is whether Geoff Keighley is ever going to produce a show that is inclusive of women and minorities in the games industry (and that doesn’t offend all of my feminist sensibilities) or whether we will have to wait for a new awards show.
