Emerson Pieper, staff writer

If you’re an avid video gamer online, you probably know of the yearly Game Awards. This event is really just a fun competition where a game is given the award “Game of the Year,” which is decided between a public vote and a jury vote. The six nominees we have this year are “Clair Obscur: Expedition 33,” “Death Stranding 2: On The Beach,” “Donkey Kong Bananza,” “Hades II,” “Hollow Knight: Silksong” and “Kingdom Come: Deliverance II.”

This list is honestly uninteresting in my opinion. I can see why Silksong is up there. Hollow Knight was pretty big when it first came out, so it makes sense that many would be fans of the new game as well, even when I myself don’t really care much for the game at the moment. However, some of the nominations are games that I haven’t heard of from either people playing them or people talking and waiting on the release of the games. Because of this, some of these games just “showed up” from my perspective. 

It most likely has to do with the fact that since I’ve started college, I haven’t been playing games that much or keeping up with upcoming games. To be honest… I think that I would have still been clued in on some of the upcoming games with the amount of friends I have who nag me to play with them all of the time. So this begs the question that happens pretty much every year: “Are The Game Awards rigged?”

Personally, my answer to this question is already “No.” There are millions of video games out there, and millions of people play various games of multiple genres. There isn’t really a way to “prove” if one game really is the “Game of the Year,” and there will always be people saying that something is rigged if they don’t like what won and are only around people who agree and hadn’t heard of the game. Not everyone will enjoy the same genres, and people who claim that the awards are rigged should at the very least take that into account.

Either way, it can still be fun to debate with friends on which games should have won or even should have been nominated. It is definitely a different conversation when someone is genuinely upset about it, and it makes me laugh quite a bit that some people do genuinely get heated up over this ranking. I keep seeing things from this streamer, Shroud, where it seems like they are genuinely upset about the award nominees, and it has to do with them wanting it to be a shooter game?

From what I have heard about the streamer, I am pretty sure it is just because the guy has a preference for shooter games and is really good at them. Again, everyone likes different genres, and I think the dude just needs to accept that fact instead of making a big deal about it. It does bring attention to his channel, of course, so it is admittedly a pretty good strategy for getting people to talk about his channel and potentially gain new viewers.

Personally, I really wish that “No, I’m Not A Human” was nominated for the game of the year award, or at least in one of the sections, but alas. Again, this is all really just a fun debate and competition between game developers and something for entertainment and a fun event that brings gamers together for a short while.