The BAFTAs Was Better Than The Recent Game Awards
Back in December, I wrote about how disappointed I was watching The Game Awards because in essence a show celebrating the game industry by giving awards to the memorable games that year, instead spent its time disrespecting the creators of the games and shoving far too many adverts down our throats. I enjoyed the trailers but it was egregious.
In some ways after the show, I felt like a bit of an award show nomad so to speak. I don’t know if I will tune into The Game Awards this year, I probably will give it a chance to correct itself but I did feel a hole which led me to want to watch a different award show. As a huge fan of Kinda Funny, I did plan to watch the DICE Awards but I didn’t get the chance to. Since then the BAFTA Game Awards came on and I was able to tune in this time.
It began with a rather warm and charming red carpet-event hosted by Jane Douglas and Lucy James. They presented well, asked some great questions in the short time they had with the guests and didn’t tread on each other’s toes either. It even led to the Alan Wake/Sam Lake coffee meme happening.
The main event host was the affable and endearing Phil Wang who I have seen many times on the satire show Have I Got News For You. His opening monologue was legitimately hilarious and warmed up the room. It was clear he enjoys video games in his spare time (which also came across on the red carpet) and the writers of the show cared too. I still remember the final joke of his monologue leading to a woman in the audience being in hysterics. Later on in the show when presenting the Player's Choice Award he manages to make a joke about how when the UK public votes for things it usually goes badly referring to the current Conservative government and Brexit.
The BAFTAs have been presenting awards for Film, and Television for a long time and the last 20 years Video Games too. They have a deep amount of experience in presenting award shows. The production of the show was incredibly smooth, 19 awards were presented in the roughly 2-hour show with plenty of time dedicated to speeches and no bloat. Some of the winners naturally had longer speeches and broke the 1 speaker only rule yet no one got played off, and no one was visibly annoyed. They understood it was a big moment. For some of these studios it could be the only award they ever win and why shouldn’t they get to make the most of their moment? Even though formally it was only supposed to be one speaker for each award, it came across to me, that it was more to keep production smooth but when people broke that rule they were given their time and the audience cheered for them too. It led to funny moments from the team at Sad Owl Studios who were all there just to have fun.
Despite everyone at the event dressed quite formally, there was a very relaxed, jovial atmosphere. A great example of this is Ben Starr strutting his stuff as he walks out on stage to present an award, one of the people from Sad Owl Studios requesting a snack and the actor who played Raphael in Baldur’s Gate 3 jumping in and out of the Raphael voice effortlessly during the delivery of his acceptance speech. No one made “jokes” about being short on time or feeling pressured to rush through and make a surface-level speech rather than saying what they wanted.
The most heartfelt moment of the night was the acceptance of the Special Award by the charity called Special Effect. I hadn’t heard of this charity until the Red Carpet event. The charity is run by a father and son who visit people with disabilities in the UK and create a set-up allowing them to play video games when they can’t use a traditional controller. The clip played was incredibly beautiful showing how much they have improved people’s lives and it was so clear how much the award meant to them. They do great work and mentioned they even provided advice to Sony for their accessible controller, as well as advice online for people who don’t reside in the UK.
People also used the platform to raise attention to causes they cared about. Something Geoff Keighley shied away from massively. The Game Awards didn’t address the layoffs in the industry, ignored the letter from the Future Class asking him to mention the genocide in Palestine and the cynic in me still believes the speeches were made so short to avoid people mentioning any of these topics. Meanwhile, Phil Wang’s opening dialogue almost instantly addressed the layoffs and the impact this has on creatives and the need for the show to give people recognition. The first acceptance speech of the night immediately called for a ceasefire for the genocide that is going on in Palestine. Instead of this being met with controversy, immediately there was a huge round of cheers and applause for the team who created the amazing game Venba. Later on Tamoor Hussain whilst presenting an award wore a keffiyeh as a way of showing solidarity to the Palestinian people, a cause he is always championing.
All these statements weren’t deemed as controversial in the show. I know sometimes people would prefer things to stay apolitical but the reality is everything is political in some shape or form. Even your typical hero story which is often used in video games is by nature political because being the hero or the villain means that both parties are trying to push their ideologies onto the other or the world. Even if the game isn’t directly political, the people who make games will have a set of beliefs. For some developers, this may be the only time they ever receive an award in their careers especially with more and more games coming out every year, so why shouldn’t they spend the small amount of time they have where a significant amount of people are watching to champion a cause they truly believe in to highlight atrocities and lack of humanity that is happening in the world. It creates awareness which can in turn benefit the world, whether that is stopping a genocide or reminding CEOs of the impact they have on people’s lives which may lead to fewer layoffs in the future or any other cause.
All the speeches were incredibly heartfelt. For example, the Music Director on Baldur’s Gate 3 struggled to breathe because he just wanted to cry with happiness, the actor who played Raphael in Baldur’s Gate 3 talked about his history with video games, and the Miles Morales actor was surprised he won over the Peter Parker actor. There was lots of respect for the UK history of video games too, for example having the original voice actress for Lara Croft coming on stage to present an award and having Phil Wang joke about locking Lara’s butler in the freezer. Sadly a lot of speeches at The Game Awards have felt like PR statements in the past. This was a little bit the case here too with the Nintendo representative spending their time highlighting features in the games which came across a little like he was there to advertise it rather than hyping up the developers but all the other winners had huge amounts of joy on their faces. Some of the award winners had come on their own, possibly because they weren’t expecting to win and so they saw it as a networking event but then were legitimately left speechless for a moment when they did win. These moments can only happen when you give people time to express what is inside them which is only a good thing considering how often society tries to repress their emotions often to their detriment.
I think in a lot of ways the differences between the shows could be summarised as the difference between a seemingly for-profit organisation with The Game Awards and a charity that is the BAFTAs. The former is rammed with adverts which were supposed to originally be a gateway to get people to watch the show and stay for the celebrations but over time the awards have been pushed to the side. The BAFTAs sort of equivalent adverts were getting several past award winners to do a video talking about how they benefitted from winning the award and what they are currently working on. The videos talked about the impact the games had on society for example Hellbade devs mentioned how their game has raised mental health awareness. It has a much more wholesome feel to it. It shows the benefits of art and creation.
The BAFTAs also had a beautiful in-memoriam where they had this amazing artistic live musical performance. The video covered so many faces, mostly full of people I didn’t recognise. It covered programmers, actors and surprisingly even data analysts and it was such a lovely thing to see. Sadly The Game Awards instead decided to start playing off the Game of the Year award winners when they wanted to spend but a short moment to mention a friend and colleague of theirs who lost their battle with cancer.
In the end, I was impressed with the BAFTAs and I will be tuning in again next year for sure. It was a truly British-style celebration with great humour and respect for the whole industry and I genuinely hope I get to watch it in person one day.
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