Gonzorreah At The 2009 Esports Awards
The 2009 esports awards are upon us and the industry once again self-fellates in public.
“Awards were made in Hollywood, in whatever the time it was created. They're to promote each other's movies. You give me an award, I give you an award and people will believe that we are great movies and they'll go to see them. It's still the same.”
-Javier Bardem
Those of you interested in such things will have seen that the 2009 e-sports awards are upon us, which at the moment are probably the closest thing competitive gaming is going to have to the Oscars. I’m not one who cares for awards, although I’ve been nominated for a few over the years. The nomination is an acknowledgement of your contribution, but the winning of any award is something that comes down to a combination of adherence and understanding of politics as well as the general zeitgeist at the time. If you look at examples from our Hollywood counterparts you will be able to see immediately that the best in show is all too often overlooked. Dances With Wolves beating Goodfellas to best movie… Chicago winning a haul of statues in a post 9 / 11 climate where a wounded America was desperate to find it’s smile again… The god awful Driving Miss Daisy winning anything at all predicated on its contrived depiction of racial tolerance. The most recent ceremony saw Sean Penn seemingly embarrassed to beat his friend Mickey Rourke to best actor. But the reality is, people being people, no one will turn down accolades even if a part of them knows they don’t really deserve them.
Now, just before this comes across as some kind of overly sour rant from someone very much out of the political loop, I’ll say that the ESL created e-sports awards are a great idea. There’s a lot of areas around the e-sports scene that get absolutely no sort of recognition outside of the community they operate within for what they do and this is a platform on which to redress that balance. Players always have the luxury of being in the public eye, in front of the cameras, having thousands upon thousands of words written about them year in year out and amongst what they do it is quite easy to discern who is best. But what people spend a lot less time thinking about are the people that tell their stories be it through the written word, radio, documentary or even the whole websites that bring them to the attention of thousands of people on a daily basis. Once a year it is only proper that attention does turn away from the game to the bigger picture and the people that work to drive e-sports closer and closer to the mainstream.
Yet, as with all things, there are a few oversights that if addressed could make these awards better. First thing that needs to be addressed is impartiality. The awards themselves are put on by the German based ESL and are heavily influenced by SK. Winning trends show that belonging to one of those three groups certainly gives you a head-start. I’d imagine the unstoppable force would be some kind of German ESL admin who also happens to have a column on SK Gaming, although I’m not sure such a person exists… For now. Being serious, it’d be nice to see a more diverse selection of people involved in it and less of the clear divisions between some sections of the e-sports community coming in to play. It wouldn’t be too hard to ensure this and it would undeniably give the awards more credibility
I was talking to my colleague Paul “ReDeYe” Chaloner about how the panel works and he seemed to agree that a good idea would be to make sure that the panel voting on anything should be made up of specific “experts” from each game that figured in the reckoning. Is it fair that voting could come down to someone who really doesn’t follow the particular games any nominees play? With a lot of 1.6 elitism could voting be trusted to not go to a player that had established themselves in the older game before crossing over, as opposed to someone who is at the top of Counter-Strike: Source but with no 1.6 pedigree? So definitely structuring the panel in such a way that there is an equal amount of expertise on each game wouldn’t be such a bad idea.
Paul was also quick to point out that the panel isn’t always the best set of people to be making the decisions anyway. For matters of players he felt a public vote was a lot more reliable than deferring to the knowledge of supposed experts, who a lot of the time aren’t really experts anyway, or have too significant a workload with their many projects to be able to follow the games with any regularity. The public can usually be relied upon to pull out who is best from a list of names and cite several reasons as to why. Although this can come out somewhat skewed based on things such as nationality, generally there’s enough of the voting public for this not to affect the outcome.
Myself, on the other hand, am largely sceptical about public votes in other nominated areas. Generally they boil down to weird popularity contests that are dictated by little more than how much positive exposure you have managed to gather for yourself in the month building up to the award. It doesn’t even have to relate to what you’re nominated for, but if you’re perceived to be a decent enough person across the board you can rack up the votes. A public vote also presents a series of problems for writers and journalists. Firstly, you can’t even rely on the people voting to have read what they’re voting for. Secondly, they are more likely to read something on a subject they care about or are interested in as opposed to a piece of work about something they know or care little about. This doesn’t mean that piece isn’t better, but how would they gauge it? Thirdly, While it is one thing to pick out who you think is the best player in any discipline, it is another entirely to make a member of Joe Public some kind of impromptu literary critic. They might not like the subject, it might stir up some anger in them, they might totally disagree… It doesn’t mean that in doing that the work wasn’t more successful or better crafted than some bland piece that leaves them feeling mildly entertained and generally pleased, but is forgotten about in minutes. If people feel strongly enough about something they can vote with their mouse clicks, they can post opinions on forums or they can even put together their own reply articles… Do they really need to be that involved in who wins awards in addition to that?
It is also debatable whether the system of voting for one piece of work annually is the best way to discern who is the best writer. Some put their work out infrequently and only upon request, others contribute lots of pieces over the course of a year. Some writers put out work of varying quality, sometimes scaling great heights, other times plumbing terrible depths. Some others put out work of a consistent standard without it hitting either end of that particular scale. In the current system it would be better to divide the award into two – one for best piece of writing and the other for best scene journalist. It does stand to reason that the best journalist over the course of the year may not have put out the best piece of work that year, so I don’t see the two as mutually exclusive.
Another conversation I had about the awards was at the EPS UK Finals in London this weekend just gone. James "2GD" Harding, who most of you will know from his contribution to ESL TV, raised a good point that there wasn’t a category for shoutcasters. Now this does seem a glaring oversight given how much a good commentator can bring to a game, or how much a bad commentator can detract from your enjoyment of one. It requires a lot of skill to be good at commentating, especially across different games, and a lot of hard work goes into preparing for something that when it is done well comes across as effortless and spontaneous. So there definitely needs to be a category for this in next year’s awards… But in an ideal world why couldn’t we open it out even further?
If you think about all the many people who work behind the scenes to make things run as smooth as they do. These can be tournament organisers, admins, people who keep news sites ticking over by doing all the thankless tasks behind the scenes, and all the other guys that never get their fifteen minutes despite being as equally dedicated to the same scene as the bigger names. I’m sure everyone could think of someone like this who has put the time and effort into making the scene at large better, usually for little or no thanks, so why couldn’t their be awards for this?
Finally I think it is another mystifying decision to not have a category recognising the hard work that many scene managers put in. Speaking from my experience, the good managers I know have usually built up their own organisations, have provided platforms for talent to develop and flourish, have raised the profile of the games that they support and help competitions themselves expand by their promotion of them. Generally they are put in one of the most stressful positions in e-sports, having to use their life experience and managerial savvy to help the players in their charge and always keep at least one eye on the bigger picture. Being a good manager is like a second job and those that do it well deserve the recognition for doing so.
I don’t know if the people who put the e-sports awards together will even read this, nor do I know how practical or valid my thoughts are. The bottom line is you can be of two minds. You can view awards ceremonies as counter-productive, a gimmick, or you may feel that, as the composer Charles Ives said, “awards are merely badges of mediocrity”. On the other hand you might see them as an opportunity to reward those that deserve it, something fun and a means to raise awareness to what people do. The only thing I will say is that doing them right and recognising everyone’s valid contribution is going to move more people from the former school of thought and into the latter.