The Game Awards set for December 8, will now start giving awards to more than games
This year's event will have a special category for things based on video games
Every summer, Geoff Keighley (the Mayor Of Video Games) calls up all of his friends in the video game industry and gets them to send him their hottest trailers and biggest announcements for his Summer Game Fest event. Then, every winter, he calls up all of his friends in the video game industry and gets them to come hang out in a big theater so he can give them awards (and so he can remind them all that he has a best friend and that his name is Hideo Kojima) at The Game Awards. Today, Keighley announced when this year’s Game Awards will be held and revealed a somewhat surprising new category.
This comes from Deadline, which says The Game Awards will be held at the Microsoft Theater in Los Angeles on December 8, and in addition to some in-person tickets being available in the fall, it will be streamable on YouTube, Twitch, Twitter, Facebook, and TikTok. There will also be some kind of IMAX tie-in in case you’ve always wanted to see game developer Josef Fares say “fuck the Oscars” on the largest possible screen. (Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise: The Game Awards are sometimes a lot of fun.)
With that December 8 date, we also have the aforementioned somewhat surprising new category: Best Adaptation. That means that, for at least one category, The Game Awards will honor something that explicitly is not a video game. Deadline explains that it covers “creative work that authentically adapts video game intellectual property to other popular media, including but not limited to theatrical movies, streaming shows, podcasts, novels, and comic books.”
It’s not totally clear what prompted the new category, but its extremely wide umbrella seems to indicate that it’s just a reflection of how many video games are being adapted into other things (like, say, Gravity Rush). We would also wager that having a category related to movies and television would give The Game Awards a little more pull in those industries, making it easier for Keighley to get trailers for stuff like HBO’s The Last Of Us or Sonic The Hedgehog 3 or the upcoming Super Mario movie. Either that or it’s just fun to see a movie compete with a podcast.