Weekend Reading: Game of the Year Edition

The Spike Video Game Awards are taking place this Saturday and at the end some games will walk away with prizes and one lucky title will get the title of Game of the Year, which it will proudly display until next year.

A full list of the nominees is here on Softpedia.

Some new titles will be confirmed for 2012 and some rumors will be dispelled or revealed as being true, but my feeling is that the title Game of the Year has become less and less important as the gaming industry has progressed and that the idea that one title can dominate one year and determine how it will be seen by future gamers is becoming obsolete.

One reason is the fact that big games, those that have a lot of promotion and generate a lot of sales, are the natural contenders for the award of Game of the Year and the process, no matter who gives out the prizes, tends to ignore smaller games that may be doing something more important in the long run.

The gaming industry is too fragmented at the moment, with gaming spawning the space from PC to gaming consoles to Facebook to handhelds and to mobiles, to be easy to condense the entire medium in a few award ceremonies.

It makes more sense to drop the idea that one outlet can accurately determine who has the best game or the best graphics or the best strategy mechanics and accept subjectivity as the main way to determine what was good and bad for the year that soon comes to an end.

We will still be publishing a series of Game of the Year articles over the coming days, until the end of the year, here at Softpedia, but be warned these are not determined by cold calculation of logic, but by searching our gaming history for 2010 and pointing out which games moved us and why.