Actually, no you are wrong.  There are less than 6000 people eligible to vote for the Oscars, and the majority of the voters are actors.  Therefore, politics go into voting quite often.

Don't get me started on past Oscar winners.  Hollywood actors often have an agenda when they vote for a movie... even if that movie tanks in the theatre, they still often give a movie an award or nomination because IT'S A MOVIE THEY LIKE.

We the people's opinions on a movie mean jack to Hollywood such as is revealed often in the Academy Awards.

yeah, that's my point. We the people's opinion don't mean jack in critical awards, and that's what these are. They aren't there to get a pulse of what's being said on various message boards and then mirror that. They are there to be critics, and give the awards based on what they think as critics.

And then they have one where anybody can vote, the people's choice awards. But you seem to suggest their awards should be "whatever the people thing". Why would they have the same think twice?

Oh I gotcha, sorry, just misread it...

Yeah, we agree... I just think that people read too much into their opinions. They are BS opinions, but they don't mean anything.

Hypothetically, we can all agree 100% that MarioKart Wii is the greatest game on the Wii, and if one guy who writes an award article that says it's the worst game of the year, then according to the gaming media, it's now become fact.

It's all a farce really...

Well of course any award is a farce. It's just somebody who has managed to land in a job that arbitrarily bestows upon them some form of visage of authority that decides he likes one over the other. Any award over subjective material is going to have that element of silliness to it.

Which is why I don't get why people are so bent out of shape. If someone likes brawl better, fine, this doesn't change how much you enjoy brawl, sorry if some guy on the interwebz isn't pandering to your taste. And I really doubt the Nintendo team was in a smoke filled back room talking about how much they hate the wii, and Nintendo especially for making the wii and that they will wage guerrilla nerd combat by giving the award to a different ingenious artistically brilliant game with a fantastic sountrack and inventive gameplay just to shove it up Nintendo's ass that it's strategy of producing easily accessible cheap games made by smaller independant studios is producing quality entertainment.....wait what? Yeah, take that Nintendo, take it all bitch.

You know, I don't necessarily agree with IGNs decision, but I like Wii's winner a lot more than the ones on 360 and PS3.

First off, World of Goo is a new IP and console-exclusive, while 360 and PS3 are dominated by blockbuster sequels and multiplats - some might even call them high budget games from the nineties. Wii's winner is actually a fresh game, and shows that even the little guy can compete equally with the big gaming titans and win, even though the victory is quite minor in this case.

That being said: Good games will remain good, regardless of the prizes they may or may not win.

You're talking about a different type of popularity.

Played time isn't about sales, and it's not about the amount of people who have heard of a game.  It's about how often the game's owners play it, and for how long.

Carnival Games is a good example, it's wildly popular and has sold millions, but nobody plays it.  One statistic common among good games is that people play them.

Owners of this year's GoTY have only played it for 7 hours.  Are those the greatest 7 hours of gaming they've had in 2008?  Yes, according to IGN.

Way back on the 3rd page of this thread, frybread said "It's not the job of game reviewers to shape and mold the game industry."

On the contraty, it absolutely is the role of game critics to shape and mold the game industry; in fact, that's why they exist.  That's why critics exist in any medium, whether it's film, music, art, or food.  Brad Bird's soliloquy for Anton Ego at the end of Ratatouille defines the role of the critic thusly:

"In many ways, the work of a critic is easy. We risk very little yet enjoy a position over those who offer up their work and their selves to our judgment. We thrive on negative criticism, which is fun to write and to read. But the bitter truth we critics must face, is that in the grand scheme of things, the average piece of junk is more meaningful than our criticism designating it so. But there are times when a critic truly risks something, and that is in the discovery and defense of the new. The world is often unkind to new talent, new creations, the new needs friends... Not everyone can become a great artist, but a great artist can come from anywhere."


I'm not going to take sides on whether SMBB or WoG is a better game, but what is clear is that Brawl, for all of its wonderful goodness, is not new.  It's not going to push the medium of video games forward.

IGN has a vision for what the Wii can be as a platform; it coincides with Iwata's creed (which IGN quoted in giving WoG its award for most innovative design) that it is not the big budget, but the big idea that will make the Wii flourish.  IGN sees the Wii as a unique platform that, moreso than PS3, 360, or PC, encourages looking at games as a new means of expression, allowing developers to create new experiences for players, to generate new feelings.  For IGN to push that vision onto the industry and to reward those developers that they think can make it happen is not "passive-aggressive"; it is, in fact, the most meaningful thing that any critic can ever do.

For more thoughts, I highly recommend Chuck Klosterman's column in Esquire about the state of video game criticism (http://www.esquire.com/features/ESQ0706KLOSTER_66).  Money quote:

"And that, ultimately, is why the absence of video-game criticism is a problem. If nobody ever thinks about these games in a manner that's human and metaphorical and contextual, they'll all become strictly commodities, and then they'll all become boring. They'll only be games. And since we've already agreed that video games are the new rock music, we'd be facing a rather depressing scenario: This generation's single most meaningful artistic idiom will be--ultimately--meaningless."

that also means playing by yourself is no fun still :(