This month marks the start of the 13th Vidya Gaem Awards (/v/GAs), with lucky number ‘13’ portending the long, rugged journey behind us and what’s ahead. Serving as both an omen for the superstitious and an affront to mainstream orthodoxy, 13 couldn’t have arrived at a better time.
The /v/GAs have grown modestly and steadily over the years, resisting efforts to commodify in favor of its intrinsic value. Indeed — it’s a unique undertaking. The awards aren’t held in a physical space, we don’t boast official status, and we aren’t funded by ads, fees, or donations. All people working on the project are volunteers and our voting jury is 4chan’s /v/.
In an environment where ‘prestigious’ is pretentious, the awards are adorned with categories that honor and satirize, such as the GOTY-like “Least Worst” and “Biggest Technical Blunder”, the /v/GAs stand as an antithesis to the deluge of mainstream award shows.
This approach is more careful and calculated than just a gamer’s spin on the Razzies. What brings it together is a deep-seated love for video games and a desire to hold the industry to a higher standard.
It faithfully puts voting into the hands of the very same website whose community made its head admin top the Time 100, sent Pitbull to Alaska, and asked Taylor Swift to perform at a school for deaf people.
It does so, in earnest, to make a project that enriches the lives of our staff, our viewers, and the game developers and studios featured each year. Even though it’s super niche, tiny in viewership, and fairly “autistic”, people appreciate our efforts all the same.
That’s because the show has given a place for countless volunteers, voters, and audience members to celebrate gaming /v/’s way. It’s a means for people to improve their writing, try out new games, hone their video talents, music abilities, and more. Local developers from AGDG promote their games on our show for free, and 29 have done so since we launched /v/GA Premiere in 2017.
We’ve also tried our hand at non-award show things occasionally. Our staff have covered conventions like Anime Expo and PAX West (interviewing PLAYISM), they teach Japanese every Friday night, and hosted an E3 co-stream for 2018 and 2019. The show has also leaned into the more traditional functions of an awards presentation, such as sending physical trophies to the winners and attending other award ceremonies, such as The Game Awards and the New York Game Awards.
Even though what we do is a hobby at the end of the day, working on the project gave me valuable lessons in leadership, collaboration, engaging our community, and fostering a creative environment with the same level of rigor as the real thing. It has provided many others the same opportunity without needing money or an insider connection.
Managing expectations
When the first /v/GA went to air, the expectation that this project would be a gaming award show with blackjack and hookers hit the friction of reality.
In the aftermath, two poignant questions emerged: 1) what is the essence of a “4chan” video game award show, and 2) how does this presentation “speak” for /v/?
Regarding the first, consider the culture. Ascribed identity holds no value on 4chan. Events like ours act as a starting point for game recommendations and opportunities to talk about the nominees, and most times, the conversation doesn’t have to end with us.
Our first show, featuring the local personalities DukeLovesYou, Nyanners, and THE BEST GAMERS, challenged that notion. Each was popular and generally well-liked on /v/, but their star power also gave way to the “e-celeb criticism” of the first show. We widened our breadth in 2012 to roughly 25 voice actors before narrowing it again to a two-host format in 2013, then slowly increased that number over the years to include a wider ensemble of about 13 people.
Being a “community project” from 4chan uniquely qualifies the show to speak on and address industry taboos in ways traditional award shows cannot. For instance, the “Kamige Award” for best eroge, the “Hello, Fellow Posters” for most blatantly promoted video game product, as well as the satirical and engendered “best representation” of Women/Men awards.
To that end, the awards speak for /v/ in the same vein as events like /v/ — The Musical, the 4chan Cup, the /v/3 Gaming Expo, and the “King and Queen of /v/” threads. While some might not participate or even agree with the premise of these projects, their strength lies in the dedication: a collective, Sisyphean effort to create original content for the board’s enjoyment.
Choosing your battles
When I watched Spike’s VGAs, I remember just feeling terrible. It was a deep dark feeling of disappointment, perhaps. The reason for that feeling wasn’t the production values, or the guests, or the winners, or the awards themselves, none of that. The reason was that it was an exercise in everything that makes people look down on gaming, making them think it’s childish, and an inferior form of entertainment.
An opinion that is just wrong in every way.
The Vidya Gaem Awards was founded as a protest to Spike’s Video Game Awards. As years went on and Spike imploded onto itself, our project refocused on what it set out to be — a local, 4chan community project that wants to do an award show better, with categories, nominees, skits, and trailers submitted by its own users.
Now that Spike's gone, we have no explicit rivalry with any modern award show. Instead, we schedule our event toward the tail end of “awards season” to allow time for the games of 2023 and so that our community can suggest categories and nominees and vote on titles they think are appropriate.
Our debut show in 2011 provided our voters a forum to disagree with eminent industry practices. It lambasted EA and Activision for unbridled greed, BioWare for subpar storytelling and overemphasis on romance, and even Minecraft for “worst graphics”, despite Notch personally visiting /v/ to “viral” and elicit feedback during its testing stages.
These are examples of our negative categories, which are mostly unique to our show. The candidates that feature in our positive categories tend to differ also.
A moment for Mass Effect 3
One example of this is the 2012 game Mass Effect 3. The game won “Best RPG” at the 2012 Spike Video Game Awards and “RPG of the Year” at the D.I.C.E Awards. We gave it three negative ones: “Most Hated”, “Worst Writing”, and “Worst Character”.
Mass Effect 3’s rollout was highly contentious. From its inconsequential ending (that was later changed), to the discovery of “parts” of digital content sold separately preloaded on the disk, to the option of romancing an in-game journalist directly reporting on events the player is involved in.
Each of these things comprised the greater problem people had with Mass Effect 3, and that’s why our voters— the players — voted that way.
Colin Moriarty, who was then the editor for PlayStation Magazine, took a position that was contrary to them. In an opinion video for IGN, he downplayed the game's faults by attributing subverted expectations to gamer entitlement. We cited the phrase as “one of the most dangerous [concepts] introduced in 2012” in our award speech for “Most Hated”.
By the decade's end, Moriarty clarified these comments, and reversed his position. He also found his publication, Last Stand Media, “blacklisted” by several game publishers, including Sony and Ubisoft, for reasons unrelated.
Ultimately, the fight isn’t necessarily best fought against individuals with “hot takes” that run contrary to consumer preferences. It’s the AAA game companies that promulgate them. In a world where the gaming industry makes the customer a live experiment for its strategies, the player is the true power broker.
Adversity Quotient
In an earlier article, “Who Runs the Vidya Gaem Awards”, I write about the modern organizational structure of the project. These roles were not as clearly defined as they are now, and they particularly weren’t when I volunteered to lead the project ten years ago.
After 2011’s show, some on /v/ hated the project so much that they asked 4chan staff to ban it. The prominence of the first /v/GA resulted in an enduring interest in the second, so people wanted to stymie that interest before a second show got off the ground. Taking the arguments against the project cogently, much of it had to do with the presumption the project directs unwanted attention to the site, disrupts on-topic discussion of video games on /v/, and that the results are not representative of the board’s users.
Many of these transgressions are no different from the criticisms any other award show gets. Around this time of year, people routinely go to /v/ to complain about how shows like The Game Awards promote gaming to non-gamers, debate the relevance of the event, and arguing how the voting body isn’t really representative of the user base. It is not so different.
On the other hand, there were a handful of valid concerns raised, one of the most egregious being that the show is attention-seeking. Yes, an award show is all about attention, but the focus should be on awards, not the follower count. I think, over time, we have demonstrated this in our content: it focuses on what’s being said, rather than who’s saying it.
Another is the “off-site” argument, particularly as it pertained to the use of Steam Groups to organize (today, the /v/GAs use Discord). It’s a fair question, given that the voting code as implemented is not currently possible on 4chan. The reason why voting is off-site is because the project is unofficial. The reason why we don’t merely tally replies up in a thread is to allow at least some level of suspense for our voters.
Regarding the production itself, things like Steam Groups, Discord, calls on VOIP programs like Ventrilo, TeamSpeak, and Mumble, and bulk emails collectively provided a way for staff to discuss things like award speeches and submitted content without spoiling it ahead of time.
The third concern was regarding monetization. Being an unofficial community project of 4chan, everyone signed up to do the same thing, and they don’t expect to get paid. While some staff have spent money for server hosting costs, or to run paid ads on 4chan, nobody has made money: and nobody, frankly, wants to make money on this. It’s a surefire way to ruin.
The /v/GAs are no less a multi-stage, indelibly intricate video game award show that rely on dozens of volunteers and thousands of nominations and votes. Navigating the production’s creative process is no small task, especially when its success hinges on its volunteer staff.
I started working on the /v/GAs at 16 years old, and with others, led the project through some of its most difficult and uncertain moments. The article will delve into three particular years of my tenure as a showrunner for the Vidya Gaem Awards, and I hope you find value in the insight.
2013 — Fires on a Sinking Ship
On the edge of 17 and still in high school, a fan of the /v/GAs named F4cemeltor asked me and other /v/GA staff if there was going to be another 2013. I said yes, and the organization slowly rebuilt a team from the remnants of yesteryear. There were some new hires as well, particularly in writing and VA.
Taking charge, I was eager to implement the feedback we had gotten from the board. However, we started in December, probably at around the same time as Spike’s VGX. Some wanted us back, but just as many didn’t.
Without a cohesive vision, our team experimented with concepts that wildly differed: from a “1950s style” website to a “machismo” skit, even a Waifu sim award. Because of having less of everything this time, we settled on the “theme” of minimalism two weeks out from the stream date. 2013 was less about scale and more about the project’s feasibility. With two mixed shows behind us, the third was either going to sink or swim.
In the last few weeks of the project, the show was fast sinking. It was February 2014, and we still had no release date for the 2013 show. In its place, we had several fires comprising one giant shitty set of circumstances. And these were fires I was responsible for putting out as the project lead.
Scandal after scandal struck the project. Voting results were public during voting. A last-minute speech rewrite dramatically improved the quality of several speeches, but infuriated the head writer who demanded no further revisions. With the head writer quitting, the rewriter of the speeches also stepped away from the project. That just so happened to be the one of the hosts, whose motivation to contribute collapsed after directing his energy into doing that instead of merely voicing the awards as written.
And that’s not all — where was our preshow? Where was our award template? Who was going to render the project? Who was going to stream the awards? Where, when, how? I instructed our web developer to put a failsafe which made the voting results public if in a week’s time if we didn’t have a director. Things were already screwed up six ways from Sunday.
I was in over my head, and I needed someone to take over directing the project. The call was answered by two people. The first was PhoneEatingBear (nicknamed “Peb”), an editor on the 2012 Vidya Gaem Awards, who took on the role of director. The second person was Segab, who made the “Actually Kind of Fun Award” that year and gave us the project files from it to use as that year’s award template.
With someone more competent at the helm, and the help of Segab, our team unfurled these crises one by one and completed the project. We secured the results webpage. We used a mix of the original speeches and rewrites. DukeVocals, a voice actor from the 2012 /v/GAs initially passed up to host, agreed to return.
The preshow was assembled from various skit submissions, and we even found someone to stream it — in VLC, while we were rendering Part 2 of the award ceremony.
As the show aired, several people in the stream thread posted screenshots of the leaked results page to try to spoil the show as it was airing. Naturally, given that the results were only public halfway through voting, there was still some surprise. Some of the winners were accurate, and some were not.
But doubters be damned, the 2013 Vidya Gaem Awards were complete— third time lucky.
2015 — 15 hours
Two years later, with the 2015 Vidya Gaem Awards, we sought to increase the breadth and scope of the awards, improve communications between departments, and reduce burnout. Peb and I had hired the person who streamed our 2013 and 2014 show as an executive producer, and he procured a TeamSpeak server and FTP to make transferring files easier than with SugarSync or Google Drive.
Together, we got a lot done. The 1990s theme emanated influences from the Goosebumps and Nickelodeon GAS era of television. We sent out nomination letters to nineteen studios— 3 of which responded to us. We listed the three (Atlus USA, Destructive Creations, and Toby Fox) in the Special Thanks credits section.
However, in the days leading up to the stream, we disagreed over two key inclusions. One was the Undertale/Death Grips mashup being slated as the final skit for the preshow, and the second was the “VHS”-effect scratches in the year’s template. We couldn't accommodate either request because of time, with the mashup taking a few days to make, and the award videos taking 3 hours to render due to ray-traced titles and uncompressed image sequences.
It might seem asinine from a practical perspective, but for someone who invested much time in the project, the veto must have felt like a slap in the face of someone whose title was the same as mine. Unable to acquiesce, he told me “You have 15 hours to find a new streamer”, and left the Steam Group.
I got out of my chair, ran to the bathroom, and vomited into the toilet.
This was another person that left our project in less than cordial circumstances, and it’s a shame they had to leave over it.
He wasn’t kidding about the time thing. There were only “15 hours” left until the stream. In that time, I barely slept, changed a lot of passwords, learned how to stream on OBS, and eagerly awaited for Peb to send the assembled awards. Sure enough, Peb did a few hours before the show, and we once again ended the year on a finished project.
Just like 2013, we got the show done, but at what cost to our morale?
Two months post-mortem, I uploaded an alternate version of the 2015 Vidya Gaem Awards, which removed the VHS effects from most awards, and added award segments for awards we couldn’t finish in time for the stream.
Untethered by the constraints of time, I wanted to make it right, but I couldn’t reverse the trauma.
The project needed to grow up, figure out what the problem was, and stop running into tragedy. We could succeed if we could do that, but I needed to decompress. To ensure 2016 could go on without me, I promoted someone who did uncredited producer work on the 2014 Vidya Gaem Awards to executive producer, I took a one-year sabbatical, and the show continued.
2017 — paid up, sold out
The person who succeeded me as showrunner wasn’t well received. Many on the team told me he asked them to run threads during the holiday season, and when it was time to make the award videos, he disappeared into the ether. After the show, he returned, only to erase most of the 2016 production channels.
In a volunteer project like ours, staff are our greatest asset. And when staff are stretched thin, wronged, or not given a second chance, the quality of the project can suffer significantly. Doing wrong by people, unintentionally or not, was getting to be a tiresome MO.
I returned to produce the 2017 Vidya Gaem Awards, a bit older, and a bit hardened from the first few times, to try to get it right.
My return was not as welcomed as I thought it was. I was a piece of shit for “retiring” after 2015’s show was over, and a bigger piece of shit for handing the keys over to a person that, frankly, threw the team under the bus.
Unlike me, Peb, the Director of the past four /v/GAs, never took a year off. He was tired of working for the same unhappy ending: a last-minute argument, an angry volunteer leaving the project in a huff, and a bitter chug to the finish line. Out of college and working gigs across the Eastern Seaboard, this wasn’t a project thrown together in the GWU media lab anymore. This would be our final year running the project, and we wanted the production to go through smoothly, without petty infighting or anyone’s time wasted.
Regrettably, we undercut this notion at every stage of the production process by engaging in a constant battle of wits. We would join in voice calls, only to spar and say we’re muting each other. Each successive meeting grew less learned and more bitter. We truly became the “old married couple”, and each showcase of invective ate at our enthusiasm. While we both wanted the project to outlast us, we did not model the right behavior to make a compelling argument.
It took two to tango, but I wasn’t without my own set of missteps. In asserting my role as the executive producer of the project, I was micromanaging the head writer and our assistant producer. The head writer wasn’t given the necessary latitude to provide depth and context to the writing speeches. Even minor grammatical corrections became a point of contention. For the assistant producer, we bumped heads on trivial things like watermarks in the award footage, and I was initially against one of his proposals that has since become a mainstay: the /v/GA Premiere.
I’m certain all four of us threatened to walk from the project at some point that year, but that wouldn’t have stopped the cycle of viciousness and drama. I needed to lower the temperature by taking a step back myself, trusting our team, and letting it shine.
With all my award videos complete and the 2017 preshow all but finalized, I was ready to embark on a last-minute trip: New York.
My younger brother, who was in recovery and had just completed a year’s probation, could now travel out of state. I asked him if he wanted to go to New York, and he said yes. I booked the ticket roughly one week out.
New York also had Peb, and I advised him of the possibility that my trip could co-align with streaming the show and a potential meetup. He seemed amicable to the idea, but we still had a show to make.
It was Feburary 14, 2018. It was both Valentine’s Day and Ash Wednesday: the start of Lent. That meant that many in Manhattan, particularly in Wall Street, were adorning black ash crosses on their foreheads. I was no Catholic, but I was vaguely familiar with the concept: a commitment to humility and giving up something you liked doing.
I enjoyed running the project, but the countervailing reality was that it was time to quit. Producing the show for five non-consecutive years was enough. While in New York, I hoped to accomplish three objectives: stream the show, meet up with Peb, and show my brother a bigger and better world than he had seen stuck within Illinois.
We traveled around a bit, the best two young adults with little money could. We visited Times Square, Charging Bull, rode through the West Side, Chinatown and over the Williamsburg Bridge. Our Airbnb in Astoria served a quiet place to wrap up the day.
There was just one more problem…
No true scotsman
Ok, this one is stupid, but I’m putting it in here because it’s something worth laughing about in hindsight.
While I was asleep, the day before the 2017 stream, we had one last scandal: a “reddit removed” graphic inserted during a preshow skit. I asked the submitter of the skit to make it again without the Reddit screenshots. When they didn’t, I just “removed” the Reddit myself.
The context was simple — fuck Reddit. Our skit prize terms allowed modifications to the submitted skits, and apart from the thing that said “Reddit Removed”, it would have still passed for a Marvel vs. Capcom gripe video.
But no, the team was totally against me on this one. The assistant producer drafted an apology letter to the submitter, and it was going to be sent unless I agreed to change it back. I resisted a little, but acquiesced once I realized the enjoyment of the project shouldn’t suffer simply because I had my nuts in a bunch.
So, from my laptop in the Airbnb, I remotely connected to my desktop via TeamViewer, haggardly deleted the “Reddit removed” images from Sony Vegas, re-rendered the preshow, and uploaded the final version to Google Drive. It sucks, but you can’t win them all.
Look, it was a stupid thing to care about, given how casually /v/ ignores that shit nowadays, symbolically it served as the culmination of a year’s worth of dueling perspectives, approaches, and our frame-of-reference.
That said, it was the last obstacle to 2017’s stream day, and we could now focus on getting our project streamed. Like Bennett Foddy, we had just gotten over it. And best of all, nobody left this time.
The Big Day
I began the morning feeling good, taking my brother to our fourth borough together: Staten Island. We walked around a bit and ended up getting some food at M&K Spanish Restaurant by the Ferry Terminal before heading back. On the ferry, I pulled out my laptop, connected to the WiFi, and the nerves began rushing back.
I asked a question out in the open that rocked of teenage angst, and was sent without any intentions of harm. It had more so to do of the nervousness every award showrunner gets the day of their event, a time so palpable you feel your heart beating out of your chest.
beatstar: am I going to die
Clam, the most senior of anyone in the project, had a measured response.
Clamburger: we’re all going to die beat
I took a step outside the cabin. The cold air pierced my face as I took a quick shot of Lower Manhattan. I invited my brother to join me, appreciating a visage that, to me, was always going to be novel.
“Hell no,” he said, “I can see just fine.”
Nothing lasts forever, and time was wearing thin, but at least our humble little project wasn’t going to perish today. Peb finished the final render of the show at 12:44pm, saving us from a repeat of us rendering the “second half” of the show as the first part was ongoing.
Because he was uploading from his cable connection, it was still going to be a close call, but we were at least equipped with a hour and 19 minute preshow to buy us time. My brother and I walked out of the Ferry Terminal and right into the subway entrance. Our “go-to” place to hole up for the evening and stream the 2017 /v/GAs was gonna be the Starbucks off of Broadway and Madison Square Park.
At around 2:30pm, as promised, I set up shop at the Starbucks to stream the Vidya Gaem Awards. I found myself a spot in a nestled corner of the two-floor Starbucks, I had established a connection to my remote VPS and we were in for the night. New York, and much of the mid-Atlantic, was due for a Winter Storm.
I am ever grateful that my brother put up with me staying inside, on our last day in New York, so that I could stream an internet award show.
With everything set up and my initial drink purchased, I had an endless supply of refills and a variety of sandwiches at the ready. My brother decided to step out to get something from the 7-Eleven nearby, and we traded headphones every half hour since we only had a single pair between us. We were off and ready to go. It was all a matter of letting the stream run its course.
All in all, everything went better than expected. While the show required someone to manage the rerun, I had given the VPS credentials to the assistant director so that he was ready to change the scene in OBS when the time was right.
Just as the 2017 Vidya Gaem Awards came to a conclusion, it parted with a solemn message from the Director, thinly borrowing from “Weight of the World” from Nier: Automata, which won our top prize. Around that time, one of the Starbucks staff came around to let me know it was getting to be closing time, with around 30 minutes left.
I contacted PhoneEatingBear, whose profile picture was that of a glowing pizza. It was time to meet, and also time to eat. As it would turn out, I only ended up refilling with a hot coffee and buying a bagel with some butter. I suggested to Peb we could meet at Famous Pizza on 28th Street. I let my brother know, and we packed up and headed out.
We braved a flurry and trekked two blocks eastward to Famous Pizza. Once we were inside, we awkwardly stood alone for about 15 minutes, the warmth of the ovens barely heating us back to life. Eventually, a gaunt, tall figure wearing a silver hoodie wandered into the shop, his heavily bearded face hooking at the seams to turn a grin. He looked in my direction and said, in deadpan:
“Oh, the famous Beatstar.”
He recognized me immediately and gave me a hug, but he was clearly out of his element. In the past 48 hours, he had only slept for four of them. Metaphorically speaking, it was as if we were at the end of our own Michael Jordan Flu Game. My brother in arms and in running the Vidya Gaem Awards on-and-off, Peb also got a chance to meet my real brother, Kyle.
The short talk we had belied the journey we had together as two young adults who wanted a better award show than what was on TV at the time. Who would of thought we could do it for this long, and still remain friends?
We picked out some slices and sat on the stools. Halfway through the meal, Peb looked at his phone and confirmed that the assistant director switched over the scene so that the rerun would be seemless. All was said and done.
Afterwards, the three of us walked through the slush astride Madison Square Park, and down to 23rd Street Station. I took a picture with Peb, hugged him once more, and we said our goodbyes.
A new direction
It wouldn’t be long before I would see Peb again. No longer burdened with the weight of running the project, we met up at MAGFest the following year. Each of us chose a respective successor to produce and direct, and both could take charge in bringing the awards to the next level.
I didn’t actively participate in the 2018 Vidya Gaem Awards, but I was able to see the production progress. Our senior staff succeeded us and handled the show with grace. They made the 2018 Vidya Gaem Awards set new heights and implemented some cool concepts, such as /v/3 (a crowdsourced stream reaction to the E3 conferences) and the prediction boards (warning: NSFW user content).
The 2018 Vidya Gaem Awards, which streamed in Feburary 2019, got its first sticky on /v/ since its inception in 2011, it was the longest /v/GA in terms of runtime, and it also got banned on Twitch for a TOS violation. I thought it had to do with the fact it lampooned Tencent and the Chinese Communist Party, but an internal Twitch document suggests we were too loose with moderation and not banning people fast enough.
Notwithstanding, the 2018 show found a receptive audience on Chinese user-generated sites like Bilibili and the South Korean message board DCinside.
The half-eSports/half-China theme proved to be quite timely, as protests in Hong Kong over an extradition bill took place the following month. How it pertained to gaming and the /v/GAs in particular was through the Blitzchung incident. Blizzard Entertainment, an American video game developer based in California, penalized a Hong Kong-based competitive esports player for voicing political support for the protests. The penalty, later partially reversed, included forfeiture of pay and a ban of the player and the media personnel interviewing him.
These things, and much more, would be covered in the 2019 Vidya Gaem Awards. I had returned from retirement and got to work in my new role as Head of Outreach.
Blackjack and Hookers II, which covers the history of the Vidya Gaem Awards through the lens of its onetime rival, continues here.
