Established in 2011 on 4chan’s Video Games board, /v/, the Vidya Gaem Awards broke ground and became the community’s take on video game award shows. The show sought to recognize both the good and bad in the gaming industry by focusing on the games. It included community skits, featured local figures from the board, and provided explanations to why their games won.
Twelve years on, thousands of people nominate and vote on the awards, a few dozen developers acknowledge or respond to their invitations, and 20–40 volunteers work on the /v/GAs: one of the largest and longest-running community award shows on the net.
Though I’ve loved working on this project for over ten years, I didn’t have a role in the first show. Nevertheless, piquant memories and firsthand accounts of the 2011 Vidya Gaem Awards are abound. From longtime watchers to some of the award winners, our first presentation definitely took a foothold in the hearts of many.
Due to 4chan’s ephemeral nature, most threads on the site are deleted after a limited amount of time and posts, but thanks to Jkid of the Yotsuba Society and the Digital Repository at Stanford University, the thread covering the 2011 Vidya Gaem Awards stream (and many others from 2007–2013) were saved and preserved. A special thanks to both of them, this was a real treat to find.
So, let’s take a look at what /v/ had to think about the 2011 Vidya Gaem Awards (>>129100249).
Note: this article contains several hundred images, be warned, some may not load in a timely fashion.
Before the Storm
The First Reply
The Second Reply
The First Constructive Criticism
If we’re dishing out criticism in our awards, we better be ready to take it in as well.
About an hour before going live, anticipation for the stream, guesses, and nay-saying were here for the ride.
As it drew closer to stream time (18:00), people were really getting excited and the chat was blowing up. Let’s get into it.
2011 Vidya Gaem Awards intro
Miles “Tails” Prowler opens with a rendition of the United States national anthem, and like any good coin flip, it was a really bad toss.
Then, DukeLovesYou came in.
Then came Nyanners’ moment to introduce herself. For those who aren’t aware, before VTuber stardom, Nyanners was a well-known figure on /a/ and /v/ boards of 4chan. She frequently participated in Vocaroo threads —where audio messages could be requested, made, and shared.
It’s important to be fair to history, so I included a sampling of the good and the bad responses to Nyanners’ inclusion, and this is just a small portion. It’s also important to challenge the narrative that she attached to the project to somehow elevate her profile — she was invited by the 2011 producer as a “secret surprise”.
While the “e-celeb” stigma is something we’ve come a long way from, DukeLovesYou and Nyanners were a solid team. Duke read most of the speeches, and Nyanners presented the category awards, explained the voting process in the intro, and even read out the VY Canis Majoris Award at the end.
The First Category— Hyperbole Award for Best Trailer
Dead Island won.
And the frustration over what wins mirrors that of other award shows: the art of getting “robbed.”
The Second Category — Sort of OK Dev for developer of the year
And, Valve won.
You wouldn’t be too far off if you thought this positive award is the reason why people thought the first /v/GAs were too favorable to Valve Software. The first show required voters to log into Steam to cast their votes. It was later categories (in which Valve itself, Portal 2, and Gabe Newell were featured) that cemented the perception.
The Third Category (and our first negative one) — Karl Marx Award for most capitalistic publisher
Long before ZA/UM were shouting out Karl Marx, the Vidya Gaem Awards were mindful to give a shoutout to “some of the great people that came before us.” This transpired in our first negative award we ever presented: the Karl Marx Award for most capitalistic publisher.
A lot of people were disappointed to see Activision win over EA, but what was said in the nominee footage and award speech, such as Bobby Kotick noting that “forever” franchises like Madden will outlast their creators was a prescient warning of games of today.
Anyway, you might be seeing a pattern in how some of these categories are live-reacted, so order to keep this article to a reasonable length, I won’t go over every category and every repeat winner. Instead, I’ll showcase some highlights and /v/’s reaction to them.
After Valve won their third award (Planescape Award for best writing)
After Valve Corporation took home its third award in under 30 minutes /v/ wasn’t having it.
It’s important to point out that this was actually Portal 2’s first award, but Valve won two previous awards (Sort of OK Dev and Alright Publisher Award). Of course, 3’s still too many, as Gabe Newell and the Half-Life development team can attest.
This gag that “Portal 2 and Bastion sweeping the awards” (despite the sweeps being fairly minor) is a good time to share that, in hindsight, where these awards were placed in the show is important. It’s also important to note that as an award show organizer, jury bias and platform biases exist also. Although the Steam requirement was an ostentatious way to reduce duplicate voting, requiring people to sign into Steam inherently gave PC owners and Valve fans an unfair advantage.
Beginning with the next show in 2012, the Vidya Gaem Awards no longer required Steam to vote.
Actually Kind of Fun Award
FromSoftware’s Dark Souls scored the first positive award for an already-released game not made by Valve.
The win provided much-needed relief from Portal 2 sweeping positive awards, and Dragon Age II sweeping negative awards.
The Best Gamers Segment
The Best Gamers were invited by the organizers of the 2011 Vidya Gaem Awards to make the presentation. They presented the “Scrub of the Year” Award for dirtiest little scrublet. Although voters technically selected iJustine as the winner, the guests decided to bestow the award to the creator of the /v/GAs, Nighthood. Nighthood said a few words that seemed combative, and The Best Gamers shot back with words of their own.
The segment was a wash. I remember distinctly running threads in 2012 and 2013 where people were telling us “the only good part was The Best Gamers”, though I hadn’t known at the time the segment was, in fact, quite polarizing.
The award wasn’t exactly peak video gaming content, so let’s call it a draw.
Two Sound Awards
The Audiophile Award (for best technical sound) and Eargasm Award (for best soundtrack) were two back-to-back awards that, while confusing the audience over which was which, seemed to bring discussion back to the awards and what won. The reception was generally okay — the Eargasm Award was Bastion’s first win of the night.
“The Worst Video Game Related Event”
The Teabagging Award was an award for the worst video game related event. The Vidya Gaem Awards were not exempt as a nominee (we ranked 4th place). In the running also were Minecon (the launch event for Minecraft), the Reddit Gaming Awards (which never released), and E3, an annual showcase of upcoming games in the industry.
ThePuppetPlayer presented this award, and gave his thoughts on the winner: the Spike VGAs. He explains that mainstream award shows like Spike’s serve to advertise and sell product.
ThePuppetPlayer’s message was to be patient, not angry at Spike. While the Spike VGAs represent “mainstream” tastes (on account of their generalist, pop-culture nature), they still are an event that seeks to celebrate gaming to at a mass scale, elevating mainstream games because they are also the best-selling and the most well-known. At the end of the day, folks always have the option to explore beyond what’s being celebrated in the mainstream.
Of course, most people rejected his message. They hated ThePuppetPlayer because he told them the truth. (Gal 4:16)
But not everybody disliked the segment — some appreciated the Katawa Shoujo music in the background, as well as the conciliatory tone of the speech.
Geoff Keighley, the producer of the Spike Video Game Awards, even gave the board a shout out after winning.
Keighley would later part ways with Spike and create his own award show, The Game Awards. In my opinion, it’s come a long way from the Spike years.
But even with the big man watching, there was something the /v/GAs team still had to do, and that was “HOW 2 DRAW DRAGEN KING”
HOW 2 DRAW DRAGEN KING
Then, as if to remind people what they were watching, now was the time to pull an ear rape. SANIC as a meme was just coming into the forefront, so the video was quite timely.
Graphic Awards —mediocre turnout
Surrounding that aural assault, three visual awards doted the /v/GAs. The “My Eyes Are Bleeding Award” for worst graphics (airing before the Dragen King Skit), the “Grafics Cat Award” for best graphics, and “Stylish Aesthetics Award” for best visual aesthetics — which aired after — were back-to-back.
Minecraft, a game originally made in Java, won the award for worst graphics. Battlefield 3 won the Best Technical Graphics award. And Bastion won the Stylish Aesthetics award.
By and large, people on /v/ disagreed with the best visual/stylistic graphics category winners. The lack of an intermission— at 1 hour and 8 minutes in — also probably fatigued the audience.
Fortunately, there was something that could bring the crowd back: the category for “Crimes Against Gaming”.
Crimes Against Gaming — something everyone could get behind
2011 was a year of movement, and a year of controversy. There was stiff competition in the “Crimes Against Gaming” award.
- Capcom faced heat for cancelling Mega Man Legends 3
- EA Games’ Origin service launched on PC and the company leveraged the platform to keep their games off Steam
- Microsoft’s E3 conference focused little on games
- Sony’s hacking scandal resulted in the temporary shutdown of PSN for weeks and 77 million users’ information being exposed
- Ubisoft’s DRM required an always-online internet connection, and would quit your game if this connection was severed.
In the end, EA’s Origin service won this award. And as some anons point out, it’s not that surprising either. Voters needed a Steam account to vote in the 2011 award show.
EA would maintain this business strategy all the way until 2019, when many (but not all) of their titles came back to Steam.
Just before that though, Epic Games would copy EA’s playbook and incentivize third-party developers to sell exclusively on their platform instead, by offering guaranteed payouts.
S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Award for least convincing voice acting
Star Wars: The Old Republic won.
The Portal 2 and Bastion super-show
After awarding the game with the least convincing voice acting, it only seems logical to next, award the most convincing voice actor.
At this point, a lot of people were thinking Logan Cunningham, the narrator of Bastion would win… but what actually won the Golden Voice Award? Stephen Merchant, who voiced Wheatley in Portal 2.
Angry posts went off like fireworks in the thread.
But we weren’t done yet — there was still the “Best Voice Acting Award” for Best General Voice Acting in a Video Game to present.
We still weren’t done yet, we still had one more category to add to the Portal 2 / Bastion gambit: the category for Most Interesting New IP.
The Most Interesting New IP had a lot of cool new IPs (franchises), including Monster Girl Quest, Bastion, Magicka, Catherine, and Xenoblade Chronicles. Of those five, what do you think deserved to win?
And of course, the follow up question. Knowing what won previously, what do you will win? It was starting to get comical — or rage inducing — depending on how invested you were in the event.
If there was a moment in time in which the 2011 Vidya Gaem Awards lost its luster, the back-to-back wins of Portal 2 and Bastion this late in the award show were definitely it. How did people come to this conclusion?
Well, Portal 2 won three awards (two for itself, and one for Stephen Merchant voicing Wheatley), but it would be fair to add Valve’s win as “Alright Publisher” and “Sort of OK Dev” to the mix, because they also made Portal 2, and own Steam, the platform required to vote.
Bastion won three categories as well, but they were fairly big ones. It won Most Interesting New IP, Best Soundtrack, and Stylish Aesthetics. It won over more commercialized, better selling titles like Deus Ex: Human Revolution, Xenoblade Chronicles, and The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword. It also won against also-loved cult classics like Magicka, Monster Girl Quest, and American McGee’s Alice. Because there was no preferential voting back then, a lot of people would have preferred their choice win instead.
There’s a lot to glean over, but we still have the two more awards to cover, and that’s the “Most Hated”, and the “Least Hated” awards.
The Most Hated Game of the Year
The “Most Hated Game of The Year” Award is a hallmark category within the Vidya Gaem Awards’, and it is our most prominent award that is “negative”. The nominees aren’t necessarily the worst of the year (despite some occasional gaffes, like the URL, that label them as such), but the nominees each did something that contributed to negative discourse within the community. Since 2011, we present it as the penultimate award: with Least Worst being our final one.
Let’s see what /v/ thought about “Most Hated”.
The winner, Dragon Age II, was largely not talked about.
Even though BioWare had its titles take the majority of the negative categories, their wins were distantly spaced throughout the presentation.
Instead, people were still mad about Portal 2 and Bastion winning, as well as pointing out other games that weren’t nominated for the category.
As the Most Hated speech drew to a close, all that was left to award for gaming was the “Least Hated”.
Least Hated Award — the /v/GA GOTY
“Five nominees entered, but only one could win.”
After the nominees for Least Hated were presented, the founder of the Vidya Gaem Awards, Nighthood, addressed the audience.
Hello again, it’s been a while. 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.
So, we decided we could go it alone. I’ll admit, the beginning of it was a little anarchic. We didn’t really have that much of a plan so it took a little while for everything to get going. Part of the reason why it’s taken so long for it all to culminate, as it were.
2011 was an… interesting year for gaming. I wouldn’t necessarily say the best. The games industry has possibly hit a bit of a wall recently. We saw some very good games of 2011, don’t get me wrong. A lot of good indies, a couple of good AAAs as well. But most of those were just stars in a cloudy sky. We really need a renaissance in gaming.
I guess that’s all I have to say. I hope you’ve all enjoyed the show. I know I have, but maybe I’m a little bit biased. Nobody’s ever going to like everything we do, hate abounds in places like /v/. But hopefully we can come together and say that this was at least not as bad as it could have been.
And I suppose that’s something to celebrate.
Now, in the words of the great Gabe Newell, “Thanks, and Have Fun.”
🥹
Alas, this is a lot of posts about the person behind the awards, but not the award itself, so, let’s go to the winner…
The winner was Deus Ex: Human Revolution. Winner of no other awards in the /v/GAs, though nominated for quite a few (Best Voice Acting, Best Writing, Best Trailer, Best Voice Actor (Stephen Shellen), and Best Soundtrack). It was the redemption the show needed; one could say… the Deus Ex machina of the /v/GAs.
Deus Ex: Human Revolution won in a landslide, and though Monster Girl Quest was a close second, most Anons were fine with the win, except for a certain schizo-poster.
The closer
Well… That about wraps things up, folks. I think I’m gonna go take a very, very, long nap. Now, whether you thought this award show was a great success, or a horrible train wreck, I still really do thank you for the wonderful privilege of hosting. But now, it’s time to saddle up and ride into the sunset, and see where 2012 takes us. Stay classy, /v/. Stay classy forever.
Wait… we forgot one!
The VY Canis Majoris Award
The VY Canis Majoris Award is for “fattest developer”, and here were the category’s nominees, as voted. As you can see, it was only Gabe Newell. It was presented in a lovingly way though, with Nyanners explaining some of the accomplishments of Mr. Newell throughout 2011.
With a job well done, Nyanners signed off from the /v/GAs, and became a successful streamer with a massive internet following.
That means there was only one last thing to present…
The Neon Genesis Evangelion: NEXT TIME skit
General Feedback, post stream
Lessons learned
Let’s address Portal 2 and Bastion’s clean sweep. The Q&A below states that it was used as a means to prevent duplicate votes. However, because you needed a Steam account to vote, that inherently prioritized Steam users of 4chan over non-Steam users of 4chan, who either had to make an account, find an account, or not vote.
Still, the point that a Steam account shouldn’t be necessary to vote was well taken. Starting with the 2012 awards, a Steam account is no longer required to nominate or vote.
Diversifying our award categories, and defining them well enough to merit distinct nominees, is equally important. The 2011 Vidya Gaem Awards only had five nominees for most categories, of which only one could be voted for. Starting in our 2012 production, we increased the nominee count for all awards and implemented the Schulze method, so that users can select multiple winners in the order that they want games to win.
I’m pleasantly surprised to see the real-time reception of the 2011 show for myself, with posts being made as it was being broadcast live. When I was younger and first starting out on the /v/GAs, I always thought it had a harder reception than it did. While it’s clear some people didn’t like the premise, the people behind it, or how it was made, many more appreciated the tremendous effort it took to make.
Not everybody appreciated the special guests, even if they were invited by the organization. In 2012, the Vidya Gaem Awards enlisted 25 voice actors so that each could voice a given award. The variety resulted in a massive variance in quality, but also meant a lot of people got a chance to participate. Since 2013, anywhere from three to over a dozen people voice the awards each year, and it’s an opportunity to celebrate what is being said, as opposed to who is saying it.
How many people watched the 2011 Vidya Gaem Awards?
It seems to have started at about 500 people, and ballooned to around 6,000 when the stream started. At its peak, roughly 13,000 people viewed them.
Feedback Q&A
The producer of the 2011 /v/GAs wrote a feedback document regarding the event, as well as the aftermath. The Commenting feature is enabled for anyone, so it looks a little bit like the Wild West. Still, here are some highlights of the things they had to say.
- The first /v/GAs had a team of about 14 people, most of whom also made the skits. Our modern productions involve upwards of 35 volunteer staff members, as well as 20 or more skit, bumper, and AGDG trailer contributors.
- It looks like the first crew didn’t send out notifications to developers about their nominations. Since 2015, we send them as part of our voting process, and many developers to this day acknowledge their nominations — be them for good or bad categories.
- It appears that the 2011 crew was open to taking donations and “ironic sponsorships” from companies like Bad Dragon. The modern /v/GAs unequivocally do not take donations, sell anything, or receive any outside funding. People who work on the show pay for things like website and server fees, 4chan ad placement, and their own Hot Pockets. In other words, they do it for free.
- The 2011 team decided that they would not do a reaction or “preliminary video” to E3 2012. An E3 reaction stream was a concept we tried in 2018 and 2019, with /v/3. The idea was that the stream would take place and live reactions from our viewers could, as well as indicate whether a segment was based or cringe based on what was being said. It was a cool concept, but failed. Probably because the best discussion is on /v/, stream threads are banned on /v/, and generally not enough value in discussion was brought to the table. However, this project is not related to the /v/3 Expo, which is a separate project founded in 2020 that promotes indie games made by AGDG developers.
Thanks to the work of these 14 people, the 2011 Vidya Gaem Awards kick-started the community award show you see today. With over twelve years of awards, winners, skits and speeches, it’s been a great time. Hopefully, you’ve been able to live through the experience of the first show with this article, and see for yourself what fun stuff it led to.
