Press X To Win The Award! 🎮
Alright, here’s your trophy, now read on or get the heck outta here.🏆
Some interesting things about this award: X is a universal button on most game consoles (not to mention, the PC also). It exists not only on the Nintendo Switch, Microsoft’s Xbox Series X/S, Sony’s PS5, but the consoles that came before them.
Indeed, the winners of Worst Gameplay represent a good blend of multiplatform and console-exclusive games. Bad gameplay can happen on any platform, and this category seeks to chronicle the worst player gameplay experiences of the year.
Worst Gameplay is a legacy award category, which means it has appeared in the Vidya Gaem Awards for at least ten years, either on screen or site-only.
Winners of the Vidya Gaem Awards’ Worst Gameplay award, by year:
- 2011: Dragon Age II (video) (results)
- 2012: Katawa Shoujo (video) (results)
- 2013: Gone Home (video) (results)
- 2014: Sonic Boom: Rise of Lyric (video) (results)
- 2015: Her Story (video) (results)
- 2017: Mass Effect: Andromeda (video) (results)
- 2018: Fallout 76 (video) (results)
- 2019: YIIK: A Postmodern RPG (results)
- 2020: The Last of Us Part II (results)
- 2021: Balan Wonderworld (video) (results)
- 2022: Diablo Immortal (video) (results)
- 2023: Starfield (video) (results)
Analysis: The winners of the “Press X To Win The Award” category indeed represent a wide variety of game genres, showing that issues with gameplay are not limited to a single type of game. While it may be true that walking simulators and movie games like Gone Home and Her Story have a higher likelihood of winning Worst Gameplay due to their passive and story-driven nature, they do not always win.
It is important to note that the Vidya Gaem Awards, like any other award show, are based on the opinions of our voters. As shown by the winners above, the winners of the “Press X To Win The Award” category span across various game genres, emphasizing that any game can suffer from poor gameplay mechanics, regardless of its genre.
Also, from 2011–2021, half of the winners of this award also won our top negative category, “Most Hated Award for Most Hated Game of the Year”. The speech in the “Most Hated Game of the Year” category typically implicates the gameplay experience of the winner as part of its outline.
Here’s an excerpt from 2018’s Worst Gameplay Award speech:
[…] Fallout’s always been more entertaining to watch break, than it has been to play. But without the story and roleplaying to actually keep the game afloat, what little enjoyment can be gained from walking around and looking for pieces of trash from trash cans is lost. Not for any particular cause, it’s just how the game is designed.
People who liked crafting survival games already had RUST; people who liked loot skinner boxes already had Diablo. Fallout 76 brings nothing new to the table, and doesn’t even try to expand upon the already-existing ideas.
The Vidya Gaem Awards are an award show for video games originating from 4chan’s “/v/ — Video Games” board. It is an award show that features both positive and negative award categories, has been held each year online since 2011, and made possible by a group of volunteers who work on the project for free. Learn more about “What are the Vidya Gaem Awards?” here.
Disclosure: I am the current Head of Outreach and the former Executive Producer of the Vidya Gaem Awards (2013–2015, 2017).
