The Vidya Gaem Awards (/v/GAs) are an online video game award show originating from 4chan’s /v/ - Video Games board. It is an annual award show, with the nominations being held in the final months of the year, and the voting process and award ceremony being presented in the first few months of the following year (January-March). The Vidya Gaem Awards are unique in that they feature positive and negative categories, and the show is made possible by a group of volunteers who work on the project for free.
This article is intended to give you a not-so-quick rundown about the history of the Vidya Gaem Awards and how it’s managed to last so long over the years, despite not having an official budget or conventional structure.
Disclosure: I am the current Head of Outreach and the former Executive Producer of the Vidya Gaem Awards (2013–2015, 2017).
Origins of the /v/GAs
The concept of an award show made by /v/, for /v/, began in response to the 2011 Spike Video Game Awards (also known as the VGAs). The Spike VGAs, being broadcast on American television in 2011, was largely perceived as a self-congratulatory, stale, and commercialized relic of the gaming industry. As such, an internet user by the name of Nighthood founded the Vidya Gaem Awards on December 11, 2011, publishing a video on YouTube to make the announcement.
If you’re anything like me, you hated Spike’s VGAs. They were puerile, childish, and god-awful: a terrible display all around. So this year, we’re doing something slightly different. The first ever Vidya Gaems Awards [sic]. We’ve got no budget, we’ve got no celebrities, and we’ve definitely got no spaghetti. But we’re pushing on regardless for fun and very little profit! More news to follow, so stay tuned.
The following day, a video was released of “The Categories”. Since the Vidya Gaem Awards were created as an alternative to conventional award shows like the Spike VGAs, and were not meant to be regarded as the Razzies of the video gaming industry, positive and negative categories were listed. Several categories were mentioned that did not persist into the 2011 voting phase, such as “Hipster Award for developer we hate now” and “Most Disappointing Trailer”.
All work intended for the show was meant to be exclusively communicated on /v/ itself, but with no hierarchy or order, chaos ensued and logistics screeched to a halt. In its place, a Steam group and a Proboards-based forum located on the /v/GA website served as the basis for production.
Several members who joined the /v/GA crew during this time would go on to work in later iterations of the show, including Clamburger (the website’s administrator), Pu (the producer of the 2011 and 2012 /v/GAs), Ryan Dell (the editor and director of the 2011 /v/GAs), Segab, and Lord Mandalore.
The 2011 Vidya Gaem Awards debuted on February 11th, 2012, with voice actor DukeLovesYou voicing most awards alongside Nyanners. The Best Gamers and ThePuppetPlayer appear as special guests.
Response from the community, and 2012’s show
The reaction to the 2011 Vidya Gaem Awards was mixed on /v/, praising the visual effort by editors and delivery by the voice actors, but criticizing its first-past-the-post voting system, requiring a Steam account to log in, attempts by Reddit to influence the voting phase and frustration that “Deus Ex: Human Revolution” won over “Monster Girl Quest". The creators of the 2011 awards later published a Q&A document about the show; the archived version is listed here.
Despite the criticism of 2011’s presentation and the insistence by the community not to do another, the Vidya Gaem Awards pushed forward regardless.
In 2012, the /v/GAs eliminated the first-past-the-post voting system and implemented a preferential voting system in its place. It also did away with the requirement to use a Steam account to nominate or vote and introduced time-sensitive voting codes that are issued at the start of every hour to discourage Redditors and sites outside of 4chan from voting.
The 2012 Vidya Gaem Awards cast and crew was also larger, resulting in a variety of new introductions to the ceremony. Namely, a plethora of skits and gameplay segments, the introduction of “custom awards” (awards that didn’t follow the show’s design template for the year), show eyecatches/bumpers, a preshow, and a unique voice actor for every award presented. The show gained a new director (Stuff3), and several new writers signed on board as well.
Coordination of the 2012 show was handled on Steam this time around, using a program that pre-dated Google Drive called SugarSync. It allowed for files to be synchronized between members of production in a folder, which was something that Google couldn’t do until around 2014. It significantly reduced turnaround times, allowing for quick discovery and review of files in the production process.
2012’s show was the first /v/GA I had worked on. I am credited under multiple roles, one of them being “Assistant Producer” because I had a hand in many areas of its development. I ran many of the threads on /v/, too, enduring some of the harshest critiques of the first show, with many raising objections to the show’s premise and its intended purpose.
To be fair, the 2012 Vidya Gaem Awards had a lot of problems, one of which was the excessive skits and gameplay segments which broke the flow from the award presentation. To make matters worse, the award was broadcast piecemeal. Instead of one big file to stream, it was a bunch of little MP4 files huddled together as a playlist in VLC, running on someone’s home connection. The lag and associated frame loss remain on the official upload of the 2012 Vidya Gaem Awards, with the second half of the presentation being salvaged using YouTube’s Video Editor system.
After the show streamed in February, I was asked by Pu to make an alternative version of the show using assets from the SugarSync folder. I didn’t have everything, like the 2012 template, but I had just enough to reconstruct the runsheet as intended and upload it before the official VOD was released. After joining the award videos together, removing a few gut-wrenching skits from the show, and adding in some new bumpers in its place, I decided to call this particular version of the /v/GAs the Condensed Cut.
2013’s reboot of the /v/GAs
After 2012’s production ended, the /v/GAs were in trouble. The producer of 2011 and 2012’s show “retired”, and there were few members remaining that were willing to persist in making another show that /v/ would begrudgingly watch.
Nonetheless, a German user by the name of F4cemeltor pushed onward and asked the listed members of the 2012 /v/GAs, one cast and crew member at a time if they would be willing to make an award show that /v/ could endure once more.
2013’s crew started meagerly enough, but once its core members (website administrator, front-end developer, video and writing team) joined ranks, so followed the cast. A group of two people became four, then eight, then sixteen, and finally, around twenty.
Although twenty people volunteering to do 2013’s Vidya Gaem Awards seems like a healthy group, it was less than half of the people involved in the 2012 Vidya Gaem Awards. From the outset, a struggle existed to convey the show’s concepts into a theme for 2013. First proposed was a machismo theme (a dark aesthetic, paying homage to games such as “Wake of the Ravager” and the DOOM series), then a 1950s theme, before settling on a minimalist presentation. Elements from each style made it to the show in one way or another. 2013’s “Wake of the Redditor” intro skit, the “DOOMGUY Award for best character”, and the 2013 voting page. New members to 2013 introduced new concepts for the show, such as the introduction of flavor text for nominees.
And, while /v/GAs had been scaled down significantly, so had its Goliath of a competitor: the VGAs. In 2013, the Spike Video Game Awards — renamed the “VGX” and co-hosted by Joel McHale — would come to be the final award show produced by Spike. The show’s Executive Producer, Geoff Keighley, would go on to make The Game Awards, a show made in-house by his production company Ola Balola.
Voting for the 2013 /v/GAs began in January 2014 and was held for two weeks. What transpired afterward was a lot of handwringing, brought about for a couple of good reasons. First, the fact that there was no release date or director was particularly alarming. But more importantly, there was no template to serve as the blueprint for our award show.
The “template” is the visual boilerplate we use in presenting most of our categories. Unlike most award shows, which take place in-person, the Vidya Gaem Awards relies on a template to establish the mood and tone of its presentation, while conveying the information necessary to distinguish each award. So, with less than two weeks to spare, the “Actually Kind of Fun Award for best gameplay” became the template for nearly all the other unfinished awards. And it worked!
The release of the 2013 Vidya Gaem Awards was controversial. It had a good deal of infighting and leaks leading up to release, but it was also the show that finally redeemed the /v/GAs for many on /v/. After much speculation that the show was going to be canceled, the Vidya Gaem Awards streamed on Twitch on March 14, 2014. “Metal Gear Rising: Revengence” swept the positive awards. “Gone Home” swept the negative awards. And also, “Monster Girl Quest: Chapter 3” video game won several positive awards.
You heard that right. Monster Girl Quest: Chapter 3, an adult video game, won an internet-based award show. Why would /v/ act any differently to it than any other award show?
Because no other major award show takes the time to acknowledge them, much less incorporate user nominations into their voting ceremony. No major award show combines positive and negative categories in such an unflinchingly serious manner that causes a knee-jerk reaction, with twists and turns in its own writing. Or at least that’s how I see the situation since I don’t play porn games.
The PhoneEatingBear/Beatstar era of the /v/GAs (2013–2017)
Directed by PhoneEatingBear, the 2013 Vidya Gaem Awards helped establish that the /v/GAs were not merely another stale gaming award show for the masses, but the brainchild of /v/. The presentation is raw, at times offensive, but never afraid to speak the truth. The show’s administration could turn over once, twice, three times and still be okay. And even then, it wouldn’t stop improving itself.
Around the time of 2014’s presentation, PhoneEatingBear and I were interviewed by Niche Gamer about the show.
Starting in 2015, the Vidya Gaem Awards started its outreach division, which informs developers at the same time as the public their games were nominated in the show. Destructive Creations, Atlus USA, and Toby Fox were the first developers to acknowledge receipt of their nominations and are listed in 2015’s credits under the “Special Thanks” section.
During 2016’s production, the production of the show transitioned from using Steam Groups to Discord. It’s something we still get a lot of shit about, but it’s a hell of a lot more efficient.
In 2017, the Vidya Gaem Awards unveiled a new voting mechanism, allowing mobile users to vote more easily, while also gamifying the voting process through the use of lootboxes and mock advertisements.
After 2017’s presentation, PhoneEatingBear and I retired from the Vidya Gaem Awards. We left on quite a sentimental note, but it was for the best.
The CounterTunes/Lamer Gamer Era (2018–2021)
Before we retired, we asked two senior staff members to take over the reins of the show for us, and they did the job with finesse.
Under new leadership, the 2018 Vidya Gaem Awards brought about the longest presentation of the show in its history, at a stark 2 hours and 18 minutes. The theme was a mix of eSports and a fake takeover by Tencent Holdings. The show, particularly the Tencent takeover, was covered on Chinese message boards such as Bilibili. Twitch suspended us for 30 days for pulling the stunt but kept the VOD intact.
I returned to the Vidya Gaem Awards in 2019 as the Head of Outreach. In December of that year, I attended The Game Awards in Los Angeles (check out my article about going there).
After The Game Awards had their show, we opened nominations for the /v/GAs two days later, on December 15. Once our nomination phase was finished and voting opened, we launched the largest campaign of any year in getting the word out. It was successful — we heard back from several developers and nominees on both Twitter and through email. Grant Kirkhope’s response was probably the funniest.
Our nineth show, the 2019 Vidya Gaem Awards, highlighed a “mecha” theme, and were premiered on February 15th, 2020.
2020 and its impact on the Vidya Gaem Awards
While the COVID-19 pandemic changed the way people do a lot of things, it didn’t affect how we ran our award show one bit. We were already online — socially distanced as thousands of miles could allow. But if anything, 2020 served as a test to see if we could double down on our resolve.
The video game industry and our passion for it is what brought the /v/GAs together each year, but internally, what kept us together? The team we had in 2019 (immediately before the pandemic) bore little resemblance to the team of 2012, or when I first ran the show in 2013. However, in the years following my tenure as Executive Producer, I couldn’t help but notice how our friendships began to solidify.
Part of it was meetups, of which I had been a part of about a half-dozen by that point. In 2017, after working with PhoneEatingBear on the /v/GAs for many years, I finally met him in New York City. In 2019, I met up with one of our voice actors, John C, also in New York, and we visited Carolines on Broadway. And in 2020, immediately before Covid swept the US, I visited Duke in Atlanta, where we visited the CNN Center and Williams Street.
The other part was belief in the project itself, expressed through free stickers, printed shirts and other forms of apparel made for and by our project’s members. Who would have thought this hobby would take us this far? From watching an award show so bad a group of strangers on 4chan’s /v/ decide to “go it alone”, to a decade long award show that has now, in fact, lasted longer than the Spike Video Game Awards. It is truly an amazing feat and made possible through the idea that if we couldn’t make a better award show, we could at least make it something we could claim as our own.
Onward and upward (2021-present)
Right before the pandemic, I met W.T. Snacks at MAGFest 2020. Though I joined 4chan too late to be banned by him (I first browsed the site in 2009), his legacy is pretty legendary for the site. If you aren’t familiar with him, W.T. Snacks was one of 4chan’s first moderators. He created the /v/ board back in 2004, and has run his weekly radio show “Midnight Snacks” since 2005. After collaborating with him on Funny Rave a handful of times, he was kind enough to submit a music mix for the 2020 /v/GA Preshow.
The 2020 Vidya Gaem Awards, which was show number ten, released on February 27th, 2021.
After our tenth production, there was significant discussion as to “where to go from here”. It culminated in a three hour meeting in April 2021 that served as both the annual post-production debriefing, and a referendum of whether to explore whether or not it would be feasible to reorganize and become a gaming showcase for the greater internet. The decision to remain a local, 4chan community based award show won by a landslide.
In the months that followed, two of our core crew members, Duke and Segab, retired from the show. Duke — our foremost voice actor since 2013, and Segab — designer of the show’s templates since 2013. Their departures weren’t the result of any personal differences, but their long tenure on the show is a reminder to cherish and value our volunteers for all the time they pour into this project.
As some of our staff departed, just as many stepped onward and upward to leadership roles, ensuring the project remained local to 4chan, and continuing as a timely zeitgeist of the gaming industry.
The /v/GAs today (2022-present)
The 2021 Vidya Gaem Awards, which had a Web 1.0 theme, were streamed on March 5, 2022.
With new leadership at the helm, the 11th show was made with the largest influx of new staff since our 2013 production. Production values didn’t skip a beat, and visually we continued to push the envelope and delivered a show our community would love.
The 2022 Vidya Gaem Awards, featuring a first of its kind narrative arc relating to publishers fighting for control of the fictional Vidya City, was streamed on March 4, 2023.
In 2023, organizers of the Vidya Gaem Awards attended MAGFest, Too Many Games, Anime Expo, and PAX West.
The Vidya Gaem Awards continue today as an annual presentation on /v/, joined with other community projects such as /v/ — The Musical, the 4chan Cup, and /v/3. Nominations for the awards are held at the end of the calendar year, with the voting phase and the show itself held in the first few months of the new year. Though anyone can vote, time-limited voting codes posted on /v/ separate the votes of 4chan from other sites; this filter keeps the show’s results true to our community.
Through thick and thin, the Vidya Gaem Awards remains the only video game award show where one’s taste in video games means a damn thing, and where the best and worst in video gaming are celebrated with equal celebration and contempt. I‘m optimistic for the games and things we’ll see in the years ahead.
