By Nick Capozzoli, NYVGCC Journalism Chair
The Games Journalism Award is given to one journalist or critic for distinguished contributions to the field during the voting year. The selected journalist will have best demonstrated traditional journalistic values, including–but not limited to–work that illuminates, contextualizes, entertains, exhibits lucid writing, sound reasoning, wit, integrity, et alia.
The 2023 Short List
Winner:
Nicole Carpenter
A Barbie Fashion Designer retrospective in 2023? Sure, a dynamite pitch on paper (yes, perhaps with some benefit of hindsight). But the details in Carpenter’s piece are delightful, whether in isolation or apropos of the popular movie (“thoughts of death” prove to be an inciting event in both, Q.E.D.). One interviewee refers to the game’s development as having been a “skunkworks” operation at Mattel. And how’s that for your “Barbenheimer?”
See: The Untold History of Barbie Fashion Designer, the First Mass-Market ‘Game for Girls’
Andrea Long Chu
Sometimes in the course of making the case for video games’ merits, good criticism has to bleed them, to relieve them of swelling hype and pretensions. As Chu concludes, “…the point is not that a video game, like other art forms, can show us something about love, but that love, at its most monstrous, can have the unyielding structure of a video game. This only a video game can teach.” And how’s that for your video game essentialism?
See: The Last of Us Is Not a Video-Game Adaptation
Brendan Sinclair
Through dogged follow-ups on company conflict mineral disclosures, and retrospectives that refuse to let c-suite mismanagement be memory-holed, Sinclair’s dry, incisive wit elevates what would already be critically necessary reporting into something that’s also its own joy to read.
See: Microsoft’s Concerning Conflict Minerals Disclosure Reflects Industry-Wide Slippage
Blessing Adeoye Jr.
7 years out from Evan Narcisse writing “The Natural,” it seems at best to be two steps forward, one step back when it comes to depictions of black hair in games. That’s an inexcusable pace to make available, as Adeoye Jr. pithily puts it, “options to be black.”
See: We Need to Fix Black Hair in Video Games
Ed Smith
“When everything [in games] is permissible, nothing has meaning,” writes the iconoclastic critic. It’s an apt inverse of the mantra from Alamut, wherein it originally belied a deep nihilism. That same quote has been invoked, with diminishing self-awareness, since the early Assassin’s Creed sequels—games that Smith notes ushered in our popular era of empty freedoms.
See: Starfield is the Death of Videogames as We Know Them
Hanif Abdurraqib
You may find, as I did, that Abdurraqib’s piece is darkly compelling even before the midway reveal that throws its broader moral enquiry into stark relief. Many have written about commiserating with a video game protagonist, but few with such candidness.
See: We’re More Ghosts Than People
Reid McCarter
Vietnam, the Congo River, Dubai. McCarter’s sprawling return trip to Spec Ops: The Line makes the case that even that game, which has become a critical darling in retrospect, has within it a vast omission: the humanity of the people who actually live there.
See: They Made Us Do It
For the previous years’ lists, click through the page numbers directly below, which will take you through the nominees by year, starting with 2015.