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Sifting through another list of press releases and ran into one for the upcoming Golden Joystick Awards. I checked out the site and saw something I'm general not used to seeing, at least with most of the awards I've followed in American media: Short-List, or write in voting, it would seem solely from the fans. Generally whenever I see fans allowed to vote most awards in this light, the nominees are pretty much predetermined. It's "Here's who we deem worthy, now choose from that." What I consider the big three (at least in the US); IGN, 1UP, and Gamespot, will often do their own editor awards and offered up a nominee for fan voting. Then of course there are the industry awards which are generally voting on by developers, journalists or some combination of both.
Now, I'm not particularly interested in exploring presentation. God knows I don't care to read or hear another discussion about how the Spike TV VGA's are the worst show ever or how Jay Mohr is the worst thing about watching the IAA's. I've seen discussion has been done to death. What I am interested in is what voting process people value more. Who's voice interests you more and what process would you prefer if you ran your own awards? Should it be a short-list process where anything that's been released in a period can be counted? Should the nominees be chosen from those with the highest review scores? Should the nominees (or for that matter winners) be those with the highest sales Billboard Awards style? And who votes?
Full disclosure: I do contribute to a press site, operate a blog, and have written other places. My educational background is in journalism and media. For all intents an purposes, I can be considered a journalist. A crappy one, but one nonetheless. Read whatever you will into that as you continue.
Personally, I'm always heavily interested in what developers think so that voice will always interest me. Ideally, they would be the voice I would want to seek. Who better to determine the merits of games made than people that do it for a living. That said, I'm never 100% sure developers get to play as many games as I think because of how busy they are with their own projects. So while I ideally want to implement the game makers into the process, I don't know if I at least want to start my process with them.
Sales say a lot and nothing at the same time. Ask Transformer movie haters. There's much to be said for the achievement of moving a lot of units, but how much of that is the result of marketing, budgets, and the where a person can get a game distributed. So it interests me, but more so statistically than a gauge of merit.
I love fans even if fan behavior at times annoys the heck out of me. I am a fan, obviously. But there's also that same problem of what did they play. Within my own circle I probably play more games than most of my friends, yet significantly less than the other journalists or bloggers I've met. For instance, in 2007, I with a load of personal stuff going on and lack of access to every system, probably only played one or two game that were universal game of the year nominees.
Then of course there is the flame war aspect of things. It's really hard at times to get objectivity out of people who've invested money into things. There's always that psychological impulse to defend your purchase in the face of something that may be better. There's the argument to be made developers may not be any more objective about their own projects. But while I've witnessed and heard stories of developers defending against a low score on their game, I've personally never seen anyone other than a PR agent go out of their way not to give other companies their propers. So while I pay attention, I temper my value of fan awards as well.
So ultimately I personally go back to journalists awards. They have their own imperfections, all awards do, but I generally with the major outlets have the trust most of the voting is being done by people that have played most of what is out. And while I don't believe in the myth of complete journalistic objectivity (even the decisions of what to cover are based on some bias), I trust their decisions to be often more fair than others that may have had some investment in the production or the purchase of a particular title or system. From there I may allot categories for fan and developer voting. Maybe even sales figure categories. But the bulk of the awards I would ideally run come from the minds of journalists.
Gerren LaQuint Fisher was not nominated for any awards this year. He does contribute to The Game Reviews, tweets @gerrenlaquint, and the runs a blog called The Underscore