Hugo Awards Overdue For A Videogame Category
August 11th, 2009
The 2009 Hugo Award winners were announced Monday, celebrating the best in science-fiction. And Fallout 3 wasn’t anywhere on the list of nominees or winners.
That’s because the Hugo Awards doesn’t yet have a category for videogames.
In 2006, the special category “Best Interactive video game” was introduced, but was subsequently dropped due to lack of interest. We think it’s time to give videogames a second chance.
Fallout 3 and Dead Space were exercises in world-building — one a vast, sprawling post-apocalyptic dystopia, the other a claustrophobic vision of Hell in space. That’s not to say that the stories in those videogames can stand up next to the prose in the novels and short stories that earned Hugos this year.
But videogames tackle science-fiction from a unique angle. Science-fiction has always been good at asking, “What if?” Games pose the same question slightly differently: “What if you were there?” They transport gamers someplace alien, letting them try on a new skin. Granted, a good many sci-fi videogames are shooters, but don’t hold that against them. After the Aikido-style pacifism of Portal, all game makers need is a little more encouragement.
Put a Hugo for videogames on the table and game developers might be inspired to create a “what if” scenario where the answers don’t involve gunplay.
Fallout 3: Mothership Zeta image courtesy Bethesda Softworks
See Also:
Posted in Uncategorized
