Camestros Felapton

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Hugo 24: Best Game or Interactive Work

Time to try and deal with at least one whole category. Unfortunately, this is going to be a bit of a messy one. As a recap here are the finalists and the extent to which I’ve engaged with them:

  • Alan Wake 2, developed by Remedy Entertainment, published by Epic Games – Not played
  • Baldur’s Gate 3, produced by Larian Studios – Not played
  • Chants of Sennaar, developed by Rundisc, published by Focus Entertainment – Played
  • DREDGE, developed by Black Salt Games, published by Team17 – Played
  • The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, produced by Nintendo – Played
  • Star Wars Jedi: Survivor, developed by Respawn Entertainment, published by Electronic Arts – Not played

Alan Wake and Jedi: Survivor I don’t have a platform suitable for playing. Baldur’s Gate 3 in principle I could get a MacOS version for but I’m not going to — at least not before Hugo voting closes because I don’t have the time. I think I would enjoy Baldur’s Gate 3 but I’m not particularly curious about it.

That leaves three games, each of which I’ve played on Nintendo Switch. I enjoyed playing each of them but how to rank them?

Chants and Dredge feel comparable. They are very different games but both are relatively short, both have a core story arc and setting and both integrate that story with the playing of the games. Comparing them is still like comparing novellas in different genres by stylistically very different authors but at least apples & oranges are both fruit.

Tears of the Kingdom is something else altogether. Firstly, I spent as long playing it as at least the other two combined AND didn’t actually finish it. It is a massive game with many gameplay elements and changes in setting. Aspects of the world-building and story relate to a decades-old franchise as well as a recent iteration of the Zelda games. Size, complexity and the level of development behind Tears of the Kingdom are on a different scale to Chants and Dredge.

Put another way: which was the better 2023 science fiction & fantasy? Thornhedge by T.Kingfisher or Star Trek: Strange New Worlds Season 2? It is a stupid question but I feel like it is at least close to the sense of mismatched scale that is involved.

One solution would be to further subdivide the category but that way lies madness. A different response would be to throw my hands up, say the whole category was a bad idea and No Award everything. Let us avoid both these options and consider why we should bother with the category at all and in the process let us consider the question I posed in the previous paragraph: which was the better 2023 science fiction & fantasy? Thornhedge by T.Kingfisher or Star Trek: Strange New Worlds Season 2?

If I’m trapped in a maze by an evil magician and the only way out is to come up with a rational, defensible argument for which of Thornhedge by T.Kingfisher or Star Trek: Strange New Worlds Season 2 was “better”, there are a number of elements I can remove. It can’t be just which one I enjoyed more and it can’t be on the basis of which characters I felt more emotionally attached to. It can’t be on the basis of plot (the novellas has one plot, the TV series has several) and it really shouldn’t be on the money spent making the two things. So what can we use to make a fair comparison? Well, I could consider which of the two made better use of science fiction/fantasy ideas and also which of the two dealt with such ideas in more original ways. A whole season of a TV show still has some advantages there but let me offer yet another question.

Which of these is more significant to science fiction & fantasy as a genre across multiple modes of expression and media: Star Trek: The Original Series versus The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas by Ursula Le Guin? Ah! Sure Star Trek is massive, including how it shaped science fiction fandom or things like fan fiction and yet, Le Guin’s little story has packed a punch through the genre to the extent that the very Star Trek: Strange New Worlds Season 2 has its own version of the story. I think, Star Trek: The Original Series wins out but at least there was a contest there.

So let me reconsider the whole category in terms of ideas. I don’t think any of these games amounts to having the punching power of Star Trek: The Original Series or The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas but I can believe video games (or other interactive media) can have the capacity to inspire new ideas and new works in other media. So in those terms what should I be looking for?

  • Originality of setting/worldbuilding
  • Novel or unusual use of science fiction or fantasy concepts
  • Integration of the gameplay with the setting and concepts
  • Immersion of the player into all of the above (the virtual sense of wonder)

So on that basis I can rank the three I played and give a kind of ranking on the other three on the basis of what I know about them (I won’t actually vote using the rankings for the three I didn’t play, I’ll just vote for the three I played).

  1. The Chants of Sennar: In this game, you wander through a huge tower encountering tribes of people at different levels of the tower (devotees, warriors, bards, alchemists and anchorites) who communicate using languages you don’t speak. You have to complete a series of language puzzles to make sense of the world about you. This is beautifully realised and the actual playing of the game is literally the task your character has to complete: make sense of what people are saying. This all ties into a broader theme of how miscommunication maintains social barriers. Game, story and worldbuilding all work together here in a world that feels original and yet familiar. An easy winner.
  2. Dredge: You run a fishing boat in some early 20th century like archepelago of islands. You take your boat out to sea, fish for sea creatures and sell them at the local port. Yet, the people you meet have dark omens and some of the fish…just aren’t right and at night…best not talk about night…you probably imagined the eyes and lack of sleep clouded your brain and the voices weren’t real. Genuinely enjoyable in a paranoid Lovecraftian fishing simulator sort of way. I’m putting it second becuase the Lovecraftian bit wasn’t as original as my top pick and the gameplay bit (mini-games for catching fish) was less connected to the broader plot.
  3. The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom: Link must explore the damaged Kingdom of Hyrule from high above to the ground below and the caverns underneath. The clever implementation of physics/mechanics in the world allows you to build devices and solve complex physical puzzles that connect to the broader plot. While the complexity of the game is to be admired there is a sense of this being a whole bunch of games mashed together in a kind of classic-Zelda meets Minecraft meets Skyrim. Still, managing to mash such games together is impressive.
  4. Alan Wake 2: According to Wikipedia: “the story follows best-selling novelist Alan Wake, who has been trapped in an alternate dimension for 13 years, as he attempts to escape by writing a horror story involving an FBI special agent named Saga Anderson.” That is certainly an interesting premise and from what I’ve read about the game, you can alter aspects of the story Wake writes to impact events in the “real” world where an FBI agent is investigating the other half of the story. I’d need to play this to rate it higher but it sounds like it has the most interesting set of ideas of the three games I haven’t played.
  5. Baldur’s Gate 3: a well relaised (by all accounts) modern version of a Dungeons & Dragons video game. I probably will play this sooner or later but as far as I can tell it is an excellent way to experience a D&D setting but there’s nothing fundamentally new here.
  6. Star Wars Jedi: Survivor: The title sums up everything I’ve read about the game. It is a survival game in the Star Wars universe where you are a Jedi. Sounds fun but does not sound like it is making a net contributor to the stack of science fiction ideas there are in the world.

So there you go. Am I overvaluing originality above other aspects? Maybe, but we need to pick a common currency between radically different things.

camestrosfelapton

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23 responses to “Hugo 24: Best Game or Interactive Work”

  2. You never know. Was Hades the most obvious choice going into 2021? Yet it won. I think the two indies could have a fighting chance, especially if they choose to give keys to voters.

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  3. This is a bit off-topic, but since you mentioned “Omelas” and how even Strange New Worlds did their own version of it, I wish someone would put together an anthology reprinting the original story and all the takeoffs and replies to it. (Including Isabel J. Kim’s “Why Don’t We Just Kill the Kid in the Omelas Hole,” which blew my socks into orbit.) Of course, said anthology would be huge, which just shows the original’s far-reaching influence.

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  4. I don’t see this as really catching on as a permanent category. The barriers to access are too high.

    Who has the money to get all of the platforms and games? And even then, who has the time to play them all? And still get the reading/viewing for the permanent categories in? Or even the ability to play all of them (it me).

    People can fit in some reading on the train to work, or before bedtime, or while the kid is down for a nap. You can get books from the library, and of course there’s the Voter’s Packet after the nominations are tallied. Even a really stupidly long movie is only going to take you an evening. A whole season of a TV show takes less time to get through than a really good game.

    People hustling with 2-3 jobs, or one very busy one, don’t have that time. People with many caregiving needs don’t have time (or money); the kids need to be fed and bathed, Grandma needs to go to the doctor regularly.

    Deaf people can read the written works and watch the TV/movies with subtitles. Blind people can do audiobooks or screen readers, and at least listen to the TV, hopefully with the descriptive sound. But game sound cues are wasted on the Deaf, and there aren’t many games blind people can play. People with various physical disorders isn’t going to be able to do things like physically push the buttons to do the shooty-runny-jumpy things (and they’re more likely to also be low-income). You could give me all the hardware and software for the above, and my thumbs and wrists are going to nope out really fast. And LOTS of people can’t use VR headsets because they will puke and fall over.

    So if it’s going to be decided every year by a minority of people with spare money and time, and still go to the biggest game everyone’s played … what’s the point? We get stories/writers you never heard of popping up on Hugo ballots; not so with games.

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    • Very true. I’ve got a handheld Switch which is the main place I play games precisely because I can pick it up and put it down and play it on a train (or coach or plane) etc. I like video games but there’s not a great deal of time in my life to fit them in. I’m not going to be spending money on a Play Station or gaming PC because, while I love spending money on tech, I just wouldn’t use them or really have somewhere to put them. I’ve also got the reaction time of a sloth and hand-eye coordination issues so lots of games I’m just going to struggle with.

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      • With the exception of The Legend of Zelda, I think you can play all of these on a Playstation 5. (I was going to say PS4, but Baldur’s Gate probably needs a PS5.) Unfortunately, the PS5 takes up a lot of space compared to the PS4 and while you can use it to stream other media, that only makes sense if you bought it to play games.

        My price points for games is about $20 so I usually have to wait until I can play them (xkcd reference number 606) and Nintendo prices remain high, so I may never play Tears of the Kingdom. That means I’d never really be able to vote in this category as I’d always be playing most of the games after the award had been given.

        You can get a feeling for the games and their stories by watching others play them on twitch and YouTube, but it will never really be the same experience as actually playing them.

        A lot of games are offering story mode now which is the easiest difficulty, but it’s still going to require time and at least some effort.

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        • The idea was to get an Hugo to stuff younger people are interested in.

          Since BG3 was the nominee I was most sure of that it was nominated I wouldn’t be suprised to see it win.

          For the first Hugo at the time I wasn’t sure if Final Fantasy VII Remake would be the winner instead of Hades (I haven’t played both games than I have played them now).

          For that Hugo I am a watcher not a voter (have a P4 but won’t play all the games)

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          • But can younger people afford all the gear and games, and do they have time between their Uber gigs and boring part-time minimum wage jobs, plus their 3 roommates telling them to turn down the volume on the pew-pew and ‘splosions?

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        • Tears of the Kingdom is good value in terms of the number of hours of entertainment it gives but that’s part of the problem – I don’t have hours and hours of time to play games unless I read fewer books or watch fewer shows.

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          • And more hours doesn’t mean better. We have a lot of trible A games were the games are gotten longer with fetchquest, grind or other unfun activities. There are long games that are good but you have to ask if a game is longer how much is unnecesary and makes the game worse.

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            • Grinding annoys me in ANY kind of game. I want to have fun, not do the same boring thing again and again. Back when I had games on PC (I think on XP), you bet I went online and found every cheat code possible.

              Nowadays all I play is jigsaw and crossword puzzles. And the last game I maxed out was Neko Atsume, which had no time limits, no fancy controls, and you got to see cute kitties faceplanting. You had to go away from it to make progress.

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  5. I have only played Jedi Survivor. I wouldn’t describe it as a survival game except in the sense that the player character has to survive in any game of its type. The title refers to the player character’s background as a survivor of the cull of Jedi when the Empire came to power. The game is really a quest. I also understand it has brought some new elements into the Star Wars universe that have been used in the tv series.

    I haven’t played Baldurs Gate 3 yet (I am still working through the first one). However, I do think it should be judged on its story content. Judging it as unoriginal because it is a computer implementation of D&D feels to me like judging a novel as unoriginal because it uses words and is written on paper bound in book form. I do concede that the setting is one that has been used previously in muliple media though.

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  6. Issues of accessibility were brought up while the category was being workshopped, so the solution of watching playthroughs was suggested:

    https://www.gameshugo.com/faq/playthroughs

    Granted, playthroughs for triple-AAA games can run a bit long, but they can be segmented/watched periodically. I think there can be viable workarounds when evaluating the category.

    I also concur that it’s a tad unfair to dismiss BG3 as offering nothing new to the table.

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    • But 27 hours? In 27 hours, you could watch/listen to most of BDP short and long. Or read Short Story and Novelette (listening to those would take longer, but you could get all of SS and some Novelette). If I have a choice of how to spend 27 Panic Blob hours, I’m going with knocking off one entire category, maybe two, instead of evaluating exactly one finalist in one category.

      This would be really hard for one category (6 games) during voting, and having to watch walkthroughs of even more to know what to nominate is… eeesh. I’m not sure if playthroughs/walkthroughs are subtitled in any language (particularly non-English). I’m a little hard of hearing, so I often turn subtitles on to help, and the auto-generated ones are gibberish too often. So people with less hearing than me are going to look at days worth of pretty pictures and decide the winner on that basis?

      But what I’ve seen/read about BG3 looks pretty darn good, so I’m thinking it’s a perfectly reasonable winner. If I wasn’t all thumbs, I’d give it a shot — with someone else’s equipment.

      Epic fantasy or SF quests win Hugos all the time in written and visual media; I don’t see BG3’s genre being a disqualifier. Else we’d have to say “A Song of Ice and Fire” (and associated print/videos thereof) wasn’t worth winning because we already had LOTR. Galaxy-exploring epics can’t be done because Star Trek already won, so “The Expanse” shouldn’t win anything. And that’s just the things that have happened in my lifetime, which means I’ve met people who worked on Trek, SW, GoT, and Expanse in my adulthood. Fie to that, I say. The good stuff is the good stuff.

      My mom loved the Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers serials and radio shows back in the day. She also loved Star Wars, particularly Yoda. She had a Yoda action figure supervising her spice rack. You wanna tell her because Buster Crabbe did cliffhanger shorts in her childhood meant that gasping alongside me at the big reveal in TESB was wrong? (She also liked Buck Rogers with Gil Gerard.)

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  7. So I happen to have an Xbox Series X and a Switch, and I also luckily bought Tears of the Kingdom and my friends gifted me BG3. Then I can get Dredge from the library (my library checks out video games!) and Jedi Survivor came out on EA Play/Gamepass the other day (and also, it’s at the library.) So, mainly hoping Chants goes on sale and I’m probably going to skip Alan Wake. My thoughts is simply to play as much as I can of each game and decide that way.

    But I’ve always been a bit of a gamer geek, so this is my category.

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