Last week I was absolutely over the moon to be invited to vote for the winners of the GDC choice awards. While making my votes in the different categories, I realised that a lot of the thoughts I have about games that influenced by decisions had never really been written down anywhere.

Questions wrongly phrased

I'll get the negative out of the way first: I found myself abstaining from voting in three of the categories. One of them, technology, was because the nominees were expensive AAA games that I haven't got around to playing yet - I prefer to wait another year until they become affordable. I'm also not sure I'm equipped to judge game technology, as a lot of it remains black boxed for me. In sum: it's my problem. However, the other two I abstained from because I thought the nominations were completely wrongheaded.

The prize for ‘best narrative’ seems to be based on which game told the best story through cut scenes. The nominees are:

  • Spec Ops: The Line (Yager Entertainment/2K Games)
  • Mass Effect 3 (BioWare/Electronic Arts)
  • Dishonored (Arkane Studios/Bethesda Softworks)
  • The Walking Dead (Telltale Games)
  • Virtue's Last Reward (Chunsoft/Aksys Games)
I don't mean to dismiss these games, all of which deserve to be nominated for prizes of various sorts. The trouble is, if you were to ask me off the bat which 2012 game I would nominate for best narrative, I would without hesitation say FTL. It doesn't have cut scenes. It probably doesn't even have a writer on its team. But through visual design, mechanics and allusion, it does an unprecedentedly good job at telling science fiction stories such as those you'd see on Star Trek or Battlestar Galactica. You're not just being told those stories; you're responsible for them. And every time you play you get a brand new one, just as entertaining as the last. To me, that's excellent narrative work. But from the nominations listed here, it's clear that the panel putting them together consider narrative in a much narrower sense. And while I don't buy into the ludology-narratology dichotomy, I still don't think that defining narrative as discursive storytelling is at all helpful to game design. And if narrative is intended to mean narration, then why isn't Thomas Was Alone on this list?

For the reasons above, I voted FTL for the innovation award. But since I believe FTL’s innovation is strongly connected to emergent narrative, I would have preferred to put them down for best narrative.

The nominations for best handheld/mobile were also strange to me:

  • Gravity Rush (SCE Japan Studio/Sony Computer Entertainment)
  • Hero Academy (Robot Entertainment)
  • Sound Shapes (Queasy Games/Sony Computer Entertainment)
  • The Room (Fireproof Games)
  • Kid Icarus: Uprising (Sora/Nintendo)
Again, these are fine games. But most of them I haven't been able to play, because they require a PS Vita or Nintendo 3DS. Caveat: I have played Sound Shapes, but not on a mobile device, and I could have played Hero Academy on my iPhone and it just happens that I have not. My complaint is not that I am somehow entitled to have access to every critically relevant game or that games which require a huge investment of cash on the player's part shouldn't be nominated. That's not my problem at all. But it seems strange, at a time when mobile devices have transformed the industry and been the home of so much innovation, that this category would be dominated by games for exclusively gaming devices. It doesn't represent the most significant work being done in the industry. And for the record, I think Super Hexagon should have this prize.

Journey

I voted Journey for a lot of prizes. I couldn't help myself. I wanted to spread my votes across a range of games, but categories kept coming up in which the game was nominated and I had to concede that I admired what That Game Company have achieved more than the other nominees.

Best visual arts

The nominees are:
  • Borderlands 2 (Gearbox Software/2K Games)
  • Journey (Thatgamecompany/Sony Computer Entertainment)
  • Far Cry 3 (Ubisoft Montreal/Ubisoft)
  • Dishonored (Arkane Studios/Bethesda Softworks)
  • Halo 4 (343 Industries/Microsoft Studios)
And yes, they are all astonishingly good-looking games. But the art style in Journey is pared-down yet highly polished, it's exotic but not exoticising, it's mythical in a way that cuts right to the heart of what myth is really about, and it's symbolic in a truly meaningful way. So it wins hands down.

Best game design

  • Dishonored (Arkane Studios/Bethesda Softworks)
  • Mark Of The Ninja (Klei Entertainment/Microsoft Studios)
  • Spelunky (Derek Yu/Andy Hull)
  • Journey (Thatgamecompany/Sony Computer Entertainment)
  • XCOM: Enemy Unknown (Firaxis Games/2K Games)
Looking at this again, I could have happily given XCOM a vote as well. I think both Journey and XCOM achieved things that should not have been possible, but I think Journey's achievements hit me on a more human level. XCOM is just incredibly good fun, absorbing, and satisfying, and it is astonishing that it managed to please fans of the series while also making turn-based tactical action appealing to a generation brought up on games that are all about speed. I thought that turn-based gaming was all but gone, but I think XCOM has shown that there's life in it yet. But I chose Journey. First of all, Journey was designed from the ground up in a way that XCOM simply wasn't, although it does have its precedent in other That Game Company projects. But also, Journey used game design techniques to engineer emergent experiences of a kind that few other games have achieved before. I honestly think that's a more significant achievement than the other nominees.

Best audio

  • Journey (Thatgamecompany/Sony Computer Entertainment)
  • Hotline Miami (Dennaton Games/Devolver Digital)
  • Sound Shapes (Queasy Games/Sony Computer Entertainment)
  • Assassin's Creed III (Ubisoft Montreal/Ubisoft)
  • Halo 4 (343 Industries/Microsoft Studios)
I voted both Journey and Hotline Miami for this. Journey's soundtrack is beautiful and evocative. I remember my heart swelling with the music, and I've never felt that way in a game before. But, until I realised I could select more than one nomination, I was going to vote for Hotline Miami. I think the music to Hotline Miami does a really good job of pulling together the parallels the game draws between the hypnosis of arcade gaming (and video games more generally) and a drug-addled, murderous haze. The musical style of Journey has clear links in the conventions of cinema, but Hotline Miami, while not totally unique, does something musically different with fewer established rules.

Best Debut

  • Humble Hearts (Dust: An Elysian Tail)
  • Polytron Corporation (Fez)
  • Giant Sparrow (The Unfinished Swan)
  • Subset Games (FTL: Faster Than Light)
  • Fireproof Games (The Room )
I voted Fez for this. I think it's interesting to consider what makes a game not just good on its own terms, but good as a debut entry by a new studio. Fez is a combination of re-imagining the legacy of game development and achieving something technically very ambitious. It's like standing on the shoulders of giants, then jumping off and learning to fly.

Game of the year

  • Dishonored (Arkane Studios/Bethesda Softworks)
  • The Walking Dead (Telltale Games)
  • Mass Effect 3 (BioWare/Electronic Arts)
  • XCOM: Enemy Unknown (Firaxis Games/2K Games)
  • Journey (Thatgamecompany/Sony Computer Entertainment)
Journey. Not just because the other categories made me realise how many ways Journey achieved something astonishing, but because it represents a far more significant landmark in game design history than any of the other nominees. Game of the Year really should go to the game that you will look back on ten years from now when asked: "How did 2012 change video games forever?"