Pretty Voices, Pretty Faces

Ever since the Spike Video Game Awards nominees were announced over a month ago, I’ve had a blog post a-brewing in my netbook. It originally started as an attempt to go through the list and rationalize the options, give my opinion on what should win, and what will most likely take the popular vote. While that’s all fine and dandy, it’s ultimately pointless. The games that got nominated are obviously qualified in one way or another.

The real shenanigans spawn from the topic of four individual categories that span the bottom portion of the nominees:

• Best Performance by a Human Female/Male
• Best Cast
• Best Voice

Now, even just looking at the categories leads one to question the validity of what Spike’s setting up here. The most obvious one being, what exactly is going to be the difference between ‘Best Performance’ and ‘Best Voice’? Upon first glance, you might think that it has something to do with a specific performance in a game versus just having an awesome voice. Apparently not! To the nominations:

Best Performance by a Human Female

• Eliza Dushku as Rubi Malone (Wet)
• Kristen bell as Lucy Stillman (Assassin’s Creed 2)
• Megan Fox as Mikaela Banes (Transformers 2)
• Tricia Helfer as Dare (Halo ODST)

Best Performance by a Human Male

• Bill Murray as Dr. Peter Venkman (Ghostbusters)
• Hugh Jackman as Wolverine (Wolverine)
• Samuel L. Jackson as Afro Samurai / Ninja Ninja (Afro Samurai)
• Shia Lebeouf as Sam Witwicky (Transformers 2)
• Vin Diesel as Richard B. Riddick (Chronicles of Riddick: Assault on Dark Athena)

Okay, clearly these people are only being included because they happen to be famous otherwise and are randomly included in a game for name recognition. The entire ‘Performance’ bit of the award seems to have absolutely no sway over the nominations, because let’s be honest: Bill Murray just phoned in his performance in Ghostbusters, and Shia Lebeouf couldn’t even pull off a convincing performance as a human male let alone as a voice in a game. Perhaps Best Cast can make up for it?

Best Cast

• Brutal Legend
• Eat Lead: The Return of Matt Hazard
• Ghostbusters: The Video Game
• South Park Let’s Go Tower Defense Play!
• X-Men Origins: Wolverine Uncaged Edition

I guess not. Granted, Brutal Legend does have a pretty great cast list… But there’s a few games I can think of that are missing from this category. Let’s look at those Best Voices.

Best Voice

• Arleen Sorkin as Harley Quinn
• Claudia Black as Chloe Frazer
• Jack Black as Eddie Riggs
• Mark Hamill as The Joker
• Nolan North as Nathan Drake

Ah! There are the talented voice actors, and precisely the games I was thinking about. Now, this brings me to an interesting point: What exactly does this category contain that the others don’t? Yet the category is “best voice”. Does that mean that their voice is pretty awesome, but because they aren’t famous enough as real people that their performances aren’t noteworthy? Or does having two actors nominated in this category make the respective game count for “best cast”? Apparently not!

Both games to dominate the “best voice” category, “Batman Arkham Asylum” and “Uncharted 2” are oddly absent from the “best cast” category. Yet present in said cast lineup are two games that don’t even have noteworthy actors present in the other three categories: “Eat Lead” and “South Park”.

Honestly, I’m not going to try to make sense of these shenanigans. All it does is point to a relatively clueless approach to having created these nomination lists. For the award show that is gradually becoming the video game equivilent of “Oscars”, I really hope that those in charge start to put a bit more thought and even common sense into the nominations going forward.

Of course, I had the same sentiments last year. Cheers, Spike, you’ve become a holiday tradition of bitter rambling!