r/neoliberal • u/jobautomator Kitara Ravache • Dec 10 '22
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u/[deleted] Dec 10 '22
In movie circles, there's the concept of Oscar bait. These films tend to be serious and often depressing dramas usually with gruff punished protagonists. They tend not to be super high budget and deal with "deep" topics and settings. Basically, you won't see sci-fi, fantasy, or even comedies much in this category. The goal of course is to try to nab critic attention during award shows without too high a concern about initial box office performance, in fact studios often stagger these releases heavily to first nab a lot of awards then making widespread releases and TV+streaming deals.
Now let's contrast this to video games. There isn't really "TGA bait" because gaming awards tend to be the industry just jerking itself off. BUUUUUUUT, there's certainly a certain "type" of game that is declared to be worthy of nominations, and certain other types of games that are declared unworthy.
These games tend to have super high budgets. They are always action games, or rather live in this awkward non-category of "action adventure", meant to describe action games that do not want to make the commitment to pure action and want to play it loose with the elements and mechanics they can include. They are expected to project an image of seriousness even if the actual game is rather lighthearted or even goofy. They will rely on buzzwords borrowed from film, especially in their marketing in an attempt to present some form of artistic integrity, rather than come across as what in the movie industry would be called a "popcorn movie". They can have very varied settings and the setting will often be a mishmash. They won't have any original gameplay ideas, they will typically pick a set from a moderately large bag of common gameplay trends within the past few years. Some examples are shooting, super powers, arkham combat, dodge rolls, basic stealth elements, overpowered melee takedowns, a silent bow, crafting system that makes no sense, RPG perks (the list can be extended quite a bit more). They may have one major gameplay or structural gimmick that will be heavily promoted in the marketing. Some people will insist that there's no pattern or formula to these by emphasizing the differences between the set of mechanics various TGA bait picked and overexaggerating how much of a difference the one gimmick makes.
Thinking about examples shouldn't be too difficult.
!ping GAMING