Via Kotaku comes this little piece of… terribly depressing news. Seems the good folks plebians at Edge, the online magazine, have bestowed their “Edge Award For Interactive Innovation” this year, and not to, let’s say, actual innovative games such as Portal or Rock Band, which were in the running, but to Halo f’ing 3. That’s right, the multiplayer game with a single player stappled on as more of an afterthought wins for “innovation.”

Edge’s reason? The online portion of the game. Apparently, all you have to do to be truly innovative in the games industry is to expand on what you’ve already done.

As a proponent of the “games as art school” of thought, this is a slap to the face to every single game company who felt like trying something new, something different with the tools they were provided with, instead the award for innovation goes to the company who plastered what’d they’d done before - admittedly, rather well, but still - over a shiny new face.

Halo 3 and its ilk have a place in the game world, of course - but they’re the summer blockbusters. They’re the ones that don’t get a look in at the award shows because, while everyone enjoys them, they’re not fare worthy of awards beyond “best explosion.”

The longer we do this, give awards such as this to games which monkey what has come before with slightly more successful results, the less movement forward we’ll have, the less likely we’ll see games like “Braid” and “Pixel Junk Eden” being made. You know, games with actual artistic merit.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 12th, 2008 at 8:09 am and is filed under Gaming News and Opinion. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.