On December 19, 2021, the "Hugo Awards" issued by the "World Science Fiction Association" announced the winners, among which the newly set "Best Video Game Award" was awarded to the Roguelike game "Hades", which was also the first video game to win the "Hugo Award".
When you first hear this news, you may feel a little surprised. How come the Science Fiction Awards also evaluate video games? In fact, this is not the first time that a science fiction award has added an award for games. The Nebula Award, which is as famous as the Hugo Awards, added the "Best Game Screenplay Award" as early as 2018, and this year is already the third edition. Today, we will take you to take stock of the games that have been "cross-border awarded" by the science fiction awards.
- 2021 Hugo Awards "Best Video Game" & 55th Nebula Awards "Best Game Screenplay": "Hades"
This is a Roguelike game with the main goal of "escaping from the underworld", a genre characterized by its randomness and returning to the original point with each death. But in addition to the game's own level design, smooth action elements and degree of completion, its excellent art style and solid narrative structure built through a large number of texts may be the reason why this game has been favored by many awards.
Unlike the average "hardcore" Roguelike game, Hades focuses more on randomness in the narrative of the plot. This also makes the work have an extremely large text volume: almost every time the protagonist "dies" back to the underworld, the dialogue with other characters will be different, you can see the relationship between the old father Hades and the protagonist Zagreos from the beginning of the rigidity become more like a teasing between father and son; it can also help the great poet Orpheus to repair the relationship between himself and his lover Eurydice; or repair the ruined Temple of Hades through the resources he has saved along the way. And when you fail to pass the level, going back to the original room is like coming home, and everything you do has feedback here, which greatly weakens the sense of loss of death in roguelike and makes the game process very easy.
On the way out of the underworld, every helper you meet will also reveal a lot of information to you, and sometimes they will even appear together and offer you help or challenge. Whenever you receive the blessings offered by the gods, they will also reveal two parental phrases to you. The already intricate relationships between the Olympian gods and the diverse personalities of the gods were deconstructed and rebuilt in a large number of texts, eventually forming a mythical world that belonged to Hades alone.
The lines of "Hades" total, and all the lines add up to more than 300,000 words
- 53rd Nebula Awards "Best Game Screenplay": "Black Mirror: Pandasnake"
Movie poster for Black Mirror: Pandasnake
Unlike the more general concept of "Best Video Game", the "Best Game Screenplay" award focuses the definition entirely on the "screenplay" itself, which means that for this award, the gameplay of the game is not important. Because of this, most of the winning games selected by the judges seem to be more suitable for "reading" than playing games in general concept.
The 53rd Nebula Awards in 2019 were awarded to Black Mirror: Bandersnatch, an interactive film that can almost be called "gameplay", which was produced by Netflix after buying the "Black Mirror" series of IP. Originally a British drama, Black Mirror is full of extremely British political satire and black humor. After being bought by Netflix in the United States, various viewers have thought that the British flavor that is all over the script seems to be less intense, and the plot seems to have a "commercial" fluency, and the popularity has been greatly reduced for a while. And what makes this IP re-ignite is this "Black Mirror: Pandasnake".
Black Mirror: Pandasnake is set in 1984, when a young programmer, Stephen, adapts a fantasy novel with a complex plot into a video game, but the intellectual challenge ensues — and he begins to be unable to distinguish between virtual and real. And the audience will decide the choice of the protagonist Stephen in the process of "watching the movie", from what kind of cereal to eat for breakfast, to whether to kill people... It's all up to the person in front of the screen.
In this interactive movie, you occasionally encounter this exact same option
The form of expression of this work seems to be very difficult to define - it does seem to be a movie, but a large number of actions that require the audience to make choices provide a game-like operability; but if you play it as a game, the protagonist's fate destined to tragedy will bring the player a great sense of powerlessness. This feeling of not being up and down is exactly the theme of the story itself - no one can really control anything. The protagonist's fate seems to be controlled by the player, and even the protagonist is aware of this. But the player who makes the choice in front of the screen can't really "choose" the protagonist's ending. Unlike most critically acclaimed word games and interactive movie games, it's hard not to feel that it was Netflix that refused to give viewers a comfortable ending in order to express the theme.
Although the evaluation of the work was somewhat polarized, in the year when the Nebula Awards first established the "Best Game Screenplay" award, awarding the award to an interactive film seemed to be a foolproof choice.
——54th Nebula Awards "Best Game Screenplay": "Beyond the Sky"
After that, in 2020, the choice of the Nebula Award seems to have become more "thematic". They chose Obsidian's 2019 production of The Outer Worlds.
This is a role-playing game set in a distant future where humans can already set foot in the universe. The protagonist of the player moves from planet to planet, exploring the customs and customs of each planet in the vast universe, and getting involved in the struggle between various forces.
Contrary to the popular open world trend in recent years, "Outer World" is a relatively "converged" game, its main line flow is not long, although the map is many but not particularly extensive. The gameplay of the game itself is relatively simple, and as a role-playing game, its growth system does not have too much depth to explore. But its narrative sophistication makes it understand why the Nebula Award chose it.
Obsidian, who had developed Fallout: New Vegas, used their strengths in the mesh narrative as always when developing Beyond the Horizons, and the amount of text in the game was so large that you could even chat with the waitress of the tavern for half an hour if you wanted, which made the worldview of Beyond the Horizons very three-dimensional and detailed. At the same time, because the appearance and attributes of the protagonist can be determined by the player, the interaction between the character and the player is also adjusted according to the different attributes of the protagonist. At the same time, the game's characteristic dialogue system also promotes the expressiveness of the text, when you participate in a conversation, there will often be other characters inserted into the topic, but the abundant amount of text makes their dialogue flow smoothly, and it is in line with the personality and logic of the character itself. This may also be another important reason why this work won the "Best Game Screenplay" award.
In fact, for a long time, games have not been accepted by the film and television field and mainstream concepts. With the development of the times, some narrative techniques that only games can do have gradually been recognized by mainstream groups. There are even many creators from other fields who have joined the creation of the game. The two major science fiction awards have opened awards related to the best game, and perhaps they also value the more diverse visual performance and story expression that the carrier of the game can carry. The game's unique sense of substitution and interactive form adds endless possibilities to the narrative. I also look forward to the future game industry, in addition to innovating in gameplay, but also more excellent stories can be born.