So it's Sunday and I'm only now getting around to writing about Thursday night, which tells you something about how my week went. Thursday was The Game Awards, and I did the thing I've apparently done every December since this blog started keeping track of Decembers: stayed up way too late watching Geoff Keighley stand in front of a wall of sponsor logos and promise us "world premieres" that turn out to be twelve seconds of a logo fading in.
I want to be clear that I like The Game Awards. I do. But I also complain about it every single year, and this year I don't think I'm going to break the streak.
The show ran something like three and a half hours, which for an awards ceremony that hands out maybe two dozen trophies is absurd math. Most of that runtime is trailers, and most of the trailers are not gameplay, they're vibes. A logo, a piece of orchestral music, a voice actor saying something ominous, cut to black. I counted at least four of these in a row around the ninety-minute mark and started wondering if I should just go to bed. I didn't, because I never do, but I thought about it hard.
The real background hum of the whole night, though, wasn't anything that premiered on stage. It was Half-Life 3. Valve confirmed it exists a few weeks back along with the Steam Machine and that new controller thing, and ever since then it's been the ambient noise under every gaming conversation on the internet, this show included. People kept waiting for Valve to show up and drop something new, and when they didn't, the chat (I had a stream open in another tab, obviously) lost its mind speculating about why. My honest opinion, and I'll probably eat these words in six months: I don't fully believe it's a real, finished, shippable thing until I'm actually installing it. Valve has done this dance before. I'm allowed to be a little cynical about a company that took over a decade between numbered Half-Life games.
Anyway. I made myself a bowl of cereal around 11:40 because I'd skipped dinner entirely, which is a bad habit I keep meaning to fix and never do, and ate it at my desk while the show kept going. My partner had gone to bed hours earlier and was, correctly, asleep like a normal person. There's something a little pathetic and a little wonderful about being thirty-eight years old and still staying up past midnight for a video game awards show with a bowl of Cheerios, typing notes to nobody. I've been doing versions of this since I was in my twenties. The show has changed a lot over the years, the production value especially, but the core experience of me sitting there half annoyed and half delighted hasn't moved an inch.
One trailer did genuinely surprise the room, some smaller game I hadn't heard of before that got a much bigger reaction than anything with a recognizable name attached to it, and that's honestly still my favorite part of the whole broadcast. Not the franchise sequels, not the fifteenth thing from a studio I already track closely, but the moment where a room full of jaded industry people and streamers audibly react to something out of nowhere. That's worth the three and a half hours on its own, even if it only happens once or twice a night.
I didn't make it to the very end. I fell asleep somewhere after 1am with the laptop still open, woke up around 3, and closed it without checking who won what. Looked it up the next morning over coffee instead, which honestly might be the better way to experience it. Less FOMO in the moment, none of the "which trailer is next" anxiety, just a list of results with your coffee already made.
The keyboard I was typing notes on that night is the same mechanical one I've had for about four years now, and one of the switches has started sticking a little, the E key specifically, which is a genuinely terrible key to have problems with. I keep telling myself I'll swap it out. I have the replacement switch sitting in a drawer. It's been sitting there since October.