Funny thing, last night I was just thinking about writing a post that discussed the exact opposite of what Gus Mastrapa wrote about in this Kotaku post, “Hating the VGAs is boring”. I disagree and I don’t think it’s boring! Hit the jump for an opinion!

I agree with this article to a certain extent. Watching the VGAs and expecting anything more than a bunch of exclusive trailers and random celebrity appearances is just a very poorly thought out (and quite possibly, dumb) expectation. I went into the VGAs well knowing that I was in for an hour plus of commercials mixed in with a piss poor excuse of an award show, but that context really only made it a smidge more tolerable to watch.

Contrary to Gus, while the minute to minute snarkcast over Twitter could have definitely come across as boring and futile en masse (I’m guilty too!), I’d argue that this running conversation was one of the three more legitimately entertaining aspects of the VGAs this year (two being Wheatley’s appearance and three being Miyamoto’s head bob). I would also argue that when the few gaming celebrities we have dismiss the show outright, that pretty much signals to me that the VGAs are doing something wrong.

Just because this kind of criticism is obvious doesn’t discredit it as boring. What’s boring is that no one (that I’ve seen) has yet to come out with a well thought-out critical take on what the shitty-ness of the VGAs. All we have are all these grumblecore tweets because no one wants to waste the time writing a critical post on the VGAs. But hey, if someone did, I think that would be much more interesting! (Update - Jeff referred me to Giant Bomb’s reaction along with Jeff Gerstmann’s, so this kind of stuff does exist, I just missed it the first time around.)

In actuality, the most boring thing of all is that the VGAs are consistently bad and they get worse every year. If things were getting better, I’d be happy to congratulate the producers for their effort to “make good TV about games”. But they’re not, and this is not even kind of good TV in the slightest so I think complaining is a pretty OK thing to do.

Meanwhile, the GDC awards are getting better, more entertaining and more interesting every year, so I can only hope that over time the GDC award shows will be the one turning heads and riling the tweeters, not the VGAs.