Geoff comes out on stage, seldom dressed like the men who make videogames in T-shirts and blazers or ill fitting dress shirts – he’s sharp and dynamic, the light plays well with his skin. Geoff looks almost uncanilly like he did a near 30 years ago when he debuted in my consciousness on Tech TV. As he gets older, he continues to age ‘well’ an increasingly foreign part of growing older to many Americans. Eternally, he’s the cherub of videogames: locked under facial moisturizers and studio lighting to appear to us, the public, as the host of The Game Awards. I never watch them, but I see Geoff every year.

Once, I had a conversation with a friend that went like this: I was bitching and moaning when I was younger about my propensity to think I Deserved certain things out of life for being smart, being a writer, or looking a certain way. It was a deep shade of masculinity I wore on my face all the time, anxious and empty and wanting the justification of being alive. He said: Hey, you stupid piece of shit, Nobody Deserves Anything, and least of all you. And if anyone alive does deserve anything, it means they also deserve all of the rotten and nasty things that happen to them: it means some of us have to die deserving the people we make ourselves into.

That conversation didn’t hit as hard at the time, but as I’ve gotten older I look at it like all the small moments of life that build up and go “huh i guess he was right” it might be one of the few things an older man ever told me that was right, and wasn’t because he was trying to sleep with me or get access to someone else through me. It was a good conversation, as far as things go.

Geoff Keighley, himself now a videogame, is the type of writer who wants their unlimited industry access to give them insight into things that get in the way of enjoying videogames: he, with near unlimited access to game developers, has a blurb on his wikipedia page about really wanting to know what causes the Red Ring of Death.

This year, the Game of the Year at the TGA’s was Astro Bot – nearly a plague like celebration of 30 years of Sony abandoning developers as they crawl over each other like crabs in a bucket to get to release larger games, bigger games, more expensive games. Itr was a game that combines the frenetic action of a mascot platformer with a near constant excess of winking at the audience playing it: “hey, remember final fantasy?”

We definitely deserve Astro Bot as our Geoff of the Year, a double edged sword that swings both ways. The enamored calling of praise for the developer, and the buried lede that we may be signalling ourself into more years of nostalgia-glaring protector shades that block out the sun and keep me inside. It’s true now though, I already see through the trailers of Capcom’s Return to Glory (Capcom has been Returning To Glory, Every Year, Since 2014)

In a way, we definitely deserve our Geoff Keighley, our primordial Geoff – the only part of the industry that drives to make it all make sense. We can have a game of the year, we can have a philharmonic orchestra do a four second trailer to a Capcom Game and pan to the audience looking like they’re not sure what to do at a videogame Award Show. We can slowly kill and choke off every part of the industry an errant journalist or even worse, member of the public has access to. We can do it all for Geoff, because he’s ours, eternally, every year.

Are we not a deserving public, then? If all of my previous writing is to be taken as wrong when it comes to the matter of The Game Awards, maybe it’s time to look at the procession as something deeply necessary to let out the trauma of videogame development: if you don’t love yourself and your staff enough, there’s no reason for you to be on stage. Videogames can be solved by crying at trailers and loving the developer, and that’s the world the awards show lives in and wants to create.

It got me thinking that if we Deserve Geoff, if deserving can be a prison and a punishment, well, then, what are the Geoff’s of the Year? Which videogames are not excellent for the traditional reasons we celebrate in the industry (Graphics, Sound, Control, Fun Factor, Challenge) that have been locked into the dynamic for forty years of glossy magazines and archived review sites? I sat in my bed for hours last night, running over a nightmare sequence of games that are absolutely dripped out in the Geoff-itude, the games that we are filled with deserving for.

Of course, the Geoff Prime, if you will, is the man himself: our erudite statue displayed on stage every year to balk at, dance, mime, and perform for the spirit of the industry. Geoff Keighley, well – like I said earlier, he still looks the same as he really always has: sort of tired, frozen in a mask like appearance. The suit does a lot of job for the presentation of our dear Geoff every year. Like many men who take to the suit as a fashion object today, he often looks guilty on stage. What is he so guilty of? What secret hides right beneath Geoff’s skin, waiting to be peeled out by the blade of time?

GRAPHICS: 4

I am familiar with Geoff’s voice, it haunts me now. It is not a low and lonely baritone capable of lulling a babe to sleep. Geoff alternates between carnival barker and shrill siren, often splitting the difference between a variety of facial expressions that never seem to link up. Geoff will sing when his face is tired, will advertise with a body elated by promises whispered in his ear. I imagine myself carried on a wind to the same station as him, and I imagine what it’s like to have to talk to Geoff Keighley for hours about publishers and the industry.

SOUND: 2

And where we have our Geoff, he is not an avatar for players even when full buck-ass-nude scanned by Hideo Kojima for the videogame Death Stranding: even depicted, we never see the real Geoff only his hologram from where he resides in the safety of an apocalyptic bunker. The man cannot be reached, attained, or controlled. What interests do you think have the mans ear? Is he behind his own puppet strings, or do we dance to his.

CONTROL: 1

And yet, the previous scores preclude the others – here we have Geoff broken down to his most base form, a recurrent advertising man who’s every word always carries the promise of something being sold. Next years promises of videogames or a final opening of the door to this years titles as if to say: these are the ones you missed, and the only ones you need to engage with. Your Games of the Year. Geoff Cries, he dances, he is my friend.

FUN FACTOR: 3.5

FINAL SCORE: 8.5 GEOFF KEIGHLEYS
EARNING OUR COVETED “DEEP-HELL’S GEOFF KEIGHLEY OF THE YEAR” AWARD

I would like to take a moment to welcome you to the Geoff’s of the Year, running till the end of December. Please Return Next Week, To Deep-Hell.Com.