Video Game Awards Season is in full swing, with the games of 2010 having already been assessed in tons of Game of the Year round-ups all over the web. Now come the professional and organizational awards, where developers and other groups recognize outstanding creativity in the video game medium.
The Writers’ Guild of America represents the interests of writers working in nearly every area of filmed or on-screen entertainment, from movies to new media. The labor union started giving out awards for video game writing three years ago, with the first trophy going to the mid-list PSP game Dead Head Fred. That a game some called mediocre won an award for during the same cycle when universally acclaimed games like BioShock and Portal cast a cloud of doubt around how legitimate the awards would wind up being. Still, this year’s nominee list– Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood, Fallout: New Vegas, God of War III, Prince of Persia: The Forgotten Sands, Singularity, Star Wars: The Force Unleashed II–was respectable in terms of the overall quality of the games. The latest entry in UbiSoft’s stellar historical murder franchise walked away with the prize this year.
(More on TIME.com: Send in the Clones: The Force Unleashed II Review)
The WGA requires a writer to have membership in an affiliated organization called the Videogame Writers Caucus for a game they worked on to be eligible for a WGA award. There’s been some criticism that this system leaves worthy non-member works out in the cold. Wondering why lauded games like Red Dead Redemption and Mass Effect 2 aren’t on that nominee list? Companies like Rockstar and BioWare don’t even submit scripts for nomination in the WGA Awards. BioWare’ co-founder Greg Zeschuk once told me that–because of the massively multipath nature of their games’ conversation trees and the unique design process to make it all playable–the makers of Mass Effect and Dragon Age actually aren’t even able to submit scripts for consideration. And a company as secretive as Rockstar may view creative documents like scripts too valuable for the insight they give onto their design process.
Still, part of the problem is that writing isn’t game design, even if the two disciplines are tightly woven together. Limbo was one of my favorite games last year but it features no dialogue and no scenario set-up. Hell, aside from the menu screen, it barely had any text. So, was Limbo written in a traditional sense? Maybe. But it certainly was designed.
(More on TIME.com: Review: “Assassin’s Creed Brotherhood” Doesn’t Disappoint)
Bottom line: different awards praise different disciplines. There’s a few more significant award ceremonies to go before the critical appraisals of 2010 go away, so chances are your favorite work might still get the recognition it deserves.