OK, we all know that this is a stupid award show targetting…well, I’m not sure who they are targetting. Lots of rappers were presenters, so I guess the target audience was anyone who likes rap or hip-hop music. But the models purring cheat codes suggest that they were targetting teenage males. Tara Reid was there, though, so the target audience may have been the mentally infirm.

Anyway, you can find a list of the winners just about anywhere so there’s no need to rehash them all. I will say that the Spike TV Video Game Awards have done strategy games no favors by not having any strategy games win. Rome: Total War was nominated for best PC game, but that was about it. I mean, there isn’t even a Best Strategy Game category – or best sim. There is Best Military Game, but that went to a shooter. Considering how console focused the whole show is, I shouldn’t be too surprised.

So we have these awards and we have the AIAS awards and all the publications’ annual lists. Hopefully in a few years, when Spike TV reinvents itself again to be a cooking channel, this travesty of a broadcast will be long gone. But there is still no industry awards show that anybody takes really seriously. In fact, I suspect that an endorsement as “Game of the Year” from any of the PC Magazines carries more weight with gamers and developers than anything that Snoop Dogg passes out.

The ironic thing about the Spike awards is that no matter how often they drag some celebrity on stage to say that they game, too, the less secure in my coolness I feel. So Method Man and Red play games? Good for them. I’m sure they do a lot of stuff that I do – eat, drink, sleep. I don’t think I need a man of average talent or woman of even less talent (hello, Ms. Reid)to make me feel like I’m part of some big social movement of urban cool. I came out of the gaming closet a year ago.