Please Pay Attention To This Year's Tribeca Games Selection

thegamer.com:

There are a lot of festivals and award shows in gaming. Some are only important to critics, some are mainly important to fans, some are important to both, and some, unfortunately, aren't important to anyone. Unfortunately, it sometimes feels as though the Tribeca Festival falls into the final category, being overlooked for glitzier shows. We're often desperate to point to the success of The Game Awards, especially when compared to the viewing figures of the Oscars, as proof that our medium has 'made it'. That games are art. That this is so a real job, dad! But few shows have more reverence for games as an artform than the Tribeca Festival, which hosts a whole variety of media rather than pitting games against film or whatever else we have an inferiority complex about. Without even playing any of this year's games, I can tell you they're worth paying attention to.

You might have seen frequent complaints from people on Twitter and various late-night comedians that the Oscars are for stuffed shirt fuddy-duddys because they don't give trophies to Spider-Man. This is a very shallow understanding of how the Oscars work (more people have won Oscars for playing the Joker than they have for playing Hamlet), but also very telling to what we value as a culture. Being recognised by the Academy used to be the highest honour a movie can receive, but now it's whether or not it breaks $80 million on its opening weekend, whether it hits $500 million, $750 million, $1 billion at the box office. Profit = prestige these days, and it makes it harder for art to survive. The Northman has received rave reviews, but will probably not profit enough for a $90 million movie, so will be deemed as a failure not just by executives with cheque books,