The Game Awards start tonight at 5:30 PM Pacific time (Dec 13, 02:30 UTC). There are a lot of announcements, sales, and events going on associated with it though, so I thought I'd try to collect a bunch of it here, and then we can discuss and post the actual winners in here later as well.

Sales

• Steam
• Humble Store
• Epic Store
• Nintendo eShop
• Xbox Store
• PlayStation Store
• Final Fantasy XIV

Announcements/Releases

• Sayonara Wild Hearts released on PC (20% off)

Events

• "The Game Festival" - 13 first-look demos of indie games available on Steam for 48 hours (announcement post)

Edit after the show: Article on CNET that lists all the winners of awards, as well as having embedded copies of most of the trailers/announcements/etc. that were shown

I was wondering if anybody had any tips for muscling through a game. I've got a few games I want to play or go back to, such as Stardew Valley (I completed it before the 1.3 update, wanna play 1.4), and Factorio (I bought in a fit of passion, haven't gotten an hour in). There are others, but these are the two I find myself going "I'm going to play this!" and I just never get to, and it's not for time.

I like the concepts of these games, and I've got something like 135 hours on Stardew Valley, but seem to get bored after I've restarted it (I lost some key items and bugs caused me to never get them back, plus the mine completion bug fixed in 1.3). I started Slime Rancher after playing through it in early access, but can't seem to get back into it after it went gold a couple years ago.

I realize I'm sort of asking for a way to force myself to play games, but has anybody done this? I'm thinking for a given game I can set smaller goals to strive for, and work on doing that, but was wondering if anybody has any ideas.

As previously discussed here, Humble Monthly is switching to a new model with no "mystery games" where you'll be able to choose which ones you want to keep from a set selection.

It looks like the games were inadvertently revealed already (image link), so the first month's options will probably be:

• Shadow of the Tomb Raider
• Blasphemous
• Void Bastards
• Phantom Doctrine
• Dead In Vinland
• Horizon Chase Turbo
• Dark Future: Blood Red States
• Desert Child
• Aegis Defenders
• X-Morph: Defense

If that's an interesting set of games to you, you'll probably want to subscribe to Humble Monthly now to be grandfathered in on the "Classic" plan, which will let you keep all 10 games every month for $12/month (and you should be able to "pause" if you don't like a particular month). Otherwise, the plan options that will be available after Dec 6 are more expensive for fewer choices.

A recent discussion got me thinking about how a lot of the standard genre descriptions for games are either opaque to the unfamiliar or seemingly incongruous with what they are describing. Almost any game can be described as a "role playing" game because you "play" the "role" of a given character. Adventure games often aren't very "adventurous" and often just mean that characters talk to each other instead of shoot each other. In survival games you survive; in racing games you race; in casual games you... well, usually match 3 but not always? Also why are we so focused on camera for some games (e.g. first-person shooter) but not for others (e.g. third-person sports)?

So, let's throw away everything we know about genres and start fresh. No baggage from gaming history; no widely understood conventions; no games that reference other games (e.g. "Souls-like"). Your goal is to make gaming genres as clear and accurate as possible, at the expense of convenience, tradition, and, in some cases, good taste.

Turn "roguelike" into "procedural death labyrinth". Turn "battle royale" into "shrinking-zone dead-is-dead killfest". Feel free to propose not just genre redefinitions but whole a whole taxonomy if you feel it's warranted. After all, some genres need a hierarchy of identifiers.

Be as formal or loose as you want, and the main purpose of this is to have fun, though if some great new terms happen to fall out of it you won't hear me complaining.