About two-thirds of the way through, it came time to introduce the game award (or “interactive category,” as they always call it), the reason why we were there. Someone from the industry came up on stage, and proudly, loudly, announced that games have now “eclipsed” movies and recorded music, combined, by some metric or other. He was, I will take care to point out, speaking to a crowd of people who had largely spent their lives in one of the aforementioned industries.

Besides the statement probably being factually wrong, it was also an unredeemable boast, one that clearly didn’t come from any kind of swagger of confidence. Instead, it was the insecure bragging of the new guy on the block. The attitude was that of the guy at a dinner party who keeps mentioning how much money he makes, or the teenager who wants his peers to know he’s experienced sex. It was silly, unnecessary– borderline insulting.

The show smoothly proceeded into the nomination and the winners, but that stray comment lingered over the rest of the evening and well into the next few days. It deeply unsettled some of the other people from games who were there with us. Here we were, invited graciously into the home of a great tradition of technology in service of art, and it felt like we had made fools of ourselves trying to prove how great we were.

The non-game people had the rest of their show and treated us cordially and politely while we mostly stuck together and talked about games. We knew them; they did not know us.