In his classic book The Design of Everyday Things, Donald A Norman spits “award-winning” as an insult against objects made with good looks and awards in mind rather than practicality.

Norman’s appraisal struck a chord when I first read it, both in print design terms (slim leftie newspapers stuffed with words have little luxury to mess about with white space) but also within gaming.

Games awards have become ludicrously overblown in recent years, to the point where adverts for unreleased works proudly show off screens full of stars to suggest a polished quality that could not possibly exist yet.

This is in part the fault of E3, the industry’s largest trade expo, where a mash-up of interests between games media outlets and publishing bosses ends up splattering “best-of” lists across dozens of magazines, websites and blogs. These amount to hundreds of meaningless gongs for games which are often unfinished at best and barely playable at worst.

Media groups gain from doing this as it’s a marketable pitch to prospective readers, while publishers get to plaster plaudits on their advertising.

This is to the detriment of gamers and often a slap in the face to industry workers, who time and again find themselves tied to promises of a final product puffed up far beyond the reality of what can be produced from the resources they’ve been given.

The most preposterous recent example of this has been the latest instalment in Ubisoft’s Assassin’s Creed franchise, Unity.

The Paris edition of this bloated stab-’em-up, which famously introduced Ubisoft’s obsession with looking at things from towertops, looks set to go down in gaming history as one of the most horrifically botched major releases of all time.

When it first went on sale it was so broken that people found themselves facing off against antagonists whose faces were entirely missing, leaving just a pair of eyeballs, teeth and a wig floating over a torso in what has to be my candidate for Most Unsettling Bug of The Year.

For months before this however, Ubisoft had been proudly smirking that Unity was the holder of no less than 24 industry “awards.”

And indeed luminaries ranging from Gamespot to The Escapist and Polygon had been flinging plaudits out to this particular rush job, 16 of which were labelled “Best Of E3” or similar. Not just the best in a particular category, but best overall.

E3 took place in June, precisely five months before Unity was released, and in this context these experts on good gaming effectively told millions of people that “this is the best thing around,” even though there was absolutely no way that what they were seeing could possibly be representative of the final product.

Generously, such wanton misinformation could be written off as media groups buying into a self-reinforcing trend. But it’s also worth noting the usually unspoken factor which often influences journalism of all stripes — advertising and contacts.

Gaming journalism is particularly vulnerable to pressure, as very few outlets are printed or directly paid for any more, relying almost solely in many cases on money doled out by the very same firms they’re supposed to be watching over.

And thanks to the relatively tight-knit world of games production, getting a reputation as a troublemaker can also lead to you losing that all-important early access to the product you’re reviewing — a death knell in an internet full of fans used to instant gratification, who’ll bounce elsewhere if you’ve not provided them a review within hours of release.

Ubisoft is one of the 10 biggest games companies in the world, with gross profits of £539 million last year and an ads budget to match. And Assassin’s Creed is so important to its projections that when it knew it was bringing out a duff title it actively tried to stop journalists from writing early reviews.

It takes a strong group to say no to such brazen attempts at censorship, and it takes a stronger one not to follow longer-term trends of fluffing the holders of a major income stream once in a while.

But over time doing so makes kowtowing to publishing giants the norm, and delivers an increasingly poorly informed public wholesale to rapacious profiteers.

When people complain about games journalism, this is at the heart of the problem. Its outlets are, more than in almost any other industry, lashed to the tail of that white whale they ostensibly hunt.

Rather than be dragged down into the deep they croon of awards, and let the beast swallow little fishies drawn by their singing.

On a related note, check out the judging panel of the Gaming Awards 2014 at thegameawards.com, which was heavily trailed as the industry’s answer to the Oscars. The words “conflict of interest” seem appropriate.