There may be no more thankless job in entertainment than agreeing to host a video game awards show. No matter what tone you try to set, a huge contingent of gamers will flood Twitter and message boards with their arguments about how you didn’t live up to their expectations. Too silly. Too serious. Too rigid. Too loose. Too obsessed with niche gaming jokes. Not enough respect for the unique humor and culture that makes the hardcore gaming niche special.

Actress Felicia Day (of The Guild, Eureka, and Dollhouse) will co-host tonight’s D.I.C.E. Awards ceremony, and she says that this kind of reaction just comes with producing content in public these days, to an extent. “I’ve heard the worst things said about me,” she told Ars in a recent interview. “I’ve been on the Internet for seven years, and I’ve heard it all. I really have.”

Fellow host Freddy Wong, known for his over-the-top gaming-themed YouTube videos, told Ars that gamers sometimes seem “impossible to please.”

“It’s too diverse a crowd,” he continued. “People say, ‘Games are art and therefore they should be respected as art, and I can’t believe Spike TV would blah blah blah.’ At the same time, if someone says, ‘OK, let’s criticize this piece of game as art, let’s talk about depiction of female characters and how it’s problematic,’ then [others] say, ‘Games are just fun, man, don’t be so serious, what do you mean?’”

Day echoed the idea that the gaming landscape might be too fragmented to really please everyone with a single awards show. “There’s no sense of a core gamer,” she said. “No one feels unified with other gamers unless they like that one game. That’s the only loyalty, to the [specific] game, or sometimes a genre. Gamers, for some reason, it’s like they’re enemies with other genres for attention and tone. I think it’s fairly destructive.”

The feeling in some gaming circles seems to be that the mere existence (and/or popularity) of other kinds of games somehow delegitimizes whatever kind of game you personally find the most rewarding, Wong said. “But it’s not! … No person who loves gangster movies is like, ‘What, you like romantic comedies? You’re not a true movie fan!’”

Still, to Day, that insular defense of each gamer’s private corner can also reflect what makes gaming special. “If you watch a movie, you’re consuming the experience of a character you’re watching,” she said. “You might feel emotion, but you don’t believe that you are George Clooney. The thing about a game is, whether you play a character you create from scratch or [you're] playing a car, you are invested as a person, and therefore any criticism or sublimation or dilution of your culture… it’s about you as a person, and you feel ownership over it.”

To Wong, it’s a reaction to gaming growing out of its “nerdy” past and creeping into the mainstream. “It’s like when your favorite indie band gets discovered and you’re like, ‘No, that was my thing, but now all these other people are listening to them and it’s not cool!’” he said. “I think gaming is going through the Green Day punk phase right now, and as a result, you get a lot of opinions about things that really—if you root down to the core—it comes down to ‘I don’t like the fact that there’s a thing called casual games. It’s not true gaming.’”

“I think that kind of attitude keeps the industry back,” Day added. “What if someone does like phone games, and then they encounter this sort of backlash, with ‘casual’ being a dirty word. I’m sorry, that’s not acceptable. That’s not a way to get people to want to be in the gaming industry or [be] a part of the culture. I think the whole purpose of doing that is to keep people out of the culture. Subliminally, they want to be special again in their own world.”

Striking the right tone

All that said, Day thinks gaming’s version of the academy awards (D.I.C.E. is put on by the Academy of Interactive Arts and Sciences) can strike the kind of balance between seriousness and fun that the wide expanse of gaming fans will enjoy.

“I think this year might not be reverential, but for me, I want to make sure you’re having fun, but you’re also honoring the people who make all the things behind the scenes that you spend dozens, hundreds of hours of your life in.”

“I think if you look at any sort of mature industry, when it comes time to give awards to themselves, the tone that they take is one of fun irreverence,” Wong added. "It’s not like, ‘We’re elevating these folks to gods!’ We’re all on the same level here; we all have confidence in what we do so we don’t have to feel like we have to prove anything to anybody, and that in and of itself is what signifies confidence, signifies maturity. To say, you know, who cares—it’s just us having fun.”

Wong said he sees most other gaming award shows as a “hidden sort of marketing [show]… It would be like the Oscars all of a sudden saying, ‘And now let’s look at an exclusive Avengers 2 trailer!’ What? That wouldn’t happen at the Oscars. That would be terrible. That’s what’s kind of nice about this awards show… it’s about achievement and about what’s been done rather than 'Let’s make sure the sponsor's happy—and here’s a trailer…'”

“I think it’s important for the industry to have that credibility [of the D.I.C.E. Awards],” Day said. “This should be a celebration. Hopefully everybody is getting drunk, and after working on a game for years—it’s a lot of time in a person’s life, and this should be the pinnacle [for] somebody who creates something.”

“But yes, there’s going to be funny jokes, obviously,” she added later. “We’re not going to be doing montages of dead video game characters.”

We’ll find out whether or not Day and Wong are able to strike that balance tonight at 7:30 Pacific time, when the D.I.C.E. Awards will take place at Las Vegas’ Hard Rock Hotel. You can watch a live stream of the event on Twitch and/or follow my (probably snarky) commentary on Twitter.