By Michael Lowell
July 20, 2010
Top Ten Reasons Your Video Game List Blows
Note: No, that is not a real picture of Digg. Please don’t sue.
An article bitching about lists. How edgy.
Look, I studied history in college. About it, how to write it. Guess what? Insight and entertainment are a tough tango to wed. So when “I think Halo 3 is better than Unreal Tournament” became a news event, the terrorists won. Game journalists, actually. Think about it. They won’t bite the hand that feeds them, where Activision chainsaws the six-figure ad campaign because of a scathing article. And you can revisit the “Top 25 Music Games” at any time, ’cause we got’s to know where Guitar Hero: Birthday Sex made it. And for those on the outside in? The guys who don’t make a living writing about the subject? Why do real research? Why add to the greater discussion when you can simply enrage others?
Video game rankings aren’t even a retrospective into the evolution of the medium. They’re a low-effort, high-yield pissing match for personal opinion. But I can’t stop journalists and fanboys from ranking their childhood memories. I would if I could, I can’t. Too much money and blind passion involved. But we can try to make the practice passable. We should expect better than what we’re getting.
Remember that debate class? Where you argued Mario wrecked the ecology of the Mushroom Kingdom in the name of “points”? That’s called a thesis. Video game lists require one too. My opinion of what makes great games is different than yours. Different than your thesis. And until you present a thesis, you can’t call me a douchebag. Because intelligent debate does not work that way.
So let’s march. The top ten reasons your video game list blows. Oh, I lied. This isn’t a list. Because with few exceptions, video game lists blow.
—
UGO Entertainment is a tribute to the young adult’s extreme taste for Mountain Dew: Blue Cheese Fruitsplosion. It has boobs. It has cosplay. And it has lists. Lots of them. One week ago, the site answered the most important question our troubled country faces: What are the “Top 25 Fighting Games of All-Time“? And we got exactly what’s wrong with this brand of subjournalism.
1,711 words to honor twenty-five games, descriptions that wouldn’t befit the first paragraph of a Wikipedia article. Fighting games not considered fighting games. A game selected because it has boobs. “This was the most popular game in the series so it must be good” syndrome. And the greatest of them all? 1992′s Street Fighter II Turbo, outlined in a description of 1991′s Street Fighter and a screencap of 1994′s Super Street Fighter II: The New Challengers.
Your thesis? “The best fighting games of all time duked it out in a Battle Royal. Who came out on top?” None. No thesis. If there was a thesis, you would be required to defend it. But the site is not in the business of defending their opinion. They’re in the business of making you click the article. And what better word of mouth than “THESE ASSHOLE’S DNO’T NO WAT THEIR TALKIGN ABUOT HERE’S THE LINK”?
The internet rages for a day, UGO pays their bills, I bang my head on the wall, I drive that bus bomb filled with orphans into the pet shop, and the cycle repeats a day later. That’s how you end up with “The Top Ten Ways to Kill Your Sims“, the “Unsexiest Sexy Video Game Characters“, and “Basketball Games Without LeBron James“. And I’m sure they could only name sixteen because the research got so exhaustive and difficult.
Seriously: “Top 25 Fighting Games of All-Time”. What does that even mean? Highest quality, maybe? The term “Top 40″ would disagree with that. Does it mean “industry standard”, itself an ambiguous term? There’s two better words, and only one works.
In 1996, the National Basketball Association commemorated American dominance of the basketball world. Media, players, and coaches voted to name the “50 Greatest Players in NBA History”. Usual suspects abound, Jordan, Chamberlain, Russell, Magic, Bird. They also selected George Mikan and Paul Arizin, superstars of the early NBA. At 6’9, Mikan dwarfed his foes, a slow-it-down, high-efficiency post player in a brand of basketball with no shot clock. Paul Arizin revolutionized the game with the most important offensive innovation of the last sixty years: The jump shot.
No disrespect to Mikan and Arizin, but the game’s grown up. It’s tough to argue they’re the best when modern conditioning turns LeBron James into an NFL linebacker with three-point range. That’s why we moniker those pioneers as two of the greatest basketball players.
Greatest means “remarkable in magnitude, degree, or effectiveness”. Best means “offering or producing the greatest advantage, utility, or satisfaction”. The “best player” debate can be backed with stats, anecdotes, and game tape. Every player on the court can be measured against the same stats. Video games cannot. By claiming you have the answers on the best games of all-times, you are claiming you poured the red and green liquid into the beaker and concluded Mega Man 3 is of a higher quality than Resident Evil 4.
But “greatest game”? “Greatest” can be quantified. “[R]emarkable in magnitude, degree, or effectiveness”. So I can argue Super Mario Brothers saved the American console gaming market. That Starcraft is the focal point of a South Korean competitive gaming empire. And even that has a problem.
In 1999, ESPN concocted “Sportscentury”, a countdown of the greatest jocks to pat each other on the ass during the 20th century. Occurring at the height of American hegemony, it embraced “America Number One!” Canadian Wayne Gretzky? Sure, he’s in. He dominated an American sports league. But Japanese baseball’s Sadaharu Oh and his 868 home runs? The Australian cricketeer Don Bradman, whose what-the-fuck accomplishments make Wilt Chamberlain’s records look like rec league shit? We didn’t defeat Hitler, the Soviets, and Jimmy Carter to give cricket a nod. You crazy?
Pads? Americans don’t play games with pads.
Of course, when Sportscentury got a web site, they were embracing the “Top N. American athletes of the century”. None of that on television. Because “Top N. American athletes of the century” doesn’t quite market the same invincibility.
So really, how can you tell the Japanese the greatest video game of all-time is Starcraft? You mean the country that was de-militarized after World War II doesn’t care for a real-time strategy game? They like their games “Japanese” and they like them “role-playing game”. When Famitsu readers voted on their all-time top 100 games in 2006, 18 of the top 20 were “Press X to Turn the Page”. And the Europeans? You want to tell them Super Mario Brothers should get god status because Americans tout it as the savior? Their love for computer gaming was holding up just fine in 1985, thank you.
“Oh, that’s obvious.” It apparently isn’t. The only time international perspective gets a nod in the Western debate is when “Starcraft is the best game ever because it’s a sport in Korea.” But you will never even hear Starcraft fans mention Warcraft III is hugely popular in China. Or Space Invaders was so popular in Japan that a national coin shortage spawned from the rash of “Invader Houses”. That is, arcades dedicated to Space Invaders and nothing else.
What “World Cyber Games 2009 in China, Warcraft III Headlining The Event” May Look Like
Look at Tim Rogers’ greatest game “manifesto”. This is a man who apparently “gets it”, but even he doesn’t get it. Who is he to tell Americans a soccer game is the best sports title of all-time? That the obscure, Japanese freeware game Cave Story is a ten-best all-time masterpiece? That the follow-up to Earthbound is top-five-best material when it never even got a commercial release in the States? Based on whose context? Whose perspective?
Hell, how can Rogers even give Cave Story a nod? Remember: His Cave Story review and his “manifesto” were both published in 2008. Cave Story’s commercial release was in 2010.
It’s important. When you think “greatest games”, you think of the products with a “buy in”, whether you’re purchasing the cartridge or popping quarters in the cabinet. When Pac-Man won the internet in 1980, content delivery was simple. You had arcades, home consoles, and computers. Yeah, you had a homebrew crowd. But traditionally, “guys in a basement” weren’t hitting it big unless Midway was licensing the unauthorized Ms. Pac-Man or Russia was distributing Tetris on Soviet terms.
Then the internet got big. Then the internet got phones. Then Apple zombies bought shit on the App Store. It’s tough to get noticed in a world where Activision throws the economy of African nations at their latest. But you’re no longer fucked if you don’t want to play by Nintendo’s licensing policies.
The popularity of gaming is now being written by new-age content delivery. Eighty million people play FarmVille. Eight times more than the culturally-significant World of Warcraft. And you will never ever hear a “core gamer” claim that FarmVille deserves a nod. It doesn’t matter that I played FarmVille twenty years ago when it was called SimFarm. Good luck telling mom Deus Ex represents the high point of video game role-playing when “a lot more people are just as happy role-playing a farmer”.
I had a lot of fun making this graphic.
“Hay maybe your right give the trophy too FarmVille u casual gaming fuck.” Not what I’m saying. Gaming’s changed. Maybe five years from now, we’ll talk about the day FarmVille and Wii Sports transform video games into bowling, where gaming is a social event instead of entertainment.
But we don’t hand out trophies for what may eventually happen. And that’s something gamers can’t come to terms with. FarmVille isn’t cracking the Pantheon any time soon. Neither is Modern Warfare 2, Super Mario Galaxy 2, Mass Effect 2, or that totally-awesome game that came out last week.
The medium’s been commercial for under forty years. And when it comes time to rank those forty years, it seems we always leave out the last five. And fingers are pointed. “It’s proof video games suck now!” “You’re just a biased retro gamer!” No, video games don’t suck now. It’s an industry less likely to take risks. More likely to sacrifice the soul in order to appease larger audiences. You might as well call the outbreak of modern shooters BrownVille. But the cream in any year of gaming is still pretty damn good. Unfortunately for them, we judge games on their legacy. Even when we say we aren’t.
In September of 2009, Kevin Durant turned 21 years old. He is what happens when your create-a-character with a 99 in every category leaps out of the video game and shatters your kid’s backboard. In his third year as a forward for the Oklahoma City Thunder, he won his first NBA scoring title. There’s a good chance he becomes one of the greatest basketball players of all-time. But we don’t measure players by their first three years in the league. So until he wins a couple rings, we aren’t calling him a legend.
Likewise, we don’t measure games by their first three years on the market. So what if Modern Warfare 2 sold twenty million copies? We’re eight months removed from that release. Computer gamers are already falling back to Call of Duty 2 and Call of Duty 4. And if console gamers head for Black Ops without a second thought, what legacy does Modern Warfare 2 really have? I think X-Fire’s stats have something to say about it.
Modern Warfare 2: Best Call of Duty Game Ever?
I mean, anyone remember when Warcraft II and Total Annihilation were seen as equals to Starcraft? True story. In 2001, GameSpy did their own “top games” list. Starcraft was placed ninth. Warcraft II was third. Two years later, they ran down the real-time strategy genre. Starcraft? Second. Total Annihilation? Top spot.
I’d say things have changed a bit in the seven years since. Warcraft II on Battle.net does not exist anymore. Nobody plays it. If Blizzard Entertainment pulled the plug tomorrow, nobody would notice and fewer would care. If you want to play online, you play at War2.ru. Total Annihilation never got the privilege of a centralized online gaming service. So today, Blizzard Entertainment wages catfights with the government-sponsored gaming organization of South Korea to determine who controls Starcraft: The Spectator Sport. And that’s a legacy I can get behind.
—
So let’s recap: When I bring up the “greatest video games” in my writing, you can imply the following unless noted elsewise: The game or games are being viewed with a Western perspective. Eligible games are any product that received a commercial release for a “major” distribution platform. Legacy, importance to the industry, sales, reception, and critical consensus all factor come into play. And if I need to break a tie, I’ll use my jurisdiction. There you go. That’s my thesis.
So I won’t disappoint: Tens of thousands of eligible games. What rules them all?
You saw that coming. Could it be anything else? Gamers love their shooters. They love competitive multiplayer. They love their pretty graphics. Content creation is becoming a business model. And iD Software was five years ahead of their competition when Doom hit shelves in 1993. Maybe Half-Life gets the nod for ushering in the “hyper-realistic” first-person shooter. But the wars of Xbox Live are not being settled in scripted, single-player action. And that bite-size description would be completely disingenuous to Doom, the Wolfenstein 3-D that preceded it, Doom’s production history, its technological advances, its deathmatch multiplayer, its memorable weapons and monsters, its controversial art design, the celebrity it gave to John Romero, the catch-up played by the rest of the industry, the level design that gave way to a robust modmaking community, the release of the source code that makes the game playable on modern computers and beyond, and the console-shooter-first market that would eventually spawn in its wake.
I expect better from game journalists, amateur and paid. There’s no shortage of enthusiasm. Unfortunately, that enthusiasm is what turns lists into a revolving door debate. And if you want to really prove to people your opinion matters, that you want to let the entire world know you’re an authority, you can start by becoming one. And that means playing the hell out of games and proving you know them inside out.
But hey, that’s just my opinion. You disagree with me on that?
…
…
Well, you’re just a douchebag.
What Real ID may look like.