10(ish) videogames for the 2010s

I played a lot of video games this past decade.

It probably had something to do with getting my first laptop in 2010 for my birthday, as well as staying semi-connected to the console scene.  But entering college in 2011 brought me from my more-or-less internetless life (living in the middle of nowhere made that a reality for a while) into a world where connections seemed everywhere.  Oh sure, I had a twitter in 2010, but I was just following Magic the Gathering people, so my view on what was happening was pretty limited.  But jump forward to September 2011 and bam, I’m now seeing all sorts of news about games daily; I join Reddit and the flow of information increases astronomically. 

Oh and I entered the workforce this decade so there was that as well.

In the spirit of a decade in review, I’m here to give a list of 10(ish) games that felt important to me.  Obviously this is super subjective, but all of these lists are.  Hell, I’ve seen lists that have Breath of the Wild #1 and that’s clearly stupid, I mean, there’s been lik-  Ahem. Anyway, like I was saying, this is a completely subjective list of games that were to me either events or signposts in the gaming landscape.  I’ve played at least a little bit of every game on the list, but most aren’t on here for their gameplay, and only one is in my top favorite games list.  But without further ado, let’s jump in

#10: Pokemon Go

In 2016, a few things happened.  I had my worst year imaginable with an absolutely miserable job, the place I was renting sent my stress levels through the roof with money concerns, and the presidential election cycle happened.  In the middle of the year, though, in the early days of July, a small game was released: Pokemon Go.  Initially it was a buggy mess, it would drain your battery in minutes, features were missing or broken all over the place, fixes only made things worse, and literally every human on the planet was playing it.

If you weren’t paying attention during that July and August of 2016, you might think that statement is hyperbole, and sure, it is, but not by much.  Driving through any neighborhood that had even a modicum of Pokestops, you would see droves of people.  And not just teens or 20somethings either, no, grandmas, Gen-Xers, everyone, their mother, and their mother’s mother were playing this game.  With all the animosity that was being spread that year, it was nice having a source of fun that could bring people together.

Pokemon Go was important primarily for that reason: it was a game everyone could and was playing, but it had other implications as well.  Driving into 20 years of Pokemon, Pokemon Go reinvigorated childhood sentiments in the games.  Even I, with next to no sentimental relationship to Pokemon, picked up some ROMs the year before when the game was announced and blew several hundred US dollars on a 3DS and the latest game, Pokemon Moon in 2017.  My family was asking me about Pokemon as the nerdy source of knowledge that I am, and even today my aunt and many cousins continue to play the game relentlessly.  It’s a game that transcended generations, pushed people outdoors, and brought communities together.  Take that, Call of Duty.

I played Pokemon Go mostly in 2017 and 2018, but still open the app from time to time.  They basically relaunched the game in 2018 which brought back most of the people I know that play today.  There’s a lot to do in the game and it’ll even track your walking when the app is inactive so you don’t need to have it draining your battery 24/7.  Pokemon Go represents the great communities that gamers can have and how the “hobby” of gaming isn’t some exclusive club.  It’s for everyone.

#9: Mass Effect 3

The year is 2012.  I’m in my second semester of college.  I’m playing lots of video games because college is easy and I’m a horrible student who just wants Bs.  I’m on twitter pretty regularly as I get more involved with the Magic the Gathering and Minecraft scenes.  And then I start seeing trailers for this new game.  There’s a giant squid floating over a city shooting lasers.  Then there’s more giant squids attacking Earth with lasers.  This is my first experience with Mass Effect.

            While I’ve never actually played Mass Effect 3 (oh no I lied earlier) I have played a bit of the OG ME, and it’s pretty fun.  But my experience with actually playing the games took a bit since my computer at the time couldn’t handle any of them.  No, what gets Mass Effect 3 onto this list was the outrage.

            If you’ve never played a Mass Effect game, let me poorly summarize for you.  You play as Shepard, a badass space marine dude with a lot of guns who everyone wants a piece of, fighting off alien robot squid from killing everyone ever.  You make a lot of decisions that make you either Lawful Good or Chaotic Evil, and the story actually changes in different ways depending on your alignment.  People raved about the first two Mass Effect games because of how the endings were different depending on your choices and how each game had influences on the next if you synced your saves (I think this is a thing).  All in all, the hype for this game was real.  At least, until it came out.

            When people started finishing Mass Effect 3, the discovered something: their choices didn’t matter.  There was only one ending.  The entire core conceit of the game, you playing Shepard how you want and dealing with the consequences of your choices just vanished.  To say this made people mad would be an understatement.  People were apocalyptic.  Rants, raving, demands for more endings, demands for refunds, I saw it all cross my twitter feed in my first real interaction with internet rage.  Obviously, not everyone hated the game, but the game’s ending (which eventually was patched to allow more options) isn’t really the point here.  The point is that this game meant something to me even when I hadn’t played it.  It was a demonstration of the echo chamber that is twitter and reddit, and how these communities just went apeshit over feeling they’d been slighted.  In the years since, I’ve seen all sorts of things, from global controversies like GamerGate to more insular things like GarrukGate (look up the original MtG card art for Triumph of Ferocity and you can figure out what went down there).  Each time, the Mass Effect 3 reaction comes to mind and makes me question: is this really an issue?  Are the people I see in the right or are they just feeding each other?  What actually matters in this issue?  In short, Mass Effect broadened my critical thinking.  Take that teachers who said games never did anything for you. 

#8: Dark Souls

            Spoiler alert: I hate Dark Souls.

            Ok, I like the lore, and the music, and some of the boss designs, but good lord the game is not fun.  Like, at all.  3/4s of the things in the game seem dropped in there just to frustrate you and piss you off and get you to quit and never buy another FromSoft game and guess what douchecanoes, it worked, I’m not buying your games.  My sibling will because they’re a masochist, but not me.

            I should probably give some background.  Dark Souls came out in 2011 (god that was a year and a half for gaming) to literally 0 fanfare that I saw.  Like, I did not know this game existed until 2013 when an anime reviewer I liked posted some videos of him playing it and memeing.  Then 2 years later, every single human being on the face of the planet was apparently playing this game.  It was truly insane how much Dark Souls went from niche hipster game to the most popular game on the face of the planet. 

            This massive growth piqued my curiosity until I played the game on PC, which quickly quelled my curiosity.  Dark Souls was hard and brutal with no way to make it easier, and since I play games to, you know, have fun, I hard passed after playing a bit at the request of my sibling.  Fast forward a few years, I’m sitting with a bunch of friends at a party and they’re all smashed.  One of them talks about Bloodborne, a game I know is basically Dark Souls with Cthulu and werewolves that I had tried a few months earlier and found lacking again.  They’re stuck on it, and I’m bored enough to give it a try.  And the weirdest thing starts to happen: I’m enjoying it.  Sure, I’m dying a ton but the gameplay is actually fun and engaging, the atmosphere is dope, and I make progress slowly and steadily.  Maybe it was playing with friends, maybe it was secondhand pot smoke, who knows, all I know is I had found a Souls game I could play.  Thus began a summer of playing Bloodborne, a game I now rank among my favorites.

            “But wait!” you exclaim, “Bloodborne isn’t the game on your list here, Dark Souls is.  Is Bloodborne later on the list?  Why would you talk about it here?” Well, thank you for noticing dear reader, and yes, Dark Souls is this section’s focus, and no, Bloodborne is not later on the list.  What that little story did was demonstrate something that is essential to enjoying and critiquing video games: not all games are made for you.  Do you hate Dark Souls like me?  That’s fine, go play more DOOM or Halo.  Do you hate MOBAs or MMOs?  Fine again, go play some God of War.  There’s billions of people on the planet, and every game can’t, and shouldn’t appeal to all of them.  Dark Souls also was a stepping stone in another path that I’ll be discussing in more detail in a future review.  Stay tuned for that.

#7: Overwatch

            It was 2015 and I was at Pax East for the first time.  It was like Mecca for me.  There were hundreds upon thousands of people walking around, just here to enjoy video games.  I obviously knew there was a community of gamers, but this event struck that home for me.  It was the most religious experience I had ever felt.  But I’m not here to talk about how great that event was.  I’m here to talk about this Blizzard game that was there. 

            At Pax East that year there was a big-ass Overwatch exhibit which, to be frank, I didn’t care about because it had a massive line and waiting in line is for squares.  Plus, there was Riichi Mahjong to play.  But one of my good friends at the time kept urging me to play it.  Unfortunately I was running on a 5 year old laptop at that time which could barely run anything.  So in the summer of 2016, I finally got a new PC, bought and downloaded Overwatch. 

            On its own, Overwatch was fine for a good while.  Like most games, I turned to the support characters because healing is OP (seriously, if you play a cleric in a game I DM, I hate you) and the easy healers were fun to play and pretty strong.  Eventually, they released Moira who I absolutely adored and played religiously.  All in all, the game was fine… until they released Brigette, who was absolutely cancerous.  Damage, CC, Healing, Armor, even Moira only got two of those.  After a few weeks of non-stop Brigette I pretty much quit Overwatch, only playing with friends occasionally since then, and I haven’t touched the game since I started playing Warframe. 

            Beyond the weird spiral I had with Overwatch, the game was instrumental in the new wave of game monetization with Loot Boxes.  If you play any F2P game (and many multiplayer games that aren’t free) you’ll be given the “opportunity” to dump cash into a slot machin- I mean a fun experience to try and get rare items.  By dropping this in a pretty well received game, the floodgates were opened for every two-bit developer looking to make quick cash to just dump loot boxes into their games 

            What does Overwatch tell us?  Mostly that people will endure anything today… up to a point.  Micrtransactions in a $60 game?  That’s small talk nowadays, especially for non-game impacting ones.  Completely broken playing styles?  Hey, as long as it’s mine.  But there’s a breaking point for everything.  I found my breaking point with Overwatch and the mainstream games industry.  Let’s see if other do too.

#6 Fallout: New Vegas & The Last of Us

            Two games in one?!? Do I know no bounds? Well, yes, and the primary reason these two are put together is for the rest of the list to be aesthetically pleasing to me, but they both give us similar lessons.  Let’s start at the top.

            Coming in 2010, Fallout: New Vegas was another entry in the Fallout series published by Bethesda.  Created by Obsidian, the game to this day is universally praised as being one of the best open world RPGs created.  With multiple dialogue options, quests, and several endings depending on which of the many factions you supported, the game deserves much of its praise. 

            On the other hand, The Last of Us is a pretty linear zombie game from 2013 by Naughty Dog.  Featuring the quest of Joel and Ellie as they attempt to make their way to a relative safe haven following a zombie apocalypse, the game offers a deep and engaging storyline.  Narratively and mechanically this game has received critical acclaim, and demonstrates with F:NV a demand for story based games.

           

            As opposed to some of the other entries on this list, the stories of these games take far more precedence than gameplay.  That’s not to say the games aren’t good games, like, there’s a reason Gone Home isn’t on this list despite also having a compelling narrative.  However, it’s pretty undeniable that F: NV’s combat is… iffy despite the amount of love it gets, and survival games aren’t exactly everyone’s cup of tea.  Even with their flaws, however, these games have engaged vast fanbases who have clamored for sequels since their release.  While due to its “lacking” metacritic score F: NV never got a sequel, Obsidian recently released The Outer Worlds, a spiritual successor to the game, and The Last of Us 2 is coming out next year, clearly indicating that this type of game is both here to stay and greatly enjoyed. 

Also I’ve barely played either of them.

            Don’t get me wrong, I clearly think these games are important, but they’re not my style.  However, I can’t leave games like them off the list because of how resonant they are with so many people.  Hell, my mom watched my siblings play through the entirety of The Last of Us and they have plans to do the same with the sequel.  What these games represent to me is the diversity of the medium, and how games can offer tales beyond “kill the baddies”.  Complex moral decisions can be made in video games, with characters can be praised for their depth and realism, all without sacrificing the essential medium of the video game.  As we see games like What Remains of Edith Finch, Life is Strange, and Firewatch come out, it’s important to remember that video games can be an artistic experience.  I for one am happy that’s the case.

#5 Amnesia: The Dark Descent

The year is 2011.  I’m just getting into the wider video game community and am hip with all the latest hot games that are popping off the charts.  By this, I of course mean Starcraft 2.  I was very much obsessed with the game despite, you know, not actually owning it.  But I was watching all the Youtube vids I could find on it: LifesaglitchTV, HuskyStarcraft, and of course Day9.  And it is to Day9 that this is dedicated to.

For you see, on Halloween of 2011, Day9 streamed a playthrough of the pretty popular 2010 horror game Amnesia: The Dark Descent, a game based around your character chugging some lose-your-memory juice, hunting down some douchebag, and being chased by a monster and some pig-zombie ass bitches.  All in all a great time.  And while I’d eventually play the game in 2012, the video “How Day9 Lost His Manhood” was far more impactful, being one of, if not the most important videos to come out for video gaming.  For it was this video that opened my eyes, and likely the eyes of many others, to streaming. 

Truth be told, I don’t know what twitch stream was the first one I watched.  I assume it was Day9 but it might have been a Magic the Gathering one.  But the lesson was clear: this was a new medium, a new way for people to enjoy video games that they couldn’t even play.  A way to interact live with people who were playing games that you either loved or were interested in.  And sure, Amnesia wasn’t the first game to be streamed, but it broke the floodgates for me and others to enjoy this way of sharing games.

While Amnesia may have launched my interest in Twitch as a service (because who doesn’t want to see a grown man scream live?) the game definitely pushed the idea for me of Youtube as a place to view videogame footage.  A year later, I got into League of Legends and immediately went to Twitch and Youtube to learn more about the game and how the people who were good at it played.

Also, while I don’t doubt that his career was launched by other things he did, a particular… ahem… National Socialist was first brought to my attention from his Let’s Play of Amnesia.  Since then I’ve had to live in the knowledge that some Nazi fuck is making more money than me just playing video games and fuck pewdiepie hope he eats shi-

Uh got on a bit of a tangent there.  Anyway, the point still stands.  Amnesia opened the floodgates for Let’s Plays and Twitch streams for me and likely many others.  The game itself? Great fun to play, more fun to watch, and important for what it did for gaming as a whole. 

#4 Undertale

Finish these phrases for me:

The cake is ____.

All your base ______.

I used to be an adventurer like you, ______.

Yep, it’s time to talk about the sensation of the decade: memes, and how they relate to video games.  While memes and video games have always gone together, few games have captured the collective memetic attention of the internet as well as Undertale did.  Marketed as the RPG where no one has to die, Undertale gives the story of a kid who drops into an underground society and has to make their way out.  Full of a diverse cast of characters, excellent jokes, and some genuinely moving moments, Undertale is a game… I should probably actually finish.  Or play for longer than idk, 3 hours?  At least I’ve played this one a bit.

Of course, what Undertale represents here isn’t just the game, it’s the impact it has had on culture, both in gaming and outside it.  While other games may have captured the attention of mass culture through memes, Undertale did it to a degree few other games can even compete with.  Undertale cut to the core of its audience and time, using previous memes to its benefit to draw players in emotionally, likely with them being unaware it was happening.  With both jokes applicable to the time like doge and more overarching humor tropes, Undertale used the concept of memes to advance its own status as a hit game.

That’s not to say that Undertale did nothing original, far from it.  One only has to look at the hundreds of covers of Megalovania that exist on Youtube to see just how beloved the game is and how much people want to interact with it.  Undertale also marks a clear delineation of how videogaming culture went from a niche subgroup to just a part of culture at large.  Look, I don’t know what to tell you, but if a pro wrestler walks out to a video game song wearing a cosplay of the character who’s theme the song is, video gaming has gone mainstream.  

           

            While Undertale used culture positively in getting people to experience it, many games have fallen victim to memes at their expense.  The infamous “Press F to pay respects” has entered the realm of legends due to its absurdity, and demonstrates how capricious cultural tides can be.  While some games that attempt to use popular memes to drive their popularity and fail, other spawn entire new memes around them becoming hits simply due to how quickly they spread across the internet.  We live in an age where in-jokes demonstrate one’s “superiority” with the creation of a popular meme being analogous to being a renaissance artist.  Where this is headed is anyone’s guess, but I don’t see videogame makers forgetting the lessons of Undertale anytime soon.

           

#3 ARMA 2

            My best guess is that you’ve heard of most of the games on this list so far.  Maybe you haven’t played some of them, like me, but at least you’ve been aware of their existence.  So about now, you might be looking at the game above and going to google asking “what the hell is this game?” The answer? Not much.  At least originally.

            Released in 2009, ARMA 2 was an open world military game that as far as I’m aware, no one played ever.  Of course, being released in 2009 and being pretty irrelevant on its own, one might ask why the hell it’s on the list.  The answer comes 3 years after the games release with a mod called DayZ.

            DayZ was a mod created to simulate life in the post-zombie wasteland, where you had to survive in a hellscape populated by the undead and worse, PvP obsessed players.  I initially encountered this mod through a series of youtube videos by a group of Minecraft griefers I thought were entertaining.  They showed off their hacking and relentless ability to aggravate random servers of players, all of which was pretty entertaining to young(er) me. 

           

            Moving past that, however, came something new and interesting: another mod built off the framework of DayZ: a battle royale.  This mod was the predecessor of a number of games built on this premise, with the creator building a game that would inspire a revolution: PUBG. 

            The idea of a deathmatch, last man standing game is pretty damn old, but the concept was popularized around 2012-2013 by both DayZ and Minecraft Hunger Games servers.  This idea was refined and refined until we got where we are today: where PUBG swept the world before being eclipsed by a game some consider a blessing and others a scourge: Fortnite.  From Fortnite spawned an army of clones, copies, and alterations on its formula that have shaped gaming for the past several years.

            Would we have gotten to Fortnite without ARMA 2, without DayZ? I don’t know.  Probably not.  And maybe this entry lacks merit, maybe the next few years will show that these battle royale games were just a flash in the pan.  But looking back, I think the impacts of DayZ can’t be understated.  While the follow-up game built on the mod was lacking, and the numerous copycats got nowhere, the past decade has had so many derivatives based on the formula of a big map with random weapons and a need to survive against impossible odds.  While the zombie craze may have died down (heh), the need for freedom, the chance at glory, and the struggle against near-impossible odds will continue to drive gamers forward.

#2 League of Legends

            I don’t know how many hours of League of Legends I played over the past decade, but its probably a lot.  Quick searches give me numbers in the range of over a month, but its really impossible to be sure.  Regardless, I can think of only a scant few games that even have a chance to compete with the sheer number of hours I’ve played LoL.

            While technically released in late 2009, I didn’t learn about the game until 2012 when I saw my roommate at the time playing it.  As a Timmy/Spike I immediately dove in to prove I was better than him (I don’t know why people play games with me ever) and was lost near instantly.  Few games have ever captured my attention as well as LoL has; the strategic depth is insane, with over a hundred individual characters to understand with each have multiple unique abilities.  No two games of League are ever alike, and with constant changes and additions, the game has remained relevant for over 10 years now. 

            For many years, playing a game of LoL was my baseline activity to any other activity I could be doing.  Many shows went unwatched, games unplayed, because the allure of LoL was too strong for me to resist.  Of course, not every game was a good game, but that’s what makes League so insidious: the twin possibilities that you can hard carry or get dumpstered (and the fleeting third of an even game, which all seek out yet rarely find).  The great games are truly great and make amazing memories.  Several of my best friends I’ve either met or got to know better by playing League.  Its nature as a long-form team game where everyone is needed to win (most of the time) sets it apart from other multiplayer games of the era, with similar games either being 1v1, too short to get to know your team, or where carry potential rules out some level of cooperation. 

            Additionally, League set the bar for e-sports.  While previous games such as Starcraft and various shooters may have been doing e-sports before, the quality of League’s e-sports blew everything else out of the water in my opinion.  I started playing around the time of the Season 2 World Championship, and even being incredibly new to the game the shoutcasting and camera work allowed me to follow the games and understand what each team was doing.  Since then the game has only improved in this division, with regional leagues increasing in quality consistently and the scope and scale of the major world tournaments growing far beyond my initial experiences.

            Throughout the years, I’ve had an on-again-off-again relationship with League.  There’s been plenty of times where I’ve thought that the average game dipped too far below my threshold for an enjoyable experience, while others were the pinnacle of entertainment for me.  Beyond that, the number of LoL clones I’ve played has been very large, though none came close to dethroning the King (yeah DotA, you’re a bitch-ass clone of League now, how does it feel?).  With the recent 10^th anniversary celebrations revealing a number of new games released by League’s Riot Games, I expect to interact with the League universe for the next decade very, very often.

#1 Skyrim

            A lot of people I’ve talked to and a lot of lists of “Best Games of the Decade” have one of Horizon Zero Dawn, Zelda: Breath of the Wild, or The Witcher 3 at the absolute top of their list.  And real talk: those games are all great.

            And a lot of those people have never played Skyrim.

            Skyrim is not the best game of the decade.  It’s barely a competent game in this year of our Lord 2020.  But by god, its impacts across gaming and culture have been bigger than nearly every other videogame.  Released in 2011, the Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim was the open world game that started off the entire open world craze.  Oh sure, it wasn’t the first, and many of its predecessors like Oblivion and Red Dead Redemption have been praised far above it, but Skyrim is truly a monolith of the 2010s in gaming and to deny it its place is folly.

            Like Undertale, Skyrim created new memes for people to enjoy as part of the in-group of those who had played it.  Like Amnesia, Skyrim created myriad Lets Plays and streams.  Few games have endured as long as Skyrim has, helped in no small part due to the propensity for Todd Howard to rerelease the damn thing every other year.  Even today, my friends and family will routinely go and play Skyrim again, saying “Oh I’m going to be a destruction mage this time” before inevitably falling into stealth archery. 

            Looking back at the past decade, in the years after Skyrim it’s influence could be felt in ways both subtle and profound.  Most obvious was the explosion of open world games, with the aforementioned BotW, Witcher 3, and Horizon being some of the most impressive.  Each game improves upon the conceit that Skyrim popularized, but each owes its DNA to Skyrim.  And mind that word: popularized.  There were open world games before Skyrim, but few of them had mainstream followings, and the timing at which Skyrim was released coincided with the popularization of all things nerdy, likely leading to its breakout success.

            But the most important thing about Skyrim in my mind is its accessibility.  The controls are simple, the best way to play is intuitive, and the story is easy to understand: there’s dragons, go kill ‘em.  There are popular videos of grandmothers playing the game, and anyone can enjoy the gameplay loop of go into a tomb, kill a bunch of dudes, get loot, leave.  And once you get bored of playing the game in its base form, mod it until it breaks, then play again.

            Like how Iron Man and Avengers brought comic books to the mainstream, Skyrim did the same with videogames.  Was it a fluke, a coincidence of timing?  Maybe.  The game is a buggy mess, the main quests have mediocre stories at best, and the mechanics of the game are solved so quickly that its hard to understand why people keep coming back.  However, people do, and call is nostalgia, call it whatever, its place up on this list has been well earned.

#0 Minecraft

            Let’s be real, if this wasn’t at the top of the list, you could just throw out my opinions on everything.  Minecraft has been THE defining game of the decade and it hasn’t been close.  And ok, technically Minecraft released in 2009, but it left Beta in 2011, and it’s released consistent patches and updates throughout the decade, so it gets in.  My interactions with Minecraft began in 2011, when my siblings both started playing.  I, the cooler older brother (lmao yeah right) refused to play this kid game… for like a month and then I was in.  And while I’ve paused and backed off from the game, I’ve never been out.

            Minecraft has been a juggernaut among games, rolling over the landscape and dominating everything that attempts to stand against it.  While other games that get popular might spawn copies or attempts to duplicate the experience which themselves get popular, almost no Minecraft clones even come to mind for me.  It’s an experience that’s deceptively simple, with the comparisons to Lego being incredibly apt for reasons beyond the actions taken.  There exist other block-based building toys, but none of them are Lego.  Similarly, there’s other block-based building games, but only Minecraft stands tall.

            For essentially every other game on this list, the lessons learned can be applied to things we learned from Minecraft.  Minecraft made youtubers millionaires and drove kids to streams to watch their favorite personalities playing the latest hit mods and alterations to the game.  Minecraft Hunger Games were one of the original Battle Royales, demonstrating the lengths people will go to win.  Minecraft memes are ubiquitous and universal.  Controversies? Of course, with the buying of the game my Microsoft and everything the creator Notch Hatsune Miku has done being on the top of the list.  Microtransactions? The game had to ban server owners from charging for in-game features, which led server owners to just add to “donation tiers” to dodge legal action; likely because Microsoft added its own in “bedrock edition”.  Open world size?  Minecraft is functionally infinite.  Perhaps the only thing that Minecraft can’t offer is a compelling story, mostly because the point of Minecraft is the freedom to do anything without constraints from a story getting in your way.

            The game’s fanbase is second to none.  Over 100 million people play the game each month, which is an absurd number.  Accessibility?  Please, every kid wants to play Minecraft.  Once they play Minecraft, they might start playing Fortnite, but the amount of DNA shared between those games makes them basically cousins.  I’ve been sitting on the train, playing Skyrim, and a little kid I’ve never met came up to me and asked to play Minecraft.  Which we of course did.

            I once had a conversation with someone on the topic of this list, with them arguing that Skyrim deserved the top spot.  Their argument was that people whose first game was Skyrim went on to other games, while Minecraft players only played Minecraft.  In fairness to them, that point has some validity.  But while Skyrim might draw people off to play other games, I argue that this is primarily a fault of Skyrim being such a mess.  In Skyrim, you mod the game to get it into a playable state, better than the base game in effectively all scenarios.  But with Minecraft, mods are just another experience.  Some mods change the game so much it becomes like another game.  Why bother with other games when you can get so much from the Minecraft experience? 

            I’ve played Minecraft for an absurd number of hours, potentially more than League of Legends, definitely more than Skyrim.  I’ve never really branched out into mods, because the base game is just so deep.  I’ve built towers of gold in creative, torn down other players’ towers as a griefer, built redstone devices complex enough to make my brain hurt troubleshooting them, run servers, gotten banned from servers, been the resident madman on servers, and completely crashed multiple games using TNT to great effect.  Just today I joined the literal Christian Minecraft Server where cursing is indeed banned.  Where will Minecraft go?  I have no clue.  Definitely not away, the game is too big to fail at this point, and unless someone does it better I don’t see it vanishing anytime soon.  Even if you don’t like the current version, go play on servers running ancient history, many still exist.  Or make your own, the game can be run on basically anything and servers can be set up even on moderately decent machines.  Minecraft has proven itself to be the king of this decade, and to be frank, I wouldn’t be surprised if it continued as monarch of this next one.