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 10th 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.
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