Can Best of the Decade Lists Actually Represent All That Gaming Has Become?
On Monday Polygon published “The 100 best games of the decade.” It is a strange list. Partially this is due to confusion about how exactly the article ranks its choices. The preface states, “this list represents games that Polygon’s team members have enjoyed playing the most, and still admire.” But in the next paragraph the editors write that some of the games on the list “represent wider shifts in gaming culture in the last decade.” A list of personal favorites is not the same as the most culturally significant games. Mixing the two categories necessarily leads to some confusion. Even granting the definitional mishmash of this list, there are definitely some odd choices. I have no clue how a Shadow of Mordor game got on the list, while Arkham Asylum did not. Her Story and The Witness, although I enjoyed both of them, seem to be included primarily as prestige indie titles. The list includes Death Stranding, even though no one outside of the games press has played it. And then there is Flappy Bird and Kim Kardashian: Hollywood. Look, these games do get unnecessarily shitted on because they are mobile titles and geared towards a more casual audience. Moreover, they are pretty good! But I am certain they are not “100 best games of the decade” good. If you are choosing a mobile game for its cultural impact, Candy Crush would be a more natural choice. But if you are going for quality, there are so many other, far more deserving titles for mobile games: Desert Golfing, Granblue Fantasy, Survive! Mola Mola!, Jelly Juggle, You Must Build a Boat, 80 Days, to name just a few. And honestly, the Style Savvy series is probably the best series that is directly aimed at women.
But these are quibbles, and lists like this exist to make pedants like me push up our glasses and go “actually…”. Putting aside the nitpicking, something about this list still feels off to me. I cannot argue with the inclusion of many games: Frog Fractions (#61), The Last of Us (#59), Rocket League (#23), The Witcher 3 (#9), The Elder Scrolls: Skyrim (#50), Stardew Valley (#22), Dark Souls (#8), League of Legends (#6) are all solid choices, even if I might argue about their ranking. I can’t even disagree with the choice of Hatsune Miku’s Minecraft as the game of the decade. But even though I cannot articulate real opposition to many of the choices for the list, the list feels still feels wrong.
In explaining my discomfort, I have found a term commonly used by television critics helpful: monoculture. Monoculture refers to a time when everybody watched the same TV shows, where there was a common shared culture around viewing certain television properties. There are some problems with the concept of monoculture, especially since it is often used as a synonym for “Peak TV” or “Golden Age Television” (which was catalyzed on premium channels like HBO that were not actually watched by everyone). But I think monoculture can be a useful term for the state when the limited number of platform holders in a medium guarantee that the public’s attention is restricted to an equally limited number of products.
For gaming, the 2010s represent a fundamental explosion of gaming’s monoculture. At the beginning of the decade, gaming was largely restricted to three console game makers, with a vibrant but often overlooked PC gaming scene. By the end of the decade, the number of devices we game on has multiplied, as have the things we consider video games. I do not think it is an exaggeration to say the the last decade has been the most significant for video games since the eighties. These years have redefined what video games are and what they can be. Some things the decade has wrought: it has shown even naysayers that video games can be art; it has loosened the grip of consoles over the marketplace, and has raised PC gaming as a viable competitor; it has introduced new genres and new types of games, such as “walking simulators” and games made in Twine; it has shown that games can be enjoyably streamed and watched as well as played; it has demonstrated your phone or tablet can be a gaming device; it has shown that indie games can supplement AAA games, and provide the games that big publishers refuse to make. I could go on and on. Any way you look at it, the 2010s have fundamentally changed how and where we game. Any monoculture in gaming, centered around console AAA game releases, has been effectively shredded.
The death of gaming’s monoculture has made it impossible for any one “best of the decade” list to capture all of gaming. And what’s more, it is already nearly impossible for any one critic to have systemic knowledge of the entire gaming landscape. Look over the Polygon list: has anybody actually played all the games? I doubt it. Even the most engaged critic can only play a fraction of the important games of the decade, let alone the hundreds more you need to play before you determine what is the most important. There is only so much time in the calendar year to pencil in all the 80-hour long games. Oversaturation of content, of course, is not unique to video games. It’s increasingly impossible for movie, television, and music critics to watch and listen to everything that is out there. But again, the time commitments for video games dwarf any other medium. Too many 140-minute movies or 10-hour television series are one thing, too many games that require hundreds of hours of dedicated time is something else entirely
How can any list reflect the fractured state of video games in 2019? How can any “Best of the decade list” capture the sheer breadth of gaming at the present moment? I don’t think we should abandon lists. They remain valuable entry points into a subject. Lists are genuinely useful to newcomers, and help build a common canon, what examples of an art form one should look at first. Rather, we need to examine how we compose lists, and what scope and scale we impart to them. In this case, I think a list of the best games of the decade is precisely the wrong scale. There are too many games, and too much diversity in the games we play for this rubric to be useful. I suspect it would be more useful to think about the decade in genres or platforms. Alternatively, the fullest accounting might be discussing every year of the decade in question. I found the AV Club’s year-by-year decade in review a more compelling format, even though this particular list is even less inclusive than Polygon’s. And to speak about inclusivity: both lists do not include offerings from the most experimental, least mass-market corners of indie gaming. Where are the Twine games? And where are the art games? The games available only on itch.io? If a list has any hope of capturing the decade in gaming, it needs to take seriously the games that are not intended for mass consumption.
