A tradition is when it happens more than once: the Alternative Talking about Waypoint Favourite Games Thread by me

[diglett]

@aoanla

However: it’s important in any discussion within a mature community to allow disagreement, and that can include letting someone say “actually I know all you lot really liked Andor, but just as a note, it didn’t work for me”, for example. Otherwise you just get lost in groupthink because people are only allowed to be positive about things, and so the loudest shouts of positivity “win”.

I don’t mean this to be invalidating if there are people here who feel this way, but I’m not sure these forums have ever been constructed or moderated in a way that prevents disagreement. Like, I don’t think someone going into the “Favorite Watching” thread and saying that Andor didn’t work for them would have gotten a bad response (though the response it would get would probably depend on what it’s trying to say, but this hypothetical probably isn’t helpful carried farther out). I think the reason no one did so, (assuming there is at least one person here who thought it was just fine — I haven’t seen it), is a little different.

Like first, I think asking people what their favorite games/movies/etc. of a given year, though, is going to turn into an exercise in hagiography, at least a bit. I enjoy reading through the mini-essays of what everyone found meaningful, I think more than I would a debate about whether or not a game deserves the praise it might be getting. It gets to the core of what I think has always been a point-of-discussion on the Waypoint pods about what GOTY discussions, top 10 lists, etc. actually are — I think generally saying something is your favorite game of the year is more like drawing attention to a… “resonant thing” more so than it is conferring a perfect score to a really nice gymnastics routine, you know? There can be easy points of contention in judging a gymnastics routine. Multiple people judge them because they will inevitably disagree. That feels like fair game in most of the other threads on this forum, at least the ones that emerge around specific games. I’ve had those kinds of discussions with plenty of y’all.

But when the point being made is “this thing meant something to me,” I don’t know if sustained criticism is a productive response. My viewpoint is definitely framed by the time I’ve spent in academia, but I think negative criticism is usually a lot easier than the kinds of positive criticism that emerge on these threads. Because explaining why you care so much about a particular object requires a kind of vulnerability that explaining why you don’t like a thing just doesn’t. Which doesn’t mean it’s better, or that there’s not a place for it. But does I think say something about why none of us feel like having those kinds of back-and-forths in these threads.

Does that make the polls counterintuitive? Maybe. But also polls are an good and simple way of engaging people who are much more tenuously involved in a community. There are 54 votes on the Favorite Game poll to only 10 posts on the thread itself. Maybe next year 5 of the 44 people who didn’t write anything decide to write something there, because they got a nice feeling from that small bit of participation and got more involved because of that.

[aoanla]

@diglett

But when the point being made is “this thing meant something to me,” I don’t know if sustained criticism is a productive response. My viewpoint is definitely framed by the time I’ve spent in academia, but I think negative criticism is usually a lot easier than the kinds of positive criticism that emerge on these threads. Because explaining why you care so much about a particular object requires a kind of vulnerability that explaining why you don’t like a thing just doesn’t. Which doesn’t mean it’s better, or that there’s not a place for it. But does I think say something about why none of us feel like having those kinds of back-and-forths in these threads.

I mean, sure, but I do want to push back a bit on the idea that “explaining why you care about an object” is harder than explaining why you really don’t like an object (not just why it’s not perfect). It’s strong emotional responses in general - not just adoration, but also fear, disgust etc - that make us vulnerable.
(And, for example, in the case of Inscryption, I felt very strongly negatively about it - not just “I can happily critique this”, but deeply disliked it to the point where it’s basically the only game I ever refunded on Steam…) Now, again, obviously, it’s fine for other people to have different tastes, and it obviously wouldn’t be fair for me to argue that people who like Inscryption are wrong - but one could reasonably have a discussion on this in a thread about “Favourite Games”, where we all understand each other better as a result. And, no, it’s not going to change anyone’s minds, probably, on how they feel about that game, but we’ll all have learned something anyway.
Because, it turns out that you can have this kind of discussion in good faith. (It’s just that you need a reasonable community to do it in, which, for example, twitter is not and never has been.)

(Similarly, I’m the source of the one bit of negative voting in any of the threads for this year - I put in a negative vote for Return to Monkey Island, which didn’t even get a positive vote from anyone - but I’d have been very interested in having a polite discussion with someone who really liked it. I can sort of see how someone might, if they cared more about some aspects of it and I did (and conversely, less about other aspects, and probably if they didn’t like hard puzzles…))

The thing is, though, we tend to treat the Favorite X threads as nomination threads rather than discussion threads anyway - other than Andor, most of the posts (including my own) that want to mention a game/etc that someone else already mentioned tend to pass quickly over it, as if it doesn’t need talking about as it “already got a nomination”. So we don’t really get much positive discussion either - partly, again, I suggest, because we’re making this implicitly a place to collect nominations for a “vote”…
…and (editing in a bit later after some thought) this is also why we tend to find people writing hagiography rather than more nuanced takes on their nominations. Personally, whilst I do think Pentiment and Last Call BBS are my games of 2022 published in 2022, I have more nuanced opinions on them than that they’re perfect - Pentiment’s very much aiming for a particular subset of the population, and (for example) if you like your text voiced at all, you’re not getting that, and it does have the usual issues of even well written multiple-choice adventures; and all Zachtronics games are similarly narrowly-targeted, with Last Call BBS suffering from a particular reliance on people being into the late-80s/early-90s computer scene - plus not every one of the bundled actual games was a hit for me (I really didn’t like the food court factory game for some reason…).

[okonomichiyaki]

Just want a chime in and say I appreciate this thread and the discussion. I always find the end of year GOTY stuff a little bit alienating, because it’s a reminder of just how few recent games I actually end up playing in a given year. But it sounds like I’m not alone. I love hearing about people dusting off old games, and this extends to the Waypoint coverage, I wish they had spent a bit more time deep diving on their honorable mentions lists. Personally I think the polls are fine, although I rarely participate because voting for the only one game out of five that I actually played seems kind of silly. I am much more interested in the mini essays people write, even if there’s not a lot of back and forth debate.