[PODCAST End of Year 2019] Game of the Year Is Too Easy. How About Game of the Decade?

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I had a daughter to Skyrim. Was wrongfully terminated from one job then got the best job of my life to Skyrim. I celebrated nine more years of marriage to Skyrim. I discovered an unhealthy addiction to Skyrim and then kicked that same addiction to Skyrim. I’ve lost weight to Skyrim and gained it all back to Skyrim. I’ve had a black President to Skyrim. I’ve had to stop caring about politics again to Skyrim. I visited my mother’s homeland in the Philippines to Skyrim, and visited my dad in the hospital to Skyrim. I learned how to cook, how to draw, how to write again, all to Skyrim.

My game of the decade is Journey.

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And that’s exactly the thing I was grappling with. The Witcher 3 is very, very high on my list of “Games of the Decade,” but I ultimately realized that the real appeal of The Witcher 3 (for me) is the writing. I never actually enjoyed the combat (or the potion-making or repairs etc.) in that game. It was mostly the stuff I did between Gwent and enjoying the writing. I would happily play The Witcher 3: The Visual Novel, but with Skyrim, I want to be there.

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After reflecting on the games I’ve played over the past decade, I think my personal GOTD is still one that came out at the very start of the decade: Mass Effect 2. We’re coming up on the 10-year anniversary of it’s release in just a few more weeks, and it’s still probably my favorite game. The cast of characters in that game is still my favorite ensemble of game characters in anything I’ve played, and I’ll always remember the feeling in my stomach as I navigated the final mission for the first time, hoping that I could keep everyone alive (and I did!). They may have stumbled a bit with the landing with ME3, and the final boss may have been pretty narratively underwhelming, so it’s certainly not a perfect game. But more than anything, it opened my eyes to some of the storytelling possibilities of the medium, and for that, it will always hold a high place in my heart.

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It’s pretty interesting to see how other people grapple with this question, as well as working with it myself. Initially I admit I jumped straight into “What did I play the most of?” In which case it would probably be something like Skyrim or Borderlands 2, though other heavily played games would include Mass Effect 2, Pillars of Eternity, or Slay the Spire. These are all great games, fantastic even, and I don’t regret spending (most) of the time spent playing them.

But then you listen to, or read how other people are figuring it: “Did the game challenge my prejudices as to what types of games I can enjoy?” “Did it have something interesting to say?” “Did it affect me emotionally?”

I never thought I was much of a “difficult game” player, or appreciator of puzzles, yet I genuinely enjoyed Dead Cells, Dark Souls, Opus Magnum, Hexcells, and Into The Breach. None of these belong to genres I had previously considered myself to have any skill in whatsoever. Despite this, I found myself getting some decent way with 2 boss cells, completing almost every puzzle in Opus Magnum, and having a serious bash at hard difficulty on ITB.

Despite it not getting a great reception, I found Tyranny to be one of my favourite examples of the genre. Each playthrough could be relatively short (in comparison to a full campaign of PoE or Baldurs Gate), but it was surprisingly replayable at the same time. There was something new to be discovered about the world and its characters each time you tried a different path (and there were what, 3? 4?).

Last decade also taught me that games can be incredibly emotionally affecting. Life Is Strange hit me so, so hard. I know the ending is somewhat contrived, but the writing, acting, direction, all come together to build a real sense of attachment to the characters and their lives. I honestly fucking agonised over the ending, and felt emotionally beaten up for a long time afterwards. Even now I daren’t go near Season 1 again. Whilst LIS built attachment to other people, Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice put me right inside (or very close to inside) the protagonist’s mind. I was sceptical of its ability to deal with ‘mental health,’ especially with how they made such a big deal out of it. However, reading accounts by others who have dealt with or were dealing with mental health issues encouraged me to give it a shot. As a fairly neurotypical man, I can’t attest to its authenticity but it gave me a powerful sense of isolation, fear, and paranoia in such a way that I felt connected, and empathetic towards Senua. In doing so, perhaps it leant me an additional sense of how some people feel in the depths of crises. This seems valuable to me.

So having considered all the above, it came as something of a surprise when going through my list of games played that one stood out strongly above all the others: Pyre. I’m questioning myself somewhat; am I picking this because I don’t think anyone else has and I want to be different? Then I look at everything about it. Consistent with Supergiant Games’ previous (and likely future work) it has incredible visual design, and the music is … it’s just so fucking good! It plays like nothing else I’ve played, and despite the basic premise of each match being the same it never gets stale. It’s a real shame that this never took off because I feel the potential of this as an esport is seriously underappreciated. It’s fast, it’s tense, it’s strategic and tactical, it’s tight and polished, and it’s easy to read as a spectator.

Yet all that serves primarily to support the narrative; one of working together, of resolving conflict, dealing with loss, and building a future. The cast is diverse, and I came to enjoy talking to my companions, and the writing was such that I could even respect some of the opponents (I think I even deliberately underplayed one match so as to let the other team win).

It is gorgeous, novel and challenging, heartwrenching and warming, and despite my having not played it for a tenth the time as many other games, I have to put Pyre forwards as my game of the decade.

Peace

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I find this with a lot of games, in fact, increasingly so - that I like everything about the game other than the… gameplay. It’s one of the things making it hard for me to pick a game of the Decade, to be honest [along with a self-imposed limit that I can’t pick a game that I haven’t managed to get at least one full playthrough of, which rules out quite a lot of things!]

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So, I found it very hard to remember which games happened in the 2010s and which were just out, so I went through a few lists of published games to refresh my memory of stuff. As mentioned above, I excluded any games that I hadn’t “completed” in some sense - for multiple-ending games, getting at least 1 non-trivial ending, for puzzle games, completing at least the first “set” of puzzles. (This rules out every single Zachtronics Game, as I’ve never gotten around to doing all the initial set before going off and doing other stuff, for example; otherwise, TIS-100 might have been on the shortlist. It also rules out the first Dishonored, which I otherwise would have included, but never completed.).
I also excluded The Beginner’s Guide, as I think it’s not a game in the same sense that Dracula isn’t a letter (it’s a thing which tells a narrative via multiple games in sequence, and so there should be some other word for it).

I ended up with 22 games on the resulting long list of “Games published in 2010s which I liked enough to want to put them on the list”.
Roughly grouped in a sort-of-semi-random order, these are:

Shadowrun:Hong Kong, Disco Elysium, Shin Megami Tensei: Strange Journey, 80 Days, VA-11 HALL-A, Analogue: A Hate Story, Deus Ex: Human Revolution, DOOM:Sigil, Portal 2, Firewatch, Her Story, Gone Home, Doomdream, Thomas Was Alone, Spelunky HD, Gunpoint, Little Inferno, Super Hexagon, English Country Tune, Into The Breech, Invisible Inc, XCOM: Enemy Within

It took a long time to pick items off this list, one by one (there were a few low-hanging fruit, but most of them too a lot of agonising over). I rejected Disco Elysium fairly quickly, because whilst I really want to pick it, it’s also literally the game I’ve just finished playing so it’s benefiting strongly from primary-recency effects.

In the end, though, I think the winner might be Gone Home, which surprises even me. I don’t really know why I’m picking it over some of the other games (certainly, I spent a lot more time on, say XCOM:EW)… but it’s the one I feel worst about throwing out / that I can’t think of a bad thing about.

Edited to add: I should really include the SIGIL wad for Doom on this, since I did actually play through all of it this year, and it’s as much a ‘whole game’ as, say The Plutonia Experiment was to Doom 2.

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Undertale, by a wide margin. There were games I liked and even loved in the past decade, but very few of them had anywhere close to the same emotional impact.

Even as big as games have got, there’s still a severe lack of understanding for how to use musical theory to sell a moment, and Undertale has that quality in spades.

When the Deltarune demo came out a couple years ago, it made me realize how much I desperately needed that kind of experience again.

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I’ve been thinking about this long and hard, and wasn’t able to come up with my one Game of the Decade. What I ended up with were four metrics by which I could see myself picking a Game of the Decade, and the games that fit in them for me.

If I’m going for games that I’ve loved playing and were easy to lose myself, I’d say either Minecraft or Breath of the Wild. Minecraft came out when I was in the 10th grade, and to this day the best multiplayer experience I’ve had was on the Minecraft server that my friend started after moving away, where his old friend and new friends could interact. I haven’t even finished Breath of the Wild yet, and have no intentions of doing so in the near future.

If it’s about games that I’ve enjoyed and that have impacted my life in a real way, it would be D&D/Pathfinder or Into the Breach. However I may feel about them now, Pathfinder and D&D introduced me to TTRPGs, which led me down the path to who I am today. Into the Breach made me realize what I wanted to do with the Engineering degree I was completing, which quickly made me not want to have anything to do with Engineering when my marks weren’t good enough to follow through on that.

If we’re talking games that I felt were brilliant, singular experiences that I will remember forever, you’d get Undertale, Return of the Obra Dinn, and Kentucky Route Zero. I’m tired and can’t think of something to say about each of these, and I just want to get to the last category.

The last category is just Twitch Plays Pokémon (the original), if only because every time I think about it I’m just as in awe of it as I was at the time, and I’m dying to have someone bring it up when talking about the decade.

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My game of the decade for every decade I’ve lived through is one that turned gaming on its head for me and made me interested in an entire genre of games that I previously was not vested in.
80s Dragon Quest
90s Symphony of the Night
00s Demon’s Souls
10s Into the Breach
Funny enough, each of these were games I was on the fence over as they came out. Convinced they wouldn’t be for me only to become intensely obsessed with them and then filled with desire to find more like them.

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If we’d had a category for “cultural event in games of the decade”, I definitely would have mentioned it. A community playing a game (something that’d been done before, even in the 1990s in auditoria) in the most 21st C way and surrounded by the social media trappings and memery of the 2010s is definitely something that sums up the decade.

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I echo Crimsons sentiments. And for me my game of the decade goes to either MGSV or… State of Decay.

I grew to love the generated characters I started with, I developed personalities based on their pre-rolled stats. Building a safe place for a community just felt so good as it actually felt safe. Going out (especially at night) to scavenge felt like a real danger, you had to go prepared, but not too prepared because if I die another life gets risked going to retrieve my rucksack. Do I risk taking a car? yes it’s quick and safe but it’s loud and draws attention, or do I go quietly, creeping in the night?

Then weapons! when should I shoot? because that will really draw attention and i’ll quickly find myself overwhelmed.

I have so many memories of characters escaping a horde by the skin of their teeth, heroes that became zombie slaying machines and folks filled with anxiety they never left the base, and that was fine.

Whilst standing on the bonnet of a wrecked pick up surrounded by dozens of zombies all grabbing at their next meal, I look out and think “where do I go from here, is there a way out?”. Sometimes there isn’t, and that’s ok.

Yup, my game of the decade is State of Decay

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I think Breath of the Wild has broken most open world games for me and already stands as a mish mash of other games of the decade, from Skyrim to Dark Souls, to Minecraft. Even though it technically wasn’t released this decade, I am going to be that person that says Minecraft. It’s kept on being iterated on and expanded across consoles. It’s a game I still like to hop on every once and a while and lose myself exploring whatever procedurally generated world it conjures up.

Having said all this…

Titanfall 2 is the best FPS there has ever been and I never get bored playing the multiplayer, finding new high octane ways to speed through levels and flying drop kick some dude in the face. It has yet to get old.

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You may have just sold me on giving State of Decay 2 another shot at grabbing me.

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I honestly need to play a lot more SoD 2, I had a baby around the time of release so just couldn’t put the time in. The frequent balance changes and things they have added in patches looks really cool. Plus there’s an interesting looking story DLC which has me intrigued.

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I narrowed it down to four, that’s close enough, right? First there’s The Binding of Isaac. If you really forced me to pick one game for the entire decade, there’s an excellent chance it would be this. There isn’t really anything else I could pick, considering it’s my most-played game ever, with upwards of 500 hours across all the versions. It was the first roguelike to devour my life, the first indie game I was obsessed with, and one of the first games I bought on Steam (even though I played it on a MacBook with a keyboard ruined by spilled Sprite). It’s the perfect encapsulation of the direction I was headed in at the beginning of the decade.

Dishonored - A big part of the '10s for me, and I think this is true of growing up in general, was figuring out exactly what my niche is and setting up camp there. Dishonored is 100% my niche. I’ve always liked stealth games and in retrospect I’ve always liked immersive sims, but this was able the first time I was put a name to the latter. And that’s kind of important, y’know? It helps you figure out exactly what it is you like about a game, and once you know that you can start looking for it in places that aren’t immediately obvious. This was also one that got me thinking more critically about games; there’s still an unfinished essay somewhere on my hard drive about the women of Dishonored 2.

Gone Home - This was the first time I was truly bowled over by a video game narrative. At the time the state of storytelling in games was so dire that in most cases we were content to settle for scraps; games didn’t need to have genuinely good stories, they just needed stories that were “good for a game.” You saw this a lot with big AAA games being universally praised for narratives that were, in reality, okay at best. We’ve come a long way since then (and yes, we still have a long way to go) and games like Gone Home played a big role in that. This one also struck a chord with me for its representation of young, queer romance - I somehow managed to avoid finding about about that aspect of it before playing it, and the arc of “wait, is this doing what I think it’s doing?” to “I relate to this on a level that brings me physical pain” is easily the strongest emotional response I’ve ever had to a game.

Diaries of a Spaceport Janitor - If Gone Home was about figuring out that I didn’t need a traditional “game” structure to enjoy a game, then Diaries of a Spaceport Janitor is about figuring out I don’t need any structure at all. What I get from this game is so abstract and inscrutable that I have difficulty talking about it. It’s the sense that the world is so much bigger and stranger than I could possibly understand, that there are systems at play that I’m barely scratching the surface of. I wasn’t even sure if I was making progress or just roaming through the city at random most of the time. Of course most of this is an illusion, but does it matter when the illusion is this effective?

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I posted this in the “Share your games writing/criticism” thread, but I figure I’d add it here too.

I compiled data from games sites, mainstream publications, forums (including this one!), youtube videos, etc. etc. on their Game of the Decade choices in order to find out what The People’s Game of the Decade was.

If you want to read the blog about how I got the data and how I ranked everything (including a list of all the runner-ups), check it out here:

Otherwise, you can find the Top 100 Games of the Decade list here, including :

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I just finished listening to the podcast and ended up thinking about it a lot today, so I thought I would make a post. Here is my Top 10:
Civilization 5
City Of Heroes
Subnautica
Creeper World 3
Overwatch
NHL 20
Portal 2
Titanfall 2
No Man’s Sky
City of Heroes
Tony Hawk (I know I am cheating with this, but I still play the PC mod a ton)

Honorable mentions: Endless Space 2, Stellaris, Super Hot, Gone Home, Destiny 2

Subnautica is my game of the decade. It lead me to discovering the survival genre. I love the exploration and crafting. Story really never does much for me. Discovering new things and figuring out how things work does. The MMO genre used to give this to me, but it became such a slog of mediocre combat. I have since put many hours into games like No Man’s Sky, 7 days to Die, and Ark. None of them give me the same thrill that Subnautica did. And still does. Hopefully the story re-write on Below Zero will be a worthy successor.

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