I've hitched my hype cart to a lot of games over the years, gushing my enthusiasm to everyone around me to try and get them on board. Some have worked out (Witcher 3, Metal Gear V), and others not so much (No Man's Sky, Fallout 4). After all of that, though, I think Overwatch is still my proudest bet. Right from the first time I saw that Pixar-looking trailer and explored the whole website that went up all at once in November 2014, I could feel that something special was happening. And from that first reveal all the way through launch in May 2016 to today, Overwatch has only grown more important to me. It became an even bigger deal in my life this year because of the launch of the Overwatch League, in more ways than I could have ever expected.
What if a free-to-play mobile game was designed to make you feel like a rich whale playing a free-to-play mobile game, and it was crazy generous with premium currency, made the grind feel like you were always progressing in huge leaps and bounds, and told you all over the place, all the time just how powerful and awesome you are? For people who pre-registered at least, that's exactly what Darkness Rises turned out to be.
You've seen me list every game I've played in a year before, and even keep track of how much time and money I spent playing every game, but this year I wanted to do something different. After last year, I was tired of keeping track of every little thing and felt like it was distracting me from the experiences I wanted to have with games. So this year, you're getting a much shorter list: the games I played in 2018 that actually mattered to me (GTMTM).
These are the games that made an actual impact on my life--the ones I thought about even when I wasn't playing them, the ones that made me feel something strongly, the ones I talked to people about and shared and loved. There's not real scientific or consistent criteria for what made this list, and that's the whole point. Each for its own reasons, these are the 9 games that actually mattered to me in 2018, in chronological order of when I decided they were going to be on this list:
And that's it. I'm sure I played 100+ games again this year, just like previous years, but these are the ones that really meant something to me.
But what do these games mean to me, exactly? Let's discuss. Over the next 10 days, I'll publish a new post every day about the next game on the list, ending with an "Honorary Mentions" and conclusions post. I'll come back and update this post with links each day. As you can see, you can start right now with God of War. Enjoy, and let me know which games mattered to you in 2018!
This is the only God of War game I have played, and to be honest, I never thought I would touch any game in this franchise. I always thought these games looked gross, and then when I watched Anita Sarkeesian's videos, I was beyond repulsed.
But right from the first reveal, this game was different. In particular, I was continually impressed by the game's new director, Cory Barlog. He seemed to have a very different concept for this franchise, and to be a genuine, passionate, and creative guy, and it showed in every trailer and clip released before launch. Finally, when the reviews came in and were almost universally gushing, I decided to give it a shot.
Like every year, the
year 2017 had 12 months. And I spent one of those months playing games. One
month, 18 minutes, and 26 seconds, to be exact.
In 2016, I kept track
of every game I played. People liked it, so in 2017,
I upped the ante and kept track of every second and every penny spent on
games--both videogames and tabletop games. If you like games and want to keep
liking them and playing them happily, don't do this.
If you don't care about
words and just want my data, go for it.
If you care a little bit
about words, but not too much, I get it. Here's my main point: games should
entertain, inspire, or both at all times. If a game is just dragging you along
or employing you in repetitive tasks just for "rewards," stop
playing. Get what you want out of your time and your life, don't get tricked
out of it by someone else's greed.
If you care about words
enough to read a lot of words, please, come with me....
Starting on January 1, 2016, I kept a list of every game I played for the whole year, including both videogames and tabletop games. Every game I touched counted, even if I only played it for a few minutes. I didn't especially try to get a large number, I just wanted to keep track of what games I played.
All told, I played 147 games across 10 different platforms in 2016.
Violence in videogames has been controversial since nearly the very start of the medium’s history, since the 1976 arcade release Death Race allowed players to run over suspiciously human-looking creatures with a pixelated car (Egenfeldt-Nielsen, et al. 62). Brad Bushman, a violent videogame researcher, recently declared unequivocally, “The research clearly shows that playing violent videogames increases aggressive thoughts…aggressive feelings…[and] aggressive behavior.” Though Bushman certainly cites a great number of studies, his discussion—and much of the wider cultural debate on the topic—lacks some important facts and perspectives. Other research, writing, and careful study of particular games can fill much of these gaps.
Recently, other researchers have attempted to bring some of that greater perspective into the
discussion, with surprising results. Dr. Andrew Przybylski from the Oxford Internet Institute, for instance, just published a study linking the increased aggression caused by videogames not to their violence, but to the difficulty in mastering the game’s controls. Professor Richard Ryan, a co-author on the study, said, “The study is not saying that violent content doesn't affect gamers, but our research suggests that people are not drawn to playing violent games in order to feel aggressive. Rather, the aggression stems from feeling not in control or incompetent while playing” (Lee). The aggression these videogames cause, then, is not dissimilar to that of any playground sport—players exhibit greater aggression because they are in a competitive situation of which they are attempting to gain and maintain control. As most of the violent videogames studied by Bushman and others include a competitive element requiring technical mastery, these findings call much if not all of the previous research into question. However, despite these findings, the wider cultural view of videogames remains antagonistic, including frequent calls for the banning and/or control of the sale of violent videogames altogether—the most prominent example of which being a California law that was taken all the way to the United States Supreme Court, where videogames were found to be protected under the First Amendment as free speech. The Supreme Court reasoned that games deserve such protection because, “video games communicate ideas—and even social messages” (Schiesel). It is these ideas and social messages that Bushman and others seem to largely ignore in their studies.
***SPOILERS FOR THE LAST OF US INCOMING--BUT ONLY FOR THE PROLOGUE***
Naughty Dog’s 2013 release The Last of Us is one such game that uses violence as part of a larger social message. It is a game that is horrifically violent, but only so to question the value and power of human relationships, and to purposely push the player to question the costs of survival in a post-pandemic world. The game is set twenty years after the real-world cordyceps fungus inexplicably jumps from ants and spiders to humans, with apocalyptic effects on human civilization. In the game, players take on the role of Joel, a middle-aged former construction worker who lost his daughter shortly after the outbreak to a soldier attempting to contain the spread of the infection. In the bitterness and disillusionment that follows the loss, Joel lives outside the law of the military state the pandemic left behind, working as a smuggler and doing whatever it takes to survive. Everything changes, though, when Joel is hired to smuggle a girl, Ellie, out of the city, and the journey leads them both across the entire country as they search for the only group that might be able to produce a cure for the infection.
Every act of violence in the game, then, is an act of either survival or protection as Joel fights for his own life, but even more for the life of Ellie, the de facto second daughter he refuses to lose under any circumstances. Players take on both human and zombie-like “infected” in the game, committing terribly graphic acts of violence against both—but never is this violence gratuitous, it is purposely horrific to emphasize the terrible costs of survival in this fallen world, always challenging the player to question what he or she is fighting for and if it is worth it. This is why one writer on reddit wrote that the game, “taught me something about myself that I never knew before…that I have a very strong paternal instinct.” In this way, the game is as much about the depth of love between Joel and Ellie as it is about defeating their enemies—the title is, after all, The Last of Us, and it is in the defense of and fleshing out of that us that the whole game blooms.
The message of the game’s violence is supported by its mechanics and systems to the same degree of attention as its narrative. Videogame journalist Nathaniel Mott explains this well: “Killing someone in the Last of Us takes time. Nocking an arrow or aiming a gun isn’t an instantaneous process. Making your shots count requires patience — which means that you spend more time observing your target than you otherwise might have. You have to hear them talk, watch them walk, and recognize that they’re as alive as you are (in the game, anyway) before you’re able to change that fact.” Resources are very scarce in The Last of Us, especially in the higher difficulty levels, meaning that as the game increases in difficulty, the player actually has to find more ways to avoid confrontation altogether in order to survive. In this way, the game frames violence as less desirable—the better players find more ways to avoid it—and reemphasizes that role of the violence as only an act of defense and survival.
When violence does come in The Last of Us—and it does come often, even to those who try to avoid it at all costs—it is most often in close quarters, chaotic, and full of improvisation. Joel will use anything around to his advantage, picking up bricks, bottles, pipes, planks, and other things. Depending on the player’s environment, Joel will even use hand rails and tables to smash enemies against for killing blows to the head. The designers have even go so far as to use the word “intimate” to describe the feel they were trying to create in such moments (Reilly). At times, enemies will plead with the player to spare their lives, or negotiate for the life of a friend Joel is holding at gunpoint. The game works very hard to never let the player forget that even though they are fighting for their own survival, their enemies are in the exact same situation. This, then, serves to make the violence all the more horrifying and viscerally disgusting. Many would point to this as the heart of the problem of videogame violence, but Ian Bogost argues the exact opposite—that the more realistic and more revolting violence is the better because violence is revolting. “If anything,” he writes, “trivializing death and torture through abstraction is far more troublesome than attenuating it through ghastly representation” (140). In many ways, The Last of Us is one of the best examples of how to treat violence in a videogame—honestly, and with each act both showing a real price and drawing a real cost from the player.
Violence in videogames—and any media, for that matter—has always been controversial, as it should be. But in the end, it is more dangerous to trivialize and generalize violence than it is to realistically depict it. If videogames do depict violence, it is the responsibility of the game designers to emphasize the human cost of violence—its abhorrence and terror. The real danger is in videogames reducing violence to cheap, easy clicks and button-presses, easy to perform and easy to digest. The Last of Us asks its players to consider what justifies violence—and what the cost is even when it is supposedly justified. Violence is terrible—and when it is simulated, it ought to be terrible as well.
