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Why I don’t have a “favorite” game.

by Omar (@siegarettes)

In which I both tell you why I find it difficult to pick my favorite games and what a few of them are.

“What kind of music do you listen to?” It’s a moment I keep remembering, a girl I had just been introduced trying to get an idea of my tastes. “What’s on of the bands you listen to?” I wanted to reply with Disasterpeace, but I knew that with him not being a commonly known artist she’d have no idea what it meant.  "Radiohead, I guess.“ 

With that she gave me an "ok” and the conversation was over. I should have said Disasterpeace.

What bothers me most about that conversation is how willing she was to leave it at that. The complex span of music and genres that I enjoyed was now reduced to my image as “that guy who likes Radiohead.” I like Disasterpeace for some of the same reasons I like Radiohead: both have a distinct quality and character, but manage to cover a wide range of styles and tones. Their style is changing, evolving. 

For the same reasons I can’t bring myself to give out a “Top 20 Personal Best Games of All Time”. I don’t have an immediate list of games that will forever be my favorites. It’s not something I’m willing to define myself by, nor something that is static. My feelings for games are defined by the person I was when I first experienced them. They are complicated and malleable, and my reflections on those games now are as much about who I was then as they are about those games.

I can’t even tell you that all of these games are “good” games, at least form a design standpoint. There are things that don’t hold up, that can’t be enjoyed in the same way by others. Sometimes those points are irrelevant, because those games are important. Those games mean something to me. 

I can tell you Link’s Awakening is my favorite Zelda game, the only one I bothered finishing. What that won’t tell you is that Link’s Awakening represents a combined effort with my brothers, a mystery that took the three of us to solve. It won’t tell you that the SELECT glitch introduced me to sequence breaking, gave us a broken world that felt like a space beyond the one the designers intended for us. It won’t tell you about the feeling of becoming a ghost in the code. 

I can tell you that Max Payne 2 and F.E.A.R. are two of my favorite shooters. That won’t help you understand how they helped create a personal passion for film noir, John Woo and Asian horror movies in me. It won’t explain what I really appreciate about it, the blend of atmospheres and unique emotional tone, the feeling of the gunplay, the way that it redefined games for me.

I can tell you Gravitation made me change the way I look at games. It made me believe in videogames are art. It helped make me more critical, more thoughtful of the way that I think about the medium. But that doesn’t matter, because it’s not a “good” game.

I can tell you that Far Cry 2 is my favorite game in the series. That it initially bounced off of me hard, but that I’ve come to appreciate the vision that defines every aspect of the game. I can tell you that I like it because it manages to subvert so much of the genre expectations, that it works both as a power fantasy and a disempowering world. That doesn’t matter. Far Cry 3 has more stuff.

I don’t often do lists because they feel empty, they feel limited by the very format. It reduces videogames discussion to “this thing is better than this thing” more often than not. It doesn’t leave space to breathe, or say anything important. They’re fun, easy, and very, very empty. You know what? That’s fine. It really is. It just not what I want to reduce these memories of mine to.