Against the List
The problem with making a list of your favourite games is that it immediately starts telling a lie about what ‘favourite’ means.
A ranked list suggests a clean comparison between discrete objects, as though BioShock, Burnout Paradise, Dear Esther, Halo, Minecraft and Planescape: Torment were all sitting in the same examination hall, nervously turning over their papers and hoping not to be marked down for dated graphics. But that isn’t how games stay with us. We don’t remember them only as products, mechanics, plots, platforms or scores out of ten. We remember them as places we inhabited, systems we learned, humiliations we endured, routes we repeated, sounds we can still hear, choices we regret, and little private geographies that somehow feel as though they happened to us.
This is why the old list I found is more useful as evidence than as a list in and of itself. It was a little social media exercise I did during the Covid-19 pandemic - “The Greatest Games” - where we asked friends to share the box art of their favourite games. I inevitably spun it out into a series of mini-reviews of my favourite games - because why say succinctly in one word what you can perorate in 500? But on review, what I think it actually records is a pattern. Again and again, I seem to value games not simply because they were technically impressive, or narratively ambitious, or mechanically refined, but because they made place, play and meaning hard to separate.
I should be clear about the method here, because otherwise the word great starts behaving badly. I’m not attempting a universal ranking of the best games ever made, which would be both tiresome and doomed. I’m not pretending that my taste is objective, because it plainly isn’t. A game is great here because I say it’s great from my own experience, but that subjectivity is not a flaw in the exercise. It’s the point of it. The pragmatic use of a personal canon like that is that it lets us ask what kind of experiences the medium can produce when it works, and what we’re actually recognising when we say a game has lasted.
That means this essay has to be first-person, because any discussion of greatness in games becomes evasive if it pretends the player is incidental. A film can be watched again and again; a book can be reread at different ages; a song can attach itself to a decade of one’s life with no permission asked. Games do all of that, but they also require us to participate. The memory of a game is therefore not only a memory of an artwork. It’s also a memory of oneself inside a system: what one did, failed to do, learned to do, refused to do, and occasionally did for five hours because the side quest icon was still there and apparently free will is a decorative fiction.
This makes games unusually treacherous to judge. A game can be great because it has aged well, or because it hasn’t. It can be great because it is replayable, or because the first experience was so particular that replay can only circle the original absence. It can be great because it solved a design problem, or because its flaws became part of its personality. It can be great because it produced technical admiration, moral discomfort, physical skill, melancholy, terror, joy, or the sort of quiet attachment usually reserved for places one used to live.
Places I Have Been
Many of my strongest game memories are not of plots, boss fights or characters. They are of places.
That isn’t to say that plot and character don’t count. They obviously do.
Planescape: Torment lodged in my head because of guilt, remorse, immortality and the awful moral weight of discovering what one has been. Mass Effect mattered because BioWare, at its best, could build a whole civilisation out of codex entries, awkward lift conversations, squadmates and the suggestion that the galaxy had been there long before I arrived. Knights of the Old Republic worked because its characters felt so lively inside a world that could so easily have become licensed wallpaper. But when I think about the games that stay behind, I almost always picture a place first.
I picture Rapture before I picture BioShock’s twist. Not the concept of Rapture, though that is clever enough: an underwater objectivist city collapsing under the weight of its own ideology, art deco ambition and genetic vandalism. I mean Rapture as a felt space. The leaking corridors, the broken glamour, the mad theatre of rooms in which enemies are not merely attacking but performing. A woman lamenting into a pram. A doctor working on a corpse. A couple dancing while you creep behind them. The political parable is there, certainly, and too much has probably been written about it, including by people who wanted games to be declared serious so badly that they treated the opening ten minutes as a constitutional document. But the thing that still works is simpler and less respectable: Rapture is a haunted house, and I remember being frightened in it.
I picture the island in Dear Esther. I know the old argument about whether it counts as a game, and I continue to find that argument immensely boring. The more interesting question is not whether it satisfies a template, but what it can do precisely because it refuses so much of one. There are no enemies, conventional puzzles, branching builds or combat loops. There is walking, listening, watching, climbing, descending, returning, and slowly coming to feel that the island is less a setting than a mind that has been externalised into cliffs, caves, shipwrecks, radio masts, chemical diagrams and grief. It is a ghost story, of sorts, though not one that behaves like a horror game. It’s closer to a place that remembers something the player can only half-understand.
I picture Halo as scale. The island in The Silent Cartographer. Snow, metal, tanks, ring-world sky, impossible architecture, and then the sudden turn into horror when the Flood arrive and the power fantasy becomes infected. The shooting still works, at least for me, because Halo combat has a rhythm I’ve never stopped loving, and which has become the core of so many follow-up titles. But the combat alone isn’t the whole thing. What Halo gave me, and still gives me when I return to it, is the feeling of being both stranded in a lost place and dropped into the middle of a war too large to comprehend. It’s lonely and militarised at the same time, which is an odd tonal combination and probably one of the reasons it still hasn’t left me.
I picture Midgar. This may be the fault of age. Final Fantasy VII was one of the first games I owned, and certainly the first one I properly played, though played may be too generous a description for a seven-year-old attempting to complete a three-disc JRPG without a memory card. For the first few weeks, I simply tried to do the whole thing in one sitting, which was not so much ambition as a child’s misunderstanding of software, sleep and human limitation. Eventually I acquired an 8MB memory card from my local Blockbuster, which at the time felt like purchasing a small miracle.
Then, as happens with long RPGs, I stopped. I don’t remember why. I put the game down, came back later, and had no idea what was happening. This is one of the old curses of the genre. You return after a few weeks and find yourself in a swamp, holding six swords with names like Butterblade, accompanied by someone you apparently care about, en route to a plot event you have no memory of initiating.
Years later, at college, I started again from the beginning and finally saw it through. The important thing is that replay didn’t puncture the memory. It tested it, and the game survived the test. Midgar still worked: smoky, oppressive, theatrical, environmentally blunt but emotionally precise. The blocky characters had aged. The backgrounds had not, not in the way that counted. I’d remembered a world, and the world was still there.
The same is true of Oblivion, though in a more inconsistent way. Oblivion is, by many reasonable measures, ridiculous. It looked odd even when it was new, and now many of its citizens appear to have been assembled from potatoes by a committee with conflicting instructions. Its titular Oblivion Gates are thrilling exactly until the repetition sets in, at which point one begins to suspect that Mehrunes Dagon’s true plan was to bore Cyrodiil into submission. Yet I can still summon the game’s scenes with absurd clarity: cresting a hill and seeing the sky redden around an Oblivion gate; stepping into the Shivering Isles as Haskill’s grey room falls away in a shroud of butterflies to reveal some strange primordial jungle; returning to Water’s Edge and learning what really happened there; stalking through the Dark Brotherhood’s murder-house puzzle. The game is clumsy, overfull and frequently inelegant. It is also, for me, replete with remembered places.
This is the distinction I’m reaching for. A game can have a setting, or it can give you somewhere to have been. The second is rarer.
The House That Isn’t There
No game makes this clearer to me than Minecraft, partly because my strongest memory of it is probably gone.
Everyone remembers their first Minecraft house, or at least everyone who played it in the particular early period when the game still felt like a rumour that had somehow become architecture. Mine was not a grand castle, nor a redstone machine, nor one of those obscene mega-builds made by people whose patience suggests either genius or a concerning avoidance of sunlight. My proudest creation was a wooden cabin on a small island. I built a reed farm on a sandbank and lived by the water. I built a large tree before naturally large trees were a standard thing, and beneath the hollow of that artificial redwood I made a library full of unreadable books.
I’ve gone looking for that island several times. I suspect it was lost to server wipes and the passing years, which sounds melodramatic until one remembers that digital places can disappear with far less ceremony than physical ones. No ruin, no plaque, no redevelopment plan, no angry parish council meeting. Just absence. A server changes, a file is deleted, a version updates, a hard drive fails, and a place you remember having lived in is no longer there.
This is not the same kind of loss as losing a real house, obviously. I’m not deranged, or at least not in that exact way. But it is a real kind of memory. The island mattered because I had made it and returned to it. I knew its outline, its farm, its false tree, its internal logic. The books contained no text, but the library had meaning because I had placed it there. It was a private gesture inside a public system, a little domestic claim against the endless procedural world.
That, I think, is one of Minecraft’s most interesting qualities. It’s not simply that it gives the player freedom. Many games offer freedom, often by putting a tragic number of icons on a map and calling the resulting administrative burden adventure. Minecraft gives freedom without requiring that freedom to express itself as conquest, completion or optimisation. It lets you make a place, then inhabit it for no reason grander than wanting to be there.
This is why it makes perfect sense to me that some people only play Minecraft. For them, it is not one game among many. It’s a medium for returning, building, wandering, experimenting, hosting, remembering and making meaning out of routines that would look absurd if described from outside. A critic can talk about systems, survival loops, crafting, procedural generation and player creativity, and all of that is useful. But it still misses the small truth of the cabin by the water.
Some games become great because they show us a world. Minecraft becomes great because it lets us leave evidence that we were there.
When Play Means What the Story Means
The old divide between narrative and mechanics is useful only up to the point at which it becomes stupid. Games plainly contain stories, and games plainly contain systems of play. It is sometimes helpful to ask which is doing the heavier lifting. But the games I keep returning to are usually the ones in which the question begins to collapse, because the play is not carrying the story like a parcel. The play is the story’s method of thought.
Papers, Please is the cleanest example. Its premise can be described in a sentence: you are a border inspector in a fictional authoritarian state, processing entrants while trying to keep your family alive. But that description doesn’t explain the experience, because the experience is not primarily in the fiction. It’s in the routine. Every day the rules change. Every day the forms multiply. Every day the queue waits, the clock runs, your family needs food, the state demands obedience, and strangers arrive with stories that are, inconveniently, attached to documents. At first, you try to be good. Then you try to be efficient. Then you try to be good only when you can afford it. Then you notice, if you’re paying attention, that the system hasn’t made you evil through a speech, a cutscene or a dramatic villain. It has made you worse through procedure.
That is not a story about bureaucracy attached to bureaucratic gameplay. It is bureaucracy as moral erosion. The rule changes, the penalties, the time pressure and the domestic costs are not separate from the theme. They are how the theme gets inside your hands. You don’t watch a person become hardened by a cruel system. You learn the gestures of hardening.
Elden Ring does something very different with difficulty. As I’ve already written about at length, I came to it as someone who usually plays games on easy, or story mode, or whatever euphemism developers have adopted to stop everyone feeling judged. I bought it largely because George R. R. Martin’s name was attached, then immediately discovered that the game had no interest in flattering my narrative curiosity. In my first attempt, I attacked White Mask Varré because he looked creepy and I’d not yet absorbed the game’s basic social contract. This led to a miserable running battle in which he kept killing me, I kept respawning, and the world kept not resetting itself around my poor judgement. Then the Tree Sentinel happened, repeatedly and with considerable emphasis.
The turning point was learning that I could just go around him.
That sounds obvious, but it changed the game for me. I started again. I didn’t attack Varré. I avoided the Tree Sentinel. I went off the path, found gear, gathered runes, used Torrent to escape fights I didn’t need to win, and began to understand that the difficulty was not simply a gatekeeping device. It was a form of attention. Because I couldn’t simply barrel from plot marker to plot marker, I had to look. I had to read item descriptions, study enemy behaviour, understand stats, examine ruins, infer stories from fragments, and accept that progress was not a straight line. When you spend an hour being melted by the same boss, even the scraps of dialogue begin to acquire theological weight.
This doesn’t mean the game is beyond criticism. The absence of a proper quest log is not a sacrament. The culture around git gud can be tedious, exclusionary and, at its worst, a little too pleased with itself. But for me, the difficulty made the world legible in a particular way. It slowed me down until I noticed what a more permissive version might have let me ignore. In that sense, the difficulty was not opposed to the story. It was one of the story’s instruments.
Planescape: Torment works again differently. Before I played it back in the early 2000’s, I didn’t really know games could be sad, or that the player-character need not be a spotless hero wearing a large quantity of shoulder armour for moral emphasis. Planescape is clunky, text-heavy and visibly old, and if someone wants to hold those things against it, they’re not entirely wrong. They are, however, missing the point so completely that one is tempted towards rudeness. The game’s power lies in the way its writing, quests, companions and world keep returning to the same questions: what can change the nature of a man, what guilt does to identity, what memory cannot absolve, and whether redemption means anything when the self has been fractured across incarnations.
This is the reason the famous story-versus-mechanics distinction starts to feel inadequate. A quest in Planescape is not just a task that gives narrative rewards. The structure of the task is often how the game thinks about belief, identity and consequence. To play it is not merely to consume a story, but to move through a moral argument with an inventory.
Even the Portal games, which are much lighter on the surface, work because they refuse to feel like a puzzle book with jokes attached. The rooms are puzzles, yes, but the game is at its best when they feel like part of a journey through a hostile comic machine. The portal gun is a mechanic of spatial reasoning; it is also a way of making the player feel clever, trapped, watched, misled and then triumphantly inconvenient. A bad puzzle game makes you solve rooms. Portal 2 makes the rooms feel like architecture with a personality disorder.
This is one of the medium’s core affordances. Games can make form and meaning meet in the player’s action. Not always, of course. Many games put excellent writing next to adequate play, or strong mechanics next to a story that appears to have been drafted during a fire alarm. That can still be enjoyable. But the games that endure for me are the ones where the doing and the meaning can’t be separated without damaging both.
The Honourable Company of the Flawed
None of this requires greatness to mean flawlessness. In fact, a suspicious number of great games are a bit of a mess.
BioShock has a weak final boss, an over-mechanical morality system, and plot holes one could probably swim a bathysphere through. Oblivion is frequently absurd and so ugly it warranted a remaster to make it palatable to a new generation. Mass Effect has tedious planetary exploration sequences that even nostalgia struggles to defend with a straight face. Final Fantasy VII has aged in ways both charming and unkind. Planescape is not exactly frictionless. Burnout Paradise opens with the confidence of a game determined to waste your time before letting you enjoy it. Elden Ring has inherited FromSoftware patterns so heavily that, after going back to the earlier games, one begins to see how much of its supposedly new world is also a rearranged family album.
But criticism that stops at flaws doesn’t tell us enough. The more interesting question is whether the flaws damage the game’s enduring power, or whether they sit around it like bad plaster around an excellent fireplace. Sometimes they do real harm. Sometimes they date the work. Sometimes they merely remind us that games are made things, full of technical constraint, genre habit, production pressure, fashion, compromise and strange decisions someone probably defended in a meeting.
This is where Burnout Paradise earns its place in my private canon despite being, in certain respects, deeply irritating. I don’t much care about driving games, but I care about Burnout Paradise, because it understands that crashing and smashing can be at least as pleasurable as racing. Its opening hour is insultingly awful: interruptions, bad menus, DJ Atomica, the repeated assault of Paradise City, a song I have come to resent as though it wronged my family. And yet, once the game gets out of its own way, it becomes pure kinetic freedom: smashing billboards, knocking through fences, discovering jumps, chasing cars, turning the city into a toy built for impact. In the end, I’ve always thought of it less as a driving game than an open-world third-person action game where you play a car.
That line is silly, but it explains something. Greatness in games often comes from the specificity of the fantasy. Burnout Paradise is great to me because it perfectly understands a narrow pleasure and builds a whole city for it. Not every great game must be morally serious, emotionally devastating or narratively ambitious. Sometimes the medium’s gift is letting you become a projectile with licensing music.
SoulCalibur offers a different version of the same point. The fighting system is one of the best ever designed: the 8-Way-Run, the accessibility, the way novices can feel competitive without the game becoming shallow. But what made SoulCalibur stay with me was not just the mechanics. It was the grand spirit of adventure around them. A fighting game did not need to feel like a mythic journey across a stylised sixteenth century of knights, ninjas, pirates, cursed swords, orchestral bombast and inescapable fate. Yet it did, and that excess mattered. It gave the button-mashing fights an atmosphere beyond the arena.
This is why my old list contains so many games that I can criticise quite freely while still defending them as great. The flaws are real, but they are not the whole truth. In art, and especially in games, a flaw is not automatically a contradiction of greatness. Sometimes it is the cost of ambition. Sometimes it is simply a flaw. The question is whether enough of the work remains alive that the flaws become part of the argument rather than the end of it.
A great game, for me, is not one that gives me nothing to complain about. That would be a very small canon, and not a very interesting one. A great game is one whose complaints don’t exhaust it.
Remembered Games and Replayed Games
Memory is not criticism, but criticism without memory is thin.
This is especially true of games because replay changes the object. The game I remember is not always the game I replay. Sometimes replay is a restoration. Sometimes it is a cross-examination. Sometimes it is an act of loyalty undertaken against the evidence.
Final Fantasy VII survived cross-examination. That’s why the decade-long completion anecdote still feels useful rather than merely nostalgic. I first knew the game as a child without the practical infrastructure to play it properly, then returned years later with enough patience, competence and digital literacy to see it through. The replay didn’t simply indulge the younger version of me. It corrected him, vindicated him and gently suggested that he might have been overreaching when he tried to finish a multi-disc JRPG in one sitting. The game was not just good because I remembered it. It was good because, when I returned, the memory still had something to attach to.
Halo works differently because replay has become part of its meaning. I’ve played it repeatedly, and the repetitions are not merely a failure of imagination. The combat loop still has a pleasing shape, the levels still carry their particular moods, and even the much-criticised reuse of spaces bothers me less than it probably should. This may be because repetition in Halo feels almost ritualistic now. I know where I am. I know what kind of danger is coming. I know the dance, and the pleasure lies partly in performing it again with enough variation to stay awake.
Other games are more fragile. Some are best left in memory because replay might expose too much. I haven’t always wanted to return to every game I admire. That is not necessarily a mark against them. Some works are bound to their first encounter: to the age one was, the hardware one had, the time available, the friends nearby, the lack of spoilers, the absence of later imitation, the simple fact that a design language had not yet become familiar. BioShock became a formula after it was a shock. Dear Esther arrived for many players before the walking simulator argument had hardened into a system. Mass Effect created a world whose later development, including the end of the original trilogy and Andromeda, complicated my attachment to the first game’s sense of possibility.
This doesn’t mean nostalgia lies. Nostalgia often gets accused of lying, usually by people who are pleased to have discovered that old things have textures and load times. But nostalgia is not simply false memory. It is a form of evidence, though not a sufficient one. It records what an experience did when it arrived. It remembers firstness, surprise, attachment, embarrassment, difficulty, awe, boredom overcome, worlds entered at the right moment. That evidence can be partial, self-flattering or contaminated by youth, but it is still evidence of something.
Replay supplies another kind of evidence. It asks what happens when firstness is gone. Does the combat still work? Does the writing survive? Does the pace feel dead? Does the place return? Do the old irritations become fatal, or merely familiar? Does the game still generate attention, or only memory of attention?
The strongest games can survive both kinds of evidence, though not always in the same way. Halo survives as ritual. Final Fantasy VII survives as rediscovery. Minecraft survives partly as loss. Papers, Please survives as a system one may not exactly want to revisit, because its effectiveness is bound up with discomfort rather than pleasure. What Remains of Edith Finch survives as a set of remembered forms, almost an anthology of small playable deaths, where each story expresses its subject through a different miniature design. I played it expecting something tasteful, brief and perhaps forgettable. It has remained lodged in my head because it understands something games can do with unusual economy: shift the rules of play to match the inner logic of a story, then move on before the device curdles.
Remembered games and replayed games are not enemies. They are two versions of the same test. Memory asks whether the game left a mark. Replayability asks whether the mark still has a source.
The Game as a Place to Think
This is where the old list, for all its looseness, becomes useful. It suggests that great games tend to give the player a place to think through something, even when the thinking is not especially dignified.
Sometimes the thinking is moral. Papers, Please makes me think about systems, rules and how decency becomes unaffordable. New Vegas makes me think about political choice, factional compromise and the strange appeal of refusing the endings a game formally provides. Planescape makes me think about guilt, selfhood and whether remorse can survive the person who earned it. These are obvious cases because the themes are explicit enough to survive description.
Sometimes the thinking is spatial. Dear Esther asks one to think by walking, listening and noticing. Oblivion asks one to think through return, discovery and the accumulation of scenes. Halo asks one to think through movement between war and loneliness. Mass Effect asks one to think through belonging to a political and cosmic order larger than the immediate plot.
Sometimes the thinking is physical. Halo again, because its combat rhythm is thought with the hands. Burnout Paradise, because the city becomes intelligible through speed and impact. SoulCalibur, because movement, timing and spacing become expressive even inside a genre that can look, to the uninitiated, like two overdressed people hitting each other until one falls over.
Sometimes the thinking is about the medium itself. Dear Esther asks what remains when goals and systems recede. Portal 2 asks how a puzzle can feel like a journey. Edith Finch asks how many forms a single game can contain without losing unity. Elden Ring asks whether difficulty can be a kind of reading instruction. Minecraft asks whether a game needs an ending if it can instead produce a home.
This is why the old narratology/ludology split, while useful in its own history, feels inadequate to the experiences I’m describing. The distinction between story and play clarifies some arguments, but it can also tempt us into thinking games are hybrids assembled from separable parts: story over here, mechanics over there, art direction somewhere else, music coming in politely after lunch. The better games resist disassembly. They make it hard to say whether the meaning is in the plot, the loop, the place, the sound, the system, the difficulty, the memory, or the player’s stubborn decision to spend ten hours doing something unnecessary because it felt, within the game’s world, like it needed doing.
The answer is usually yes.
This doesn’t make games superior to other media. That sort of argument has always struck me as adolescent, in the precise sense that it resembles a teenager demanding that their hobby be recognised by the adults. Games don’t need to beat novels, films, theatre, music or television in an imaginary cultural fistfight. They need to be understood on their own terms. The distinctive thing about games is not that they are more artistic because they are interactive. Interactivity can produce tedium as easily as depth; one should never mistake a button prompt for an aesthetic revolution. The distinctive thing is that games can align action, system and meaning in ways other forms generally cannot.
That alignment is what I keep calling greatness, though always from my own perspective and always provisionally. It is not a score. It is not a claim of universal canon. It is a way of saying: this game used the affordances of the form to create an experience that stayed available to thought afterwards.
A game is great, in this sense, when it keeps giving back.
Why Some Worlds Outlive Their Graphics
Graphics age strangely. Sometimes they date a game brutally. Sometimes they become charming. Sometimes limitation turns out to have been doing more work than anyone realised.
There is a common line about older games benefiting from imagination filling in the gaps, and it is both true and too neat. The abstractions of limited technology did leave room for the player’s mind. The original Halo could suggest scale partly because it didn’t overexplain everything. Final Fantasy VII’s painted backgrounds and blocky figures invite a kind of imaginative completion. Planescape could be verbally immense because it wasn’t trying to render everything in expensive cinematic detail. But this isn’t only a story about limitations becoming virtues. Some old games are ugly, awkward or technically crude in ways that do them no favours. Some modern games are visually lavish and still feel empty, which is worse, because at least an old ugly game has the decency to be limited by history.
The deeper issue is whether a game’s world exists only at the level of representation, or whether it exists as a structure of attention. A game world outlives its graphics when the player remembers how to be in it. Rapture outlives its textures because the place has pressure. Midgar outlives its polygons because its social and environmental imagination remains legible. Cyrodiil outlives its potato citizens because its scenes still have force. The Normandy outlives individual corridors because it becomes a mobile home inside a galactic argument. The first Minecraft house outlives the server because the act of making it was the experience.
This is also why some technically superior remakes and sequels can feel oddly less alive than their predecessors. Improved fidelity does not automatically deepen place. Sometimes it clarifies too much. Sometimes it replaces suggestive abstraction with expensive busyness. Sometimes the old roughness held space for memory, and the new polish leaves no room for the player to complete the image.
This is not an argument against improvement. I like convenience. I like readable maps, stable frame rates, decent interfaces and games that don’t make me fight the camera as though it were the secret final boss. But the history of games should make us wary of assuming that technological advance and artistic advance are the same process. They overlap. They also diverge. A game can have better lighting and less atmosphere, more recorded dialogue and less mystery, a larger map and fewer places, more freedom and less agency.
The games that stay behind are not always the most advanced games. They are the ones whose design choices, limitations and ambitions make a coherent demand on the player’s memory.
The Small, Useful Definition
So, after all that, what makes a game great?
The honest answer is still: because I say so. But the more useful version is this: a great game is one that continues to organise experience after play has stopped.
It gives you somewhere to remember. It gives you a rhythm your hands retain. It gives you a system that made you feel clever, compromised, frightened, guilty, free, powerful, small or responsible. It gives you a world you can still picture. It gives you a flaw you can forgive because the living part of the work remains stronger. It gives you something to test against replay, and either survives the test or becomes interesting through the failure. It gives you, not necessarily a story, but a way of having been inside one.
That definition is partial, personal and probably unfair to several kinds of excellent game. Good. Definitions of greatness should be allowed to show their owner’s fingerprints. My canon is shaped by the games I played, the age at which I played them, the machines I had, the friends nearby, the time available, the genres I cared about, the genres I neglected, the games I returned to, and the games I only think I remember clearly. Someone else’s canon would produce a different theory. It should.
But that is why the exercise is useful. A personal list becomes interesting when it stops pretending to be a scoreboard and starts becoming an account of value. I don’t need BioShock, Halo, Minecraft, Final Fantasy VII, Planescape: Torment, Papers, Please, Elden Ring, Oblivion, Portal 2, Mass Effect, Dear Esther, Burnout Paradise, SoulCalibur, Knights of the Old Republic and What Remains of Edith Finch to prove that they are greater than all alternatives in some imaginary court of final appeal. I need them because together they show me what I seem to want from games when I stop posturing: place, pressure, agency, memory, rhythm, strangeness, return.
This is also why I distrust the clean separation between remembered games and replayed games. The remembered game is not the real game, but neither is the replayed game. The real object sits somewhere between the software, the historical moment, the player’s attention, the cultural afterlife, the memory of first encounter and the stubborn fact of what happens when one returns. A game is not only what it was on release, nor only what it is now, nor only what I felt then, nor only what I think today. It is a relationship across time with an interactive work that may or may not still answer when called.
That sounds grand, but the examples are often small. A cabin by the water. A city under the sea. A ring in the sky. A painted slum. A border stamp. A portal placed just right. A stag floating in darkness. A murder mystery in a house full of guests. A skeleton that probably should’ve been removed from a bathtub two centuries ago. A game you couldn’t finish as a child, then did. A boss that flattened you until one day you returned with a large hammer and revised the balance of power.
The games that stay behind do not always stay because they were perfect. They stay because they gave us somewhere to be, something to do there, and a reason to remember the doing.
That is enough, I think, to call them great.