Arguments and Differences Reign in VG Top 100 lists

IGN says it's Super Mario Bros. G4 and Entertainment Weekly say it's The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past. Electronic Gaming Monthly said it was Tetris, then said it was Super Metroid a few years later.



These widely varied picks for "the best video game of all time," show the differences of opinion that go into the making of each video game top 100 list.



This is not necessarily a bad thing. Each list is supposed to be a product of the writers and editors that make it, and it's hard to get any two gamers to even agree on a top ten list. But despite the different opinions that go into each list, the same games seem to show up time and time again near the top of many lists (Tetris is in the top four of all four lists mentioned earlier). Are there certain agreed-upon criteria that make some lists more objective than others?



"Yes, of course this list is entirely objective. Just don't ask the other guy," said Peer Schneider of IGN, paraphrasing one of his favorite quotes from the Japanese story Rashomon. Schneider, who worked on IGN's top 100 list, said that objective ranking is only possible to a certain extent; much of it is just the editors' personal taste. "It's IGN's Top 100 Games -- very much a collective, objective, subjective ranking of our favorite games."



EGM Executive Editor Mark MacDonald, however, thinks that video games can be ranked more objectively. "Games, as subjective as they are, there are still objective criteria to them," said MacDonald, who worked on EGM's second list. "People who say, 'That's only your opinion,' they're wrong. It is your opinion, absolutely, but it can also be a matter of objective criteria."



MacDonald says things like backwards controls or jumpy frame rates are objective problems that most game players can agree on. "It's not always like chocolate ice cream, where you can like it or not with no evidence," MacDonald said. "Like they say in logic class: all truths are not equal."



At the same time, though, MacDonald acknowledges that "no two gamers are going to have the same list. There will never be the definitive list. You can make it as well thought out as possible, but that's pretty much all you can do."



Schneider said that comparing old and new shows the difficulty in generating an objective list. "Can we really list a game like Pitfall alongside infinitely more complex titles, released two decades later? The creation of any ranking is a subjective process that's bound to lead to plenty of disagreements."



Is a revolutionary game that started it's own genre better or worse than a newer game that improved on the graphics? MacDonald and the team at EGM asked a simple question of older games to help prevent the team from being blinded by nostalgia: "Would you pull it out now and play it today?"



"If [someone brings up an old game], but they never pull it out and play it, then we'll tell them to quiet down," MacDonald said. "If they say they played it last week, then it's definitely a consideration, but not be all end all. In general, the games that revolutionized the industry are the ones you'd still pull out and play."



In the end, Schneider said that gameplay fun and intelligent design were more important than influence or technical merits. "If you stress technological prowess or general influence too much, you'd end up with a list devoid of charming follow-ups like Ms. Pac-Man or SimCity 2000. The reasons for a game being "good" are manifold. A game is the sum of its parts -- and sometimes more; the balance of gameplay, graphics, presentation, sound, and how well everything is wrapped up into a unified whole."



But is an intangible "fun factor" really a strong enough criterion to rank an entire medium? You don't see other pop art forms like music and movies ranking themselves by how fun they are. For that matter, you rarely ever see top 100 lists for "higher" art like literature or painting. Is the ranking of video games itself indicative of an industry viewed merely as "an exciting form of pop-culture entertainment," as Entertainment Weekly put it in a press release?



"I think the things you think about for things like video games and movies... it's kind of silly when you think about it in terms of books, paintings, and sculpture." MacDonald said. "It has something to do with pop culture. Books are in [higher art], but video games and movies are only in pop culture."



Schneider, on the other hand, thinks video game style rankings are applicable to all art forms, as long as the ranking is done by people who know the subject matter. "Would I agree with anyone else's Top 100 Paintings? No, of course not. But the whole beauty of these lists is that you will remember things you thought you'd long forgotten. I can't tell you how many games came up on other people's lists during the selection process where I sat up and went 'Oh, man! Yeah, M.U.L.E. was great! That has to be on there!'"



Schneider also said he thinks video games are well suited to ranking because of the time constraints associated with playing them. "There just isn't enough to time anymore to go back and play all these games, so remembering them by writing about them is as close as we can

get."



MacDonald said he thinks that the drive to rank video game might be indicative of the industry's consumer-oriented nature. "It's really consumer driven more than something like painting or sculpture... it's much younger. As younger art forms, maybe more younger people are into them. I definitely think video games 100 years from now will be considered higher than today. As they broaden into different niches, they'll definitely be held in higher regard, but I don't know if this will affect how they're ranked."



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