Another potential factor, I guess, is that what “top” means is not fixed. When I see a “top list”, I think “what are the best games in the context of the time that the list is written”. Like, advice on what games one should play today.
But it’d also be legitimate to create a top list to just recognize the studios that created a game, ranking them taking into account in the context of their time. Like, there are certainly games here that advanced the genre. I’d have an easier time swallowing some of this if the ranking is to be taken in a “context of the time” thing.
I see a similar debate surrounding Citizen Kane in movie rankings. The movie is often featured very highly in some movie rankings, even at the top. However, a lot of people are not really that into watching it. Thing is, it introduced a lot of things that later movies then adopted, stuff that we kind of take for granted now. So if you’re looking to give credit to the movie’s creators, then it might rank very highly, but many people are looking for a ranking as to what movies to watch today, and don’t think that the movie ranks nearly as highly today.
Citizen Kane Is Still the Greatest Film of All Time
Entertainment enthusiasts love to debate what the best of all time in any given medium is, and in most cases, they conclude with the one that changed the game. When television fans discuss the greatest show ever, they usually narrow it down to The Sopranos, The Wire and Breaking Bad. All three were created decades after television existed, but they change the way people viewed TV shows. Citizen Kane released nearly 50 years after the birth of cinema, but it changed the way people watched and made movies. Other iconic films that changed the game were made around the time of Citizen Kane like The Wizard of Oz, Gone With The Wind, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs and Casablanca, but Welles’ movie leaves the more lasting impression because it combines the Hollywood budget with the genius of a bold and young outsider.
Citizen Kane may not be as entertaining as some that came after it nor does it tend to be on the top of everyone’s personal favorite movies list, but when talking about the most respected and influential movies ever made, it’s always near the top of that conversation.
I think that maybe some of the problem is that we should just use different terms, to avoid confusion between the two types of lists. Like, instead of “top”, maybe “ground-breaking” for lists of the “innovative” category, and “best movies to watch today” for lists of the “what’s most enjoyable to watch in the present time” sort.
I would not recommend Wolfenstein 3D or Doom as a first-person shooter in 2024. But if one asked me for a list of the most influential first-person shooter games…well, they might be pretty high on that list. If I wanted games like that, I’d be looking for games that introduced ideas or technical improvements that were then widely-adopted. For example, regenerating shields are now very common in first-person shooters. They solve a gameplay problem that plagued early first-person shooters where a person would save a game with very low health reserves and get caught in a very difficult situation; players didn’t like that. I think that it might have been Halo that popularized that mechanic. Is the original Halo the best FPS to play in 2024? Well, it’s playable – I played it the other day, in fact. But it’s probably not where I’d direct a new player to the genre asking me for the best game for them to play. But sure, it was influential.
I remember that a lot of early computer RPGs followed many conventions introduced by Dungeons & Dragons from the time, like stat scales modeled on a 3d6 dice roll, skill progression decoupled from skill use (e.g. I can gain “experience points” from doing one thing that I can then apply to something else, which seems a bit unintuitive), the concept of discrete classes with equipment restrictions. Dungeons & Dragons was quite influential, introduced a lot of useful ideas, but some of its rules were designed around pencil-and-paper play – it needed to keep the math quick and simple. I remember being delighted by the fact that in the original Fallout, gaining a stat point really was something that you could feel, whereas in Dungeons & Dragons, it tended to be a smaller effect (and particular tiers were more important, where modifiers got changed). And it took some time for computer RPGs to shift away from those conventions. I think that games that introduced those different mechanics were important for the genre, but…that doesn’t necessarily make a given game itself something top-tier that I want to play in 2024.
Your Citizen Kane example is great, and another frequently cited victim of the same phenomenon is Seinfeld. In fact, the TVtropes article about it used to be called “Seinfeld is unfunny”.
Another potential factor, I guess, is that what “top” means is not fixed. When I see a “top list”, I think “what are the best games in the context of the time that the list is written”. Like, advice on what games one should play today.
But it’d also be legitimate to create a top list to just recognize the studios that created a game, ranking them taking into account in the context of their time. Like, there are certainly games here that advanced the genre. I’d have an easier time swallowing some of this if the ranking is to be taken in a “context of the time” thing.
I see a similar debate surrounding Citizen Kane in movie rankings. The movie is often featured very highly in some movie rankings, even at the top. However, a lot of people are not really that into watching it. Thing is, it introduced a lot of things that later movies then adopted, stuff that we kind of take for granted now. So if you’re looking to give credit to the movie’s creators, then it might rank very highly, but many people are looking for a ranking as to what movies to watch today, and don’t think that the movie ranks nearly as highly today.
Example:
https://www.cbr.com/citizen-kane-still-greatest-film-all-time/
I think that maybe some of the problem is that we should just use different terms, to avoid confusion between the two types of lists. Like, instead of “top”, maybe “ground-breaking” for lists of the “innovative” category, and “best movies to watch today” for lists of the “what’s most enjoyable to watch in the present time” sort.
I would not recommend Wolfenstein 3D or Doom as a first-person shooter in 2024. But if one asked me for a list of the most influential first-person shooter games…well, they might be pretty high on that list. If I wanted games like that, I’d be looking for games that introduced ideas or technical improvements that were then widely-adopted. For example, regenerating shields are now very common in first-person shooters. They solve a gameplay problem that plagued early first-person shooters where a person would save a game with very low health reserves and get caught in a very difficult situation; players didn’t like that. I think that it might have been Halo that popularized that mechanic. Is the original Halo the best FPS to play in 2024? Well, it’s playable – I played it the other day, in fact. But it’s probably not where I’d direct a new player to the genre asking me for the best game for them to play. But sure, it was influential.
I remember that a lot of early computer RPGs followed many conventions introduced by Dungeons & Dragons from the time, like stat scales modeled on a 3d6 dice roll, skill progression decoupled from skill use (e.g. I can gain “experience points” from doing one thing that I can then apply to something else, which seems a bit unintuitive), the concept of discrete classes with equipment restrictions. Dungeons & Dragons was quite influential, introduced a lot of useful ideas, but some of its rules were designed around pencil-and-paper play – it needed to keep the math quick and simple. I remember being delighted by the fact that in the original Fallout, gaining a stat point really was something that you could feel, whereas in Dungeons & Dragons, it tended to be a smaller effect (and particular tiers were more important, where modifiers got changed). And it took some time for computer RPGs to shift away from those conventions. I think that games that introduced those different mechanics were important for the genre, but…that doesn’t necessarily make a given game itself something top-tier that I want to play in 2024.
Your Citizen Kane example is great, and another frequently cited victim of the same phenomenon is Seinfeld. In fact, the TVtropes article about it used to be called “Seinfeld is unfunny”.