The Polygon 500 And Why We Still Don’t Think Of Games As Art
Whenever a publication releases a ranked list of a particular style or medium or decade of works — best metal albums of all time, best movies of the 1970s, etc. — there is a tendency from both those reporting on such lists and the list makers themselves to assure readers, often with a prideful, snickering tone, that they will surely find the selections therein to be “divisive.” This is an interesting choice of words to me because it implies that some will like their choices and some will not, whereas I have never met a single living soul who has agreed with, or even abstractly respected, the compositions of any of these lists’ rankings. The purpose of such lists is ostensibly to enlighten the public as to the best that the arts have to offer, but their actual outcome is almost always to illustrate that the critical gatekeepers of a given form have little to no connection with what either enthusiasts or popular audiences at large consider to be outstanding or meaningful. They can sometimes provoke, but they are almost never convincing.
Polygon’s recent list of the 500 greatest games ever made is a more arresting failure in this regard than most. When lists this large falter, it is usually (ironically) due to the scope of their focus being too narrow. Rolling Stone’s collection of the 500 greatest albums of all time is likely the most notorious example of this: though large enough to be able to comfortably encompass a robust variety of artists, genres and disciplines, the list has a neurotic fixation with big-selling rock music from the 1960s and ’70s, including next to no releases from outside America and western Europe and making only the most obvious and disinterested forays into genres like punk, hip-hop, electronic music and classical. What could have made for an epic, insightful cultural document instead became a monotonous tome that ended up bearing little use for anyone born outside the Baby Boom generation.
Polygon’s list is almost as disappointing, but far more interesting in its implications. Rather than display a lack of rigor and imagination in the cultural bodies covering gaming, it, more than any other published work of writing on games, shows the inherent problems with the ways all of us think about games. It shows how more than any other media gaming struggles with its body of technology and commerce against its spirit of artistic expression, how this struggle has not been commanded or even addressed except by a very few, and why the form will never be considered “true” art as long as even its champions hold its unartistic virtues to be its most valuable.
To understand the confused nature of this list let’s first take a look at Polygon’s stated methodology in picking and ranking the games:
We asked everyone to vote based on innovation, polish and durability, rather than simply personal taste. We cut games released in 2017 to eliminate recency bias. And we left out sequels that we deemed too similar to the games that came before them.
Truly, this is not an unreasonable way to go about making a list such as this one. Unfortunately this criteria appears to be have either been ignored or left open to overly generous interpretation at many turns: within the top 100 alone, one game is described as being “a clone” of another, Doom 2 is stated as being “largely similar to the first Doom,” and while Super Mario Galaxy 2 “didn’t change much” from its forbear, apparently both titles are welcome to the title of all-time greats at positions #59 and #63 respectively. One wonders how similar a game need be to its predecessor to disqualify it from the list; perhaps this criterion was an addendum made so that the staff could more easily restrain itself from including dozens of Tetris ports and MMO expansion packs across its selections.
We’ll come back to Tetris in a moment, because it’s the lynchpin to understanding why this list seems so scattershot and ill-conceived. For now, let’s move on to “innovation, polish and durability.” The nature of these qualities is without question open to debate, yet even with that in mind the ordering of these games can’t be described as being anything except for complete, inarticulate madness.
The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask, for example, is frequently cited as one of the finest entries in the much-beloved Zelda franchise and tends to chart highly on traditional lists of the greatest games ever made. This is all with good reason: it is a challenging game with tremendous exploratory and replay value, it has a compelling aesthetic that is surreal, diaphanous and nightmarish in effortless turn, and the experience revolves around a time-altering mechanic that is so individual and so seamlessly interwoven into its gameplay and story that even 15 years later, Majora’s Mask remains not-quite-comparable to any other game ever released. On Polygon’s list, it sits at a faintly insulting #331 position, whereas Homeworld, a game described as “more of the same” except for its impressive visuals, is #96. This would not be dissimilar to making a list of the 500 greatest films of all time wherein Vertigo sits hundreds and hundreds of placements behind The Lawnmower Man. The internal ranking process by which “innovation, polish and durability” were assessed is not simply flawed and at times openly preposterous, it is unfathomable. It is impossible to justify from a thoughtful critical perspective.
But this is the problem with the way even the most mindful writer tends to think about games: enjoyability and performance supplant expression and meaning at nearly every turn, but this is a notion that has neither been embraced nor confronted by game criticism at large. Thus we queasily sit at a precipice from which we demand games be taken seriously as a unique art form but simultaneously cannot let works that we deem ugly or unpleasant into the fold of our canon. LSD Dream Emulator, an objectiveless game in which one wanders a dream landscape as though it were a psychedelic museum of the subconscious, will likely never make it onto a list such as this due to its fringe concept and monotonous gameplay; nor do I mean to imply that such a game should necessarily be entitled to a placement on any such list. But it is among the first, released back in 1998, of a recently and rapidly growing number of works that challenge what a game even is in the first place, and this is an important question that is not being thoughtfully reconciled.
Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty is my personal favorite game of all time; not only that, I think it is the greatest story told and the most impressive work of media, period, released over the course of the 21st century thus far. Its narrative is a wheel of Joycean complexity, indissolubly linked to the player’s actions and experience with the fabric of its gameplay. It’s a game that in 2001 managed to foretell everything from drone warfare to the complex inner world of one’s digital life, and was among the first popular works of the century to grapple with the increasing meaninglessness of fact vs perception that has dominated modern life since 2016. It is not only a gripping espionage game but a landmark of postmodernism that has been dissected and reinterpreted countless times over, a work so singular that, like Majora’s Mask, it has not spawned a single imitator in the almost 20 years since it has been released. It is a work about September 11th, 2001 and Twitter and Donald Trump crafted years and decades before those things and the meanings associated with them came to pass. It is not just a great game but an indispensable artistic lens from which to view and discuss contemporary life.
By Polygon’s criteria, Metal Gear Solid 2 is the one hundred and first greatest game ever made. Tetris is number one.
Now: is Tetris better than Metal Gear Solid 2? To answer this I would have to compare and contrast the two works, which is not something I consider to be a reasonable critical undertaking. The question seems ludicrous to the point of being a non-sequitur. It seems like asking which is better, the broadcast of Muhammad Ali’s legendary fight against Joe Frazier, or Raging Bull? Would one ever think of pitting these two filmed projects against each other, and by what critical mechanism would they ascertain which one was superior if they did? No one has ever answered this question because no thinking person would ever float it as a serious inquiry.
Yet in gaming such comparisons are so common as to be the established norm. Nobody questions it. People will debate about the list’s myriad placements and omissions without bothering to ask why all of these things belong in the same conversation in the first place. What does Overwatch have to do with The Oregon Trail? In what tangible sense is The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim an inferior video game to Mrs. Pac-Man? If Tetris is the greatest video game of all time, how does Super Mario Bros. 3, in its venerable #2 position, stop just short of it? What specific attributes make Tetris the superior experience? I’m not saying these games share absolutely, positively no creative DNA with each other or that a session of Crazy Taxi can’t be as life-affirming and meaningful as playing through Gone Home or that Tetris isn’t a fucking incredible game. I’m asking why do we take it for granted that this is all more or less the same thing?
I don’t mean to pick on Polygon with this essay; any other gaming publication, or even your average Youtube critic for that matter, would likely have ginned up a list that was just as absurd as this one. Games like the aforementioned Gone Home, as well as ambient phone games like Monument and a recent surge in the popularity of visual novels, are challenging definitions and preconceptions of the structure and purpose of video games like never before. Game criticism and punditry, unfortunately, is lagging far behind. And without articulate envoys into the world of gaming, without a concise and sensible rubric with which to discuss and critique games and all their enchanting variations and subdivisions, we will remain with assessments of gaming like the one exemplified by its list: a perception of its breadth with no understanding of its depths, a vulgar and scattershot critical language that will never marshal into something that can truly communicate.
