A question I was just thinking about:
What video games would you choose if asked to make a list of classics?
I'm not asking for your favorite games--I'm asking, what would you call a classic in the same vein as the classics of literature or film; a game that every well-read (or "well-played"?) person should be expected to have at least passing familiarity with? (assume for the purposes of this that video games are generally considered a worthy form of art (they are, but not everyone agrees))
@Felthry ...every attempt I make to answer this question turns into a giant essay. Like, multiple kilobytes of text. I'm pretty sure I could come up with over a hundred games for a Criterion Collection-style archive and I'm pretty sure I could come up with enough games to fill a college semester for an introductory course with commentary on almost every example.
(The 'almost' reflects the gaps in my own education: I never got into 4X or fighting games.)
Just throwing some items on a list so I can stop and do anything else today:
- M.U.L.E.
- Depression Quest
- Gran Turismo 3: A-Spec
- F-Zero (on the SNES, not an emulator)
- Gone Home
- Left 4 Dead (maybe L4D2? idk, either one)
- Portal
- Mega Man 2
- Myst
feel free to ask for commentary on any of these
@packbat I'd love to see detailed commentary on your choices! We've never even heard of some of those. Why not emulating F-zero?
commentary on my other videogame reading list choices (474 words)
@Felthry (All of these have Wikipedia pages apparently? Useful.)
- M.U.L.E.: economics game. Has some pretty sweet game dynamics for markets. Particularly of interest for me because of the implicit condemnation of predatory business practices; as a kid, I would always monopolize food and create artificial scarcity to pull as much money as possible from my competitors, and then at the end it would always say the colony as a whole was super poor.
- Depression Quest: Incorporates the minimum possible element of player interaction, a choice with a fixed set of options, to highlight how depression /eliminates/ choices. The option is there, but you can't do it. That's not commonly used for narrative purpose in game design and it does it well. Also, choice-based text adventures are a thing and examples of it are good to include. (In the draft where this was a curriculum, the horror game "my father's long, long legs" - https://ifdb.tads.org/viewgame?id=u6urdbmp6pdv6lk1 - came first, because it's an excellent game and a more typical, if virtuosic, example of the Twine medium.)
- Gran Turismo 3: A-Spec: one of the best Gran Turismo games from the period when they still included the license test mechanic. I think those license tests were good pedagogical tools in and of themselves in the skills of analog controller-based sim-style videogame driving.
- Gone Home: Environmental storytelling, self-paced exploration, and multiple narratives, many of which take place in the player's mind as they determine what happened. Probably the most iconic first-person exploration game, and if not, I still think it's a more intellectually accessible choice than "Dear Esther".
- Left 4 Dead: This is the game that taught me how to play first-person shooters. As someone who was incompetent at first-person shooters, I was still an asset at normal difficulty because I was someone who could press the "get a downed person back up" or "get a special infected off" button for one of my allies. It's a cool game, it's a cool co-op shooter game, there's a lot to talk about with the AI Director and so forth, and it would also be a co-op game that a class containing players of very different skill levels could still participate in.
- Portal: ...it's a good first-person puzzle game? I haven't put a lot of thought into this choice.
- Mega Man 2: It's my favorite 2D action platformer game. Again, not a lot of thought put into this one.
- Myst: Early point-and-click adventure game. Explore beautiful fantastical worlds, solve weird puzzles, find all kinds of interesting worldbuilding information. I think a lot of puzzle games owe inspiration to this, and I think it's still a neat game.
Gran Turismo license tests re: commentary on my other videogame reading list choices (474 words)
@Felthry They're a series of basic race driving skill tests in isolation. Acceleration and braking, basic cornering, a variety of different kinds of corners by themselves or in series ... basically practice drills on all the parts of driving a car in a sim racing game, like practicing scales for a musician.