The Polaris List
Hey the Polaris list of influential video games is out!
It's a list of the 100 most influential video games, as voted on by 167 professional game designers (including me!). And if you look carefully, you'll see a comment of mine got used for a pull quote for Deus Ex, one of the top 10 games on the list.
Now that it's out, I figured I should post up my list of games and the notes I submitted for each. So here goes, in no particular order, 10 games that have been influential for me, and a lightly edited version of the notes I sent over at the time:
JS Joust - Standing in a courtyard, seeing the lights glow, seeing people circling, their eyes locking onto each other. It's a videogame but it's also about bodies moving around each other in space.
Soda Constructor - A game can be a toy, a way of exploring something, what if we used sine waves to control springs to make legs. Stylish, undemanding, there for you to investigate as long as you like and then walk away again.
Kentucky Route Zero - Who knew a game could look like this, could be written like this, could be so curious and exploratory and eager to show you new things but also so confident. and also so committed to a particular story and a particular place. Blue collar but also about art galleries. And, too, I can't forget the way my hairs rose when the roof lifted off.
Deus Ex - As a kid, playing through Liberty Island again and again, slowly learning how different actions could provoke different responses. It felt like a world and it also felt like a toybox.
Creatures - The sense that these creatures were made by a bloke in a office somewhere in England, but also the sense that they had some essential mystery to them - how do they behave this way? what is the limits of their behaviour? I think what was also special was the sense that the bloke himself didn't really know the answer to that.
King of Dragon Pass - God I keep waiting for a wave of games to rip it off, and the wave never comes. It's hard to penetrate, committed to rewarding play that fits with a particular fictional culture's mores - but slowly you learn more, and you are constantly surprised by new situations. The way the narrative and the system combine to make something so much larger than the sum of their parts.
Vesper 5 - The idea that a game could be a commitment, a meditation, something that you need to put the effort in to enjoy - that the effort could almost all be found within that commitment, not within the game itself. A game that I played together with others, all understanding the system as it unfolds together.
Digital Bird Playground - A game as well as a playground. Sitting with friends and just... fucking around. You can find your own play within a game, and often it's better that way. And also the sound of the bicycle bell. Just — joy.
Neopets - A game as a social space, a game as a system, a game as something you try to hack and cheat within, a game as something which exists to dangle shiny paintbrushes in front of you. A game which is many games, you can choose, engage the way you want to. A game which is also a web of guilds and forums and shops, half existing within the game but also extending outside of it.
Harmony Summer Hardpack Tape 11-in-1 - Playing this repeatedly and falling in love with the Blondie song Sunday Girl, seeing the scribbles laid out, the hand-drawn marks on the paper on the camera within the texture within the game engine. The collision is wonky and the writing is unmistakeable. That videogame mystery, that essential magic of all of these elements coming togather - but done on the smalles scale.
Out of these, only two featured in the final list - Kentucky Route Zero at #50, and Deus Ex at #7. I am honestly not so very surprised to find my influences out of step with other designers (or am I? I wonder what the average is? Bruno Dias's list definitely has more overlaps)... partly this is that some of my picks are kind of wilfully obscure – but still genuine! – and partly it's that the kind of stuff I usually work on and think about doesn't fit into the mainstream of videogame thinking. I keep talking to people and they ask what I do and I say game design, and then they ask what kinds of games, and then I explain that it's the kind of game where the context they're played within shapes the experience more than most. Where my design thinking is about how the frame of the game shapes it, rather than assuming it will be played with a controller on a TV by 1-4 people. So of course the games I am inspired by will also push those boundaries - games that are durational, games that bleed into the wider web, games that are about creating things or games that are about interacting with a software object or objects more than they're about exploring particular goals.
Anyway, all that said, I'm still surprised that Neopets didn't place. Definitely influential!
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