Top 50! Top 100! Top … oh, who cares …

Has a list of the best games, music, movies, books, etc. ever done anything but annoyed people? Or, rather, sparked discussions and arguments?

Having read the Top 100 list of adventure games over at Adventure Gamers, I couldn’t help but wonder “surely they added the Portal games to make people get upset and drive more traffic to their site?”. Yes, they actually consider Portal 1 & 2 to be adventure games … which doesn’t work for too many reasons to name (and that would surely be a different blog entry altogether) but considering virtually no-one who has seen the Top 100 believes they should be in there, it does seem a pretty odd decision to include them.

In reality, these lists are 100% pointless and useless. At best, it shows you what the writers of a site believe and helps you decide whether they represent what you like or not. At worst, it’s a complete waste of time with no value what so ever. These lists always crop up on forums – especially if they have controversial entries (like Portal above). “What?? Justin Bieber best artist of 2011??” or “Dragon Age II a better RPG than The Witcher 2! What, are they braindead??” being just two examples. Okay, okay, I admit: that last one was actually a real comment of mine when I read IGN‘s list of best games of 2011 where they didn’t even mention The Witcher 2. If anything, it shows how easy it is to fall into the trap of getting worked up – everyone knows to totally disregard IGN since they’re less reliable than a 50 year old Lada and yet I still couldn’t help but get annoyed.

See, instead of writing some pointless numbered list, why not simply mention the games you liked and write some explanation next to them instead of feeling you have to put them in a certain order. It will still get people to go “Why didn’t they mention game X?!” but it’s better than the endless “game Y should be 5 spots higher than game Z, and … etc.” arguments or complaints. Not only that, but it might send a signal that maybe, just maybe, games aren’t so simplistic that they can be shoved in a numbered list. Review scores are another such thing, but that’s for another post of mine …