Polygon: "Why Gone Home is the Most Important Game of the Decade" - Polygon does it again

[Syaoran Li]

Polygon posts a dumb clickbait article. Also, the sky is blue, grass is green, and Liberace was very very gay.

All this and Andy Rooney tonight on 60 Minutes!


Serious question though, what would you guys consider to be the most influential game of this decade?

Despite its autistic fanbase, I'm going to have to agree with some of the others and say Minecraft. That being said, I'd also say Dark Souls, Fortnite, and Red Dead Redemption are contenders as well.

 

[Maamtis]

Polygon posts a dumb clickbait article. Also, the sky is blue, grass is green, and Liberace was very very gay.

All this and Andy Rooney tonight on 60 Minutes!


Serious question though, what would you guys consider to be the most influential game of this decade?

Despite its autistic fanbase, I'm going to have to agree with some of the others and say Minecraft. That being said, I'd also say Dark Souls, Fortnite, and Red Dead Redemption are contenders as well.

Amazing thing about Minecraft is they technically are still on the first release but probably could have justified putting out a sequel with all the new stuff they've added to it.

 

[Keroruma]

I'm going to say in advance that a game doesn't need to be good to be influential.

Dark Souls - it has defined the genre of third-person action games for this decade spawning a myriad clones.
PUBG - yes, Fortinte was bigger, but it was PUBG that for years made Battle Royale games a thing.
Dear Esther - came out earlier than Gone Home and defined the indie bullshit that plagues us to this day.
The Walking Dead - the other face of the adventure game genre whose heritage plagues us to this day. This is the game we have to thank for Life is Tumblr.

Red Dead Redemption was very successful, but how did it influence the industry? I struggle to think of a single thing RDR did that wasn't done before and that can is visible in the medium after.

 

[Pumpkin Girl IRL]

I'd say World of War raft but then I realise it's been out for more than fifteen years, and I feel more of my life force drain away.

 

[TFT-A9]

Gone Home is important because we got a new standard for measuring whether a game is trash or not.

"On a scale of Gone Home to good..."

 

[Hux]

The only impact Gone Home ever had for me was the time me and my friends were ripping on it with stuff like

"Gone Rome where you get breastfed by a wolf and kill your brother because you don't like him naming the city you both built"
Or
"Gone Ohm where you're an electrician"

 

[UnclePhil]

Statutory rape and bad behavior in general are to be celebrated with triumphant fanfare music when it's a quirky pretentious teenage girl and her AWOL black lesbian lover. Otherwise no one would have given a crap about the runaway teens and still wondered where the ghosts were.

The parents know Katie is coming home but they schedule their marriage retreat trip so she will arrive at their empty house, just to heighten the "mystery" of where everybody went.

I liked piling all the movable objects in the foyer to make them look like hoarders.

 

[Gar For Archer]

Polygon posts a dumb clickbait article. Also, the sky is blue, grass is green, and Liberace was very very gay.

All this and Andy Rooney tonight on 60 Minutes!


Serious question though, what would you guys consider to be the most influential game of this decade?

Despite its autistic fanbase, I'm going to have to agree with some of the others and say Minecraft. That being said, I'd also say Dark Souls, Fortnite, and Red Dead Redemption are contenders as well.

Minecraft has had a massive CULTURAL impact, but I dunno if it’s had that big of an impact on the industry. The one thing that sets Minecraft apart from other games is a true open world that you can alter entirely to your liking, and that’s something that only really works with its ridiculously low-resolution blockiness, in a game without any real objectives. That means it’s hard to make a game that’s “inspired” by Minecraft’s defining feature without also aping the distinct blocky aesthetic of the world.

That being said, it’s not IMPOSSIBLE - the Minecraft Without Cubes mod, for example, results in a very unique-looking aesthetic very different from Minecraft, while still operating much in the same way. I could see a Minecraft-inspired game that’s low-poly instead of blocky, which would differentiate itself enough from Minecraft’s style to not be considered a “Minecraft Clone”.

That being said, Minecraft no doubt had a lot of indirect influence. Factorio (and I’m pretty sure Infinitactory as well) was inspired by IndustrialCraft, a Minecraft mod that adds machines for resource processing and encourages the construction of large factories; and the whole Battle Royale craze can arguably be traced back to Minecraft Hunger Games, a staple of shitty Minecraft Youtubers of the 2010’s.

 

[Syaoran Li]

Minecraft has had a massive CULTURAL impact, but I dunno if it’s had that big of an impact on the industry. The one thing that sets Minecraft apart from other games is a true open world that you can alter entirely to your liking, and that’s something that only really works with its ridiculously low-resolution blockiness. That means it’s hard to make a game that’s “inspired” by Minecraft’s defining feature without also aping the distinct blocky aesthetic of the world.

That being said, Minecraft no doubt had a lot of indirect influence. Factorio (and I’m pretty sure Infinitactory as well) was inspired by IndustrialCraft, a Minecraft mod that adds machines for resource processing and encourages the construction of large factories; and the whole Battle Royale craze can arguably be traced back to Minecraft Hunger Games, a staple of shitty Minecraft Youtubers of the 2010’s.

True, although I'd say it also had a direct technical impact because it started the "open world survival sandbox" genre along with Day Z, and unlike Day Z, Minecraft was never a mod of a preexisting game at any point.

Red Dead Redemption was very successful, but how did it influence the industry? I struggle to think of a single thing RDR did that wasn't done before and that can is visible in the medium after.

It's influential because it showed that even "dead" genres had viability as video games. Probably not quite as influential as Minecraft, Dark Souls, or even The Walking Dead, but it's notable.

There were Western video games before RDR, but overall the video game industry avoided it because Westerns were already a dead genre in Hollywood for the most part. Most of the Western games that did exist were usually arcade shooters (Mad Dog McCree, Lethal Enforcers 2) or obscure cult classics at best (GUN, Sunset Riders, even Red Dead Revolver)

If we see more obscure or dead genres of fiction get more video game adaptations in the future, I'd wager that RDR could be cited as an influence. Especially if they're well-made or big budget.

 

[Idiotron]

Yes, and the Man of the Year is that hobo who sleeps around the corner from where I live.

Also, Minecraft came out in 2009 so you can't count it as a game from this decade.
My vote goes to GTA V, maybe Fortnite but unlike Fortnite, GTA V is good.

 

[Recoil]

Zoe Quinn isn't even remotely related to Gone Home - what are you dorks talking about?

There's nothing wrong with The Fullbright Company itself - it's just some hipsters shitting out mediocre indie "narrative experiences". Both Gone Home and Tacoma are harmless and inoffensive walking simulators. The only issue here is that game journos are propping their games as some revolutionary mindblowing revelations that changed the world of gaming forever. Which they aren't. They barely qualify as good stories. Industry awards are cancer in every industry, but gaming media is far more degenerate and incestuous than even Hollywood, so shit like Gone Home gets a ton of free marketing, and real diamonds don't.

Thanks for correcting me, I could've sworn the two were tied somehow.
I guess all of these people just bleed together in my mind after a while.

 

[Biffo]

I would say Pokemon Go or PBGU, not saying they are good games however, then again better than Gone Home for sure, a shit game with a bad story made for people that don't watch movies that don't cost over $100 million.

 

[Tanner Glass]

Even if you're a huge Gone Home fan, why the fuck would you put it over shit like Last of Us (if you're into that shit), PUBG, Skyrim, Rocket League, Overwatch, Destiny, Portal 2, Mass Effect 2, or really any game for "Game of the Decade".

Jesus Christ. Embarassing.

Saints Row 4 came out the week as Gone Home - I wouldn't even call Gone Home "Game of the Week for Week 3, August 2013", much less "Game of the Decade".

 

[MrTroll]

Serious question though, what would you guys consider to be the most influential game of this decade?

Whichever game has made the most $ with microtransactions (probably GTA5). That's the real sea change in gaming over the last decade. No narrative "innovation" is going to compete with a process that allows a $60 game to become a $600 "service", in terms of overall impact. It's more consequential than traditional DLC ever was.

 

[Notgoodwithusernames]

SKyrim. The game is the resident evil 4 of the seventh generation due to how many ports their are

 

[Ruin]

How many people does Zoe Quinn have to kill before people stop furiously sucking her clit? One is clearly not the answer.

 

[Pumpkin Girl IRL]

Surprisingly, the support is notable by its absence. Sure, she gets the usual bush eaters on Reddit and so on, but there's been no defense of her in the gaming media (once her story was picked apart anyway), her social media is routinely flooded with "ok murderer" regardless of what she's posting, and the usual suspects aren't carrying the same zeal they used to.

She's gotten fat and is not as useful to them nowadays.

 

[Marissa Moira]

So is Gone Home as significant as JFK's Assassination, 9/11, or more significant than these two events combined?

 

[Vault Boy]

Skyrim, Minecraft, Fortnite, PUGB, and GTA V beg to differ. All phenomenons, and they'll give you more bang for your buck.

What exactly did Gone Home inspire, vapid indie tripe that at best is as long as a movie?

 

[AnOminous]

walking simulators aren't even new though, they're just text adventure games where you control them with a dpad instead of a keyboard

you walk into a room
there is a lamp in the room
turn lamp off
the room becomes dark

Even comparing this bullshit to something like the classic Infocom games is ridiculous. Consider Suspended. You're dropped into a complete disaster without any explanation. You're a suspended brain controlling a giant facility that is supposed to be self-maintaining, but something has happened. You don't know what, only that it's increasingly obvious the whole place is going to blow if you don't figure it out.

Your only way of interacting with the facility is through a number of robots you can give orders in text and that return information in text or numbers, often cryptically and with very limited understanding, because each robot only specializes in one sense, so you only get the information they can actually detect.

And guess what? Only one of them can see and is broken when the game starts. So you have to fix it even though you're completely fucking blind and so are all your robots.

Also if one of them gets killed, tough. You're no longer able to get that kind of information or interact with the objects it can interact with. So generally, then, you get killed. Sometimes after figuring out more of what's going on and how to avoid that next time.

Ultimately, you die. Again and again and again and again. If you ultimately win the game, it's only by slowly figuring out the world you're in and what's going on in it, and how to stop your impending doom.

Suspended was released in fucking 1983.

In Gone Home, you can rummage through some bull dyke's possessions. You can pick them up and, umm. . .put them back down again. Fucking awesome. Innovation! A new fucking paradigm.

Flash games made in the 2000s probably have more impact.

Not even a shitpost. Super Meat Boy was a flash game on Newgrounds in 2008 and had vastly more impact than this piece of shit.