This is as good a time as any to talk about one of my biggest beefs with modern day publications talking about art, the always controversial all-time lists put together by seemingly everyone for no one. There’s simultaneously a sense of urgency and laziness, knowing that your list will generate Discourse that gets people talking about your website, the most important factor of all.

PC Gamer’s "The top 100 PC games" is a helpful example of a bad list in the same way that Filip Miucin is a helpful example of a plagiarist. It’s so bad, so wrongheaded, and so backwards that it can be studied as a textbook, elementary example of how and why the behavior as a whole works the way that it does. Let’s start with the criteria: the list has a numerical algorithm driving it, with four determining factors.

I sorely long to be a fly on the wall when these were decided. This is the epitome of producer brain, seconding quality to importance, hilarious considering the list’s chronic case of short-term memory loss, and creating an algorithm designed to boost the latest trendy titles to the top of the pile. I pity anyone at PC Gamer who had to argue for a game that doesn’t have an ecosystem of short form video content formed around it. Playability is an interesting metric in theory but demeaning in practice, lacking a lot of nuance especially considering some of the choices here. The connotation of playability is more akin to ease of access. Can anybody with a good graphics card find this game on steam during a midweek sale and fly through it? Extra points for you! It neglects the medium’s turbulent relationship with preservation, biasing games that have more distance from their original forms than the ship of Theseus and are only a few clicks away, neglecting games that may be lacking in support, delisted, or banned altogether. Some games that make the list, like Ultrakill, make it despite being unfinished, an odd contrast from excluding games that may be gone despite the work that went into them.

All of these attitudes contribute to recency bias, a major factor in lists like these, compare the rhetoric here to the introduction to Rolling Stone’s latest all-time songs list:

We know these lists happen because these publications need a digestible posturing of being hip with the times, and recency bias in all time lists is nothing new, hell I’ve done it myself in previous writings that are still available for public viewing. But now that I’ve done a bit of rhetorical deconstruction and moralizing, I want to look at a few of the individual choices made in this list and where I think these (bad) attitudes come from.

Recency Bias Examples I Have No Interest In Examining Further

The release dates on a lot of these games are plainly incorrect, listing Ghost of Tsushima as releasing in May of 2024 and Snake Eater in October of 2023. There’s no explanation for this, but it’s likely referencing the latest major update or whatever port the writers are actually playing.

• Balatro at #8 - an eight month old game you can play on your phone

• The recent Resident Evil 4 remake at #63 and the System Shock remake at #60 - don’t we love remakes, gang!

• Animal Well at #43 - you certainly could’ve found something other than a five month old game. Maybe even something from a year that doesn’t start with the number 2… daring!

Bold and Brash Decisions

• A fickle claim that “we'll usually only allow one game per series—we'll only include multiple if we feel the games are different enough from each other to be worth mentioning both,” that allows the list to contain Morrowind and Skyrim (embarrassing), as well as Doom and Doom Eternal (more justifiable).

• Lots of talk about metroidvanias for a list that contains neither a Metroid nor a Castlevania. Not saying you have to, but weird choice.

• Not to be That Guy, but, no Spec Ops: The Line?

The Baldur’s Gate Sized Elephant in the Room

In the same way that calling anything the greatest of all time less than two years after it comes out is clout chasing and shameful, putting Baldur’s Gate 3 at the top of this list is embarrassing. Have some sense of self-position here, people! I know you played a video game before this! Complimenting the writing of BG3 courts my most dangerous argument, I don’t think BG3 has good writing. It designs plenty of compelling scenarios for a player to navigate, but the characters don’t feel real, all of their demeanors vulnerable to the whims of the player. It’s a game that puts player agency above establishing any real foundations for its world, becoming more of a sandbox for the player to stomp around in than a setting that feels governed by any rules. To some extent these are all good things to have in a video game that wants to do D&D 5e without the essential component that is human communication, but it is a player-pleasing exercise to a pathetic degree.

Above all, the choice is safe and marketable to PC Gamer’s readership. It’s clickbait. Sure, there are some words from writers in there who probably mean what they’re saying, but there will always be an aftertaste of insincerity to an editorial decision like this. It’s easy money, it’s uncontroversial clicks. That’s the big issue with all these all time lists, frankly, they all feel like pathetic attempts to earn thumbs up from the loudest online fandoms who get weird if you criticize their darlings, much less kill them.