I don’t think anyone could have predicted this would be my number one. For all of the number ones you were expecting, you’ll have to check Part 7 once it goes up in a couple of days. Part 7 won’t be so much a list of honorable mentions, as it will be a list of alternate #1s that didn’t seem to fit the rest of the list.
#1 - a post by Akoomsh
‘Never read the comments’, says the popular wisdom. And to be honest, I’m not even sure how I originally came across this obscure post by a random player on the Steam forums. But I saved it to my Instapaper account, and over the past few years since it appeared in 2013, I’ve gone back and re-read it several times.
I think this piece is important for a number of reasons. First, it’s not criticism, so much as opinion writing; it’s not directed at the creators and it doesn’t exist within the established circles of critical discussion. It’s not a reply to someone else’s blog post, article or retrospective. It’s not an attempt to generate clickthroughs or page views. It lives on its own, and from a reach perspective, it may just as well have been written in a diary and tucked under a pillow.
Furthermore, one gets the impression (or at least I make the assumption) from reading it, that the author is not even particularly familiar with the critical discourse surrounding the game. He claims to have read comments - likely forum posts themselves - about the game, but does not seem to be regurgitating other people’s messages from the usual sources. He seems - at least to me - to have arrived at his assessment of the game on his own. The fact that he’s not really saying anything new is not important at all - the fact that he is arriving at his conclusions and his assessment of the game autonomously is what matters to me. His does not appear to be an opinion constructed from exposure to the opinions of others. It feels to me, at least, to be genuine.
It helps, of course, that he is celebrating the experience we intended. I could easily point to a thousand forum posts that are equally detached from the critical discussion that lambast the game for its many unconventional designs. I’m biased in pulling the one forum post in a million from the player who ‘gets it’. I hope you’ll indulge me.
Because in many ways, that’s the entire point of this exercise. For years before Far Cry 2 I frequently asserted that I don’t make games for reviews, or for money, or for any of the superficial reasons that I am a professional game developer. I asserted that the reason I make games is to contribute to the discussion about what games are and what they can be. The thing I have often claimed to value above all is the sincere feedback of other developers, and the opinions and impressions of those players who choose to deeply engage. I have often said that if the games I worked on could change the perspective of one person, it would all be worth it.
Going ten years without having shipped a game has made it enormously difficult to keep believing that. In the first couple of years after Far Cry 2 is was still an easy position to hold. After 5 years and a couple of failed attempts at a couple of different jobs, it became harder. After Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory reached its ten year anniversary, I was pretty full of self-doubt. Maybe just making games for a paycheque should be enough. Maybe I was holding a position that easy to hold for a guy who’d been lucky enough to work on a few critically acclaimed games in a row. Maybe it was only privilege and fluke that allowed me to claim some higher purpose in my work. Maybe I should just shut the fuck up and do some work - put my mouth where the money was instead of vice versa….
But this is the one; Akoomsh is the one player in a million who gets it. And he gets it not because he read all the other articles by the people who are like him, the people with whom he is predisposed to agree. He gets it on his own. By his own admission, he struggled with the game, and he found his own way to what the game is about. Far Cry 2 changed his perception of what games are and what they can be, and what they can say, and how they can say it. Akoomsh, and some invisible minority of people like him, are the reason I make games, and this forum post is worth more to me than a 10/10 on a popular website, or a big bonus earned for hitting a sales target. It’s proof that the things I believe aren’t futile and that I’m not just flailing at windmills.
It’s proof that games are worth fighting for - even if fighting means a decade of losing. And I owe it to all the Akoomshes out there to keep fighting.
To paraphrase Orson Welles on Greta Garbo, you only need one masterpiece. <3
Posted by: Austin Lancaster | November 04, 2018 at 06:54 PM