04-26-2022, 09:46 AM
To any online-gaming-community regular in the late '00s and early '10s, it would seem obvious that The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time was the greatest game ever made. I don't remember it being a contentious subject, nor one often debated, nor something that members of such communities came together to decide on; it was simply the truth, as self-evident as the fact that the sun rose this morning. A handful of other games received a similar sanctification - Half-Life 2, Doom, Quake, Bioshock - but none came close to Ocarina's level of unquestionable holiness.
In addition to these "god games", there were a handful of universally-panned "n00b games". It was customary to label yourself a "hardcore gamer" and malign "casuals" who enjoyed mobile or sports games. If you were a PC gamer, you would fling shit at console gamers, and if you were a console gamer you would fling shit right back. If you were a fan of less mainstream first-person shooters, like Team Fortress 2 or Counter-Strike, it was a borderline ritual to hate Call of Duty. Being indifferent or disinterested w.r.t CoD wasn't enough. You had to actively despise it, and heap invective on "cod nubs" joining your server.
This is a 2012 video by TheWarOwl, a well-known Counter-Strike JewTuber. He plays Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 for all of an hour, deliberately acting like an idiot the whole time and doing everything he can to reinforce his own negative perception of the game. At the end of his "deep-dive", he comes to the conclusion that MW3 is inferior to "skill-based shooters" like Counter-Strike because it lacks predictable spray patterns and other "skill-based" elements. The reason for Call of Duty's persistent popularity, WarOwl posits, is that the game gives people a false sense of accomplishment, due to its focus on improving the player character instead of the player himself.
I like Counter-Strike, and am indifferent to Call of Duty, but it's clear to me that WarOwl's critique of MW3 lacks substance. In fact, it's less of a critique than a unity signal. The effect of this video is to affirm his CS-playing audience, to tell them that they're smarter than the CoD-squeaker masses, that they enjoy Gamer Kino as opposed to mass-produced pablum.
The general point I'm trying to make here: "Gamer Culture" (however you define that) had a laundry list of things you were expected to like, and a laundry list of things you were expected to hate, and these lists were based more strongly on social shaming than the liked / hated things' actual merits.
You see a similar phenomenon with "canon" movies and music, but these media are older than video games, and their critics are taken much more seriously. The question I want to answer with this thread is, "Where did this notion of the 'games canon' come from?"
Let's start with Ocarina of Time. I don't mean to throw shade on Ocarina - it's a legitimately great game - but I can't think of any reason why it's taken such a singular place in the Gamer Canon compared to, say, Mario 64.
- Game Critic / Journo Consensus? While Ocarina was critically acclaimed on launch, it received nowhere near as much attention from the games press as Mario 64. The rash of articles in games magazines calling it the "Greatest Game of All Time" seems to be for the most part a reaction to the Cult of Ocarina; only a handful post-date the game by less than a decade.
- Popularity? Ocarina sold very well, but Mario 64, Mario Kart, and Goldeneye all outsold it. And how much it sold is wholly irrelevant; by the late '00s (the heyday of Ocarina nut-hugging) the console the game was made for was long discontinued. The only ways to play it were 1) buying an old N64 and cartridge, or 2) playing it on the Wii Virtual Console (which required a special controller, as the Wiimote couldn't fully emulate an N64's).
My best guess: Ocarina of Time strikes a perfect balance between accessibility and "hardcore-ness". It sold millions of copies and made a mark on popular culture, but is lengthy and (at parts) oblique enough that only a small fraction of the people who picked it up actually played to the end. Like some classes of computation problems, a completion of Ocarina is (relatively) difficult to achieve but easy to verify, and grants clout in a wide variety of places.
(Pinging