Or, you know, just provide a five-minute break from the night shift. They can be dangerous, encouraging you to gamble away your paycheck and consume every millisecond of your free time. They can be tools for communication and experimental spaces for self-discovery. Games can be adventures and puzzles and release valves for our anxiety and frustration. Video games are too many things to be confined by some notion of universal relevance. They see games like Cyberpunk 2077 and The Last of Us Part 2 as “real” video games that will pull the form closer to respectability, and that mobile and free-to-play games, games with color and joy, will propel the medium into a cultural ghetto. Some gamers still express a defensiveness about the medium: that games aren’t taken seriously, that they’re not perceived as high art, not shown the respect of books or music or film. In turn, the games community must evolve so that newcomers want to stay. Some newcomers will return to old hobbies, but I believe most folks will keep games in their lives.

In a year of bad news, it felt good to look forward to anything - even if it was just a slightly better box to put beneath our TVs. Then came the new consoles, and the corresponding marketing strike teams, vacuuming all these new potential players into the hype cycle. Mario Kart, Mario Odyssey, and Mario Party reminded people why they loved the medium back in the day, and Hades had other folks asking why they’d even fallen off this habit. Theater friends experimented with virtual reality via The Under Presents. Literary pals took a trip on Kentucky Route Zero. Anecdotally speaking, this year we at Polygon saw our nongaming friends spread across the medium. Now, everybody’s expected to care at least a little about games, lest they be mistaken for pop culture troglodytes.īy the summer of this year, it was evident that Animal Crossing had become a gateway. It’s like when prestige TV filled cable channels suddenly, “I don’t even watch TV” transitioned from a brag to an embarrassment. This year simply cemented that normalcy status. Then came Fortnite, tying together mobile free-to-play games and blockbuster quality, and the die was cast. Millions of people who would never identify as “gamers” began playing idle games for hours each day.

Games filled prime-time television, with Call of Duty commercials running during the NBA playoffs, and CBS sitcoms making references to World of Warcraft. Throughout the month, we’ll be looking back on the year with special videos, essays, and surprises!Ģ020 didn’t make games normal that process has been happening over the past decades. For our 2020 guide to the best entertainment of the year, Polygon is counting down our top 10 with a collection of essays along with our full Top 50 list.

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