The Best Video Game Ever!

Had some friends over this evening, and while we were talking I fired up Super Mario World on my Wii's Virtual Console. While I played, one friend asked a question to the effect of, "Do we still play games like this one because it's truly a great game, or is it not actually that great and we just play it for nostalgia? I mean, when your [my] kids [who are 2 and 4] hit that magic video game demographic of 8 or 10 years old, will they look at this and recognize a great game, or will they see a crappy old videogame?"

This lead to an interesting discussion of greatness in videogames, and how if it's even possible, could a game objectively be described as "great" or "the best?" We came up some interesting things:

"The Best" anything is a highly subjective matter; Halo is widely considered to among the best FPSs out there, but one of our impromptu round-table members who is a big fan of the FPS genre cannot stand it, as he hates any FPS played on a console. We decided that "best of" contests would work the best within a given genre. I asked would it possible to come up with a list of criteria for each of the "canonical" video game genres in order to remove as much subjectivity as possible from a "best of" contest, and we decided that it probably would, but it was not a task we were interested in at the moment.

Someone brought up something that they had seen on XPlay, I think, about how one of the hosts was introducing some of the games from his childhood to his kids, and sometimes he could not remember why he liked a particular game so much, but other times he found games that he and his kids both had a lot of fun with. We decided that that was probably the fairest possible method, and the best video games could hope for was a certain level of "timelessness," something that can only be determined until a few more generations of people are exposed to the same game; if it was fun for kids then, and still fun for kids 25 years later, then it's probably a really good game. I suggested that, based on that criteria, SMW is probably more timeless than the original NES Super Mario Brothers and everyone seemed to agree with me.


One thing I've thought of since they all left: Since we probably can't fairly list out the criteria for "the best videogame ever," would it be possible list the criteria of a "great" videogame, either by genre or overall? I mean, not everyone has the same list of "best books of all time" but we could probably agree on certain things that make a book great; the same should be possible for videogames. It might be easier with games to list the things that a "great" game shouldn't have: sluggish controls, slowdown, things like that.