On the New York City subway, a dour-faced commuter swipes her way through Angry Birds on a smartphone. In a basement in Baghdad, Iraqi teen-agers huddle around a TV playing Battlefield, a game in which they pretend to be American soldiers. In a Taiwanese Internet café, a middle-aged man, ghosted by lack of sleep and caffeine, goes on World of Warcraft quests with friends he’s never seen in person. Everybody plays; this is one of the fundamental instincts of our species. The ubiquity of video games is no surprise given the increasing omnipresence of screens in our lives. Wherever there are people, there are games.
This year was marked by a fresh diversity of video games, from elaborate productions like The Last of Us, which carefully mimics cinema’s control and grandeur, to curious mini-games like the viral darling Dots, which you play in your browser or on a smartphone. This was partly because 2013 was a transition year for the medium, moving from an older generation of consoles to newer, sharper iterations: the Xbox One and PlayStation 4. The video-game industry has a different creative rhythm than Hollywood or publishing; novelists do not wait for “book 2.0” in order to better render the fruits of their imagination on the page.
Some of the past year’s blockbuster games, which offer vast, intricate environments—and which have production budgets of hundreds of millions of dollars—have caused some to question whether we need a new generation of console hardware at all. No two games more clearly or beautifully illustrated this than Bioshock Infinite and Grand Theft Auto V. The former tells the story of a failed utopian project called Columbia, a city suspended by giant blimps in the clouds, where racism, ideology, and the American dream collide. But its aesthetic wonder was unmatched by its plot and its uninspired shooter-based gameplay. Likewise, Rockstar’s grandiose Grand Theft Auto V rendered an alternate-universe Los Angeles with unsurpassed vividness. From the nib of its mountain spires to the heaving waves of the coast, Los Santos, as the city is called, reflects the wonder of our world like a mirror. It deserves no such accolade, however, for its sub-standard criminal drama, its scattershot satire, or the stultifying missions it presents to players.
Many of the year’s most interesting titles came from the medium’s periphery. There was a blossoming of indie games with purposes beyond mere entertainment, such as Cart Life, a “retail simulator” designed to offer players insight into immigrant life in contemporary America, which won the Independent Game Festival prize in March. It was one of several games designed to elicit empathy and provide experiential insight into the lives of others. Another one was Private Eye, a detective game designed for the forthcoming Oculus Rift virtual-reality headset. Inspired by Alfred Hitchcock’s “Rear Window,” players assume the identity of a wheelchair-bound detective spying on a building through his binoculars—and attempting to stop a murder.
Despite gaming’s stigma as a time-wasting pursuit, each entry on the list that follows, in adherence to the novelist Kurt Vonnegut’s rule, does not waste people’s time. This year, some titles perfected earlier articulations of what a video game can be, some offered a signpost to where games may be headed, and some attempted to untangle the curious relationship that exists between a game, its maker, and its player. Video games are everywhere, and these are ten of the best.
1. Papers Please (PC)
It’s November 23, 1982. Your first task in your new job, as an immigration inspector at the Grestin Border Checkpoint, in the fictional European country Arstotzka, is straightforward: deny entry to all foreigners. The huddling, shuffling line weaves off-screen, and you must process as many would-be immigrants as possible, checking their documentation one by one, confirming or denying entry. The more people you process in a day, the more money you take home to your family.
A slew of additional rules arrives each day. As the red tape piles up, the number of people you are able to process by day’s end decreases. The fewer you process, the less money you make—the effect of which is revealed in a harrowing post-work financial breakdown, where, once you’ve paid your rent, you are forced to choose between spending your remaining earnings on heat, food, or, in the event that a family member falls sick, medicine.
Your choices have narrative consequences: Will you deny a mother from seeing her son simply because her entry document expired a few days ago? Allow her through, and the newspapers will report that immigrants are beginning to take local jobs. Grim yet affecting, it’s a game that may change your attitude the next time you’re in line at the airport.
2. The Stanley Parable HD (PC)
Originally launched in 2011, and expanded and further developed for a high-definition commercial release, The Stanley Parable is an example of the kind of art that is only possible within a video game. You play as Employee 427, a man who loves his dehumanizing job in a towering office block. One day, you looks up from your desk to find that your co-workers have vanished. As you explore the block, your actions are commentated on by an omnipresent narrator (played by Kevan Brighting), who, as well as reporting on your movements, offers prompts and clues to guide your decision-making.
The narrator chastises you when you divert from his instructions or spoil the story ahead of time; he sometimes even restarts the game without your consent. It’s ostensibly a game about trust: whether you trust the organisation you work for and, more pertinently, whether you trust the narrator enough to do as he says. As the short game progresses, a complicated relationship forms between you, the character, the game designer, and the narrator, in a fascinating study of pre-destination.
3. Super Mario 3D World (Nintendo Wii U)
How to achieve reinvention without creating alienation: this is the dilemma for Nintendo as it plots the ongoing career of the medium’s unofficial mascot. In Super Mario 3D World, the challenge is particularly tall: not only must the game find new creative ground to till after the Super Mario Galaxy titles plundered the farthest reaches of space, it’s also tasked with selling the company’s ailing Wii-U console.
It is the strongest orthodox game of the year, demonstrating Nintendo’s unmatched talent for spatial-reasoning designs. It shows up developers the world over with a seemingly endless stream of novelties and ideas. Its levels are taut, narrow affairs that progress in a way more reminiscent of Mario’s formative N.E.S. days than of his more recent outings. Contemporary invention comes by way of the game’s social features, which allow up to four players to quest in unison, and even sends your best runs into other players’ games across the Internet. It is beautiful and beautifully crafted.
4. State of Decay (Xbox 360, PC)
State of Decay celebrates the tension of a survivor community in crisis in a post-apocalyptic, zombie-pocked landscape. You hole up in an abandoned house and venture out to connect with other local men and women, inviting them back to the expanding commune. These characters provide your “lives.” If a zombie bites you, control switches to the next comrade in line. If you run out of friends, the game is over, a systemic theme that echoes its story.
As the community grows, its burden does, too: you’ll need more food and medicine to sustain the group. The world’s diminishing resources create a mounting sense that you’re in a race against your own consumption. State of Decay has problems: it is a patchy, occasionally ugly game; it does a poor job of explaining its own rules; and the gunplay is functional, not refined. But it contains a vivid, interesting world, in which impromptu, unscripted stories arise with astonishing frequency.
5. Pikmin 3 (Nintendo Wii U)
Nintendo’s star designer, Shigeru Miyamoto, famously conceived of Pikmin while gardening: he imagined herds of tiny creatures scuttling about, scavenging fruit and vegetables. That kernel of inspiration is markedly evident in this unorthodox game. You play as one of three spacemen guiding a herds of Pikmin, compliant, ant-like creatures, around the world with sharp whistles, collecting fruit, unearthing long-lost human technologies from the soil, and travelling deeper into unknown territory.
The Pikmin are, on a functional level, mere tools for progression. But they move and animate with such character and warmth that you develop a strong attachment to them. When one is eaten by a larger animal, or fails to make it back to the safety of the rocket ship before nightfall, there is a keen sense of loss.
The game offers a deep, primal appeal to both children and adults. For children, there’s the welcome example of small people’s usefulness and the thrilling terror of being left behind at the end of the day. For adults, it’s the welcome burden of stewardship and custody, of leading small people around a world, looking after them in the face of danger, and, finally, delivering them to their beds at night.
6. Ridiculous Fishing (Apple iOS)
In the iPhone-game landscape—now a toxic wasteland, corrupted by microtransaction-ridden offerings that have sacrificed passion for profit—the odd examples of beautiful game design stand tall. One such game is Vlambeer’s brightly colored fishing game, in which you play as a wizened fisherman named Billy. You cast your line with a tap on the screen, then tilt the phone to avoid fish as the line unspools down into the murk.
Once the bait reaches the seabed (or accidentally snags a fish en route), you must catch as many creatures on the line as possible while the hook rises back toward the surface. When the mass of fish breaks the water, it splays into the air, and Billy must shoot the confetti of falling creatures for a high score. The seesaw rhythm of play is endlessly compelling, and the wistful tale told through the gameplay lends the journey a melancholic ambiance.
7. Saint’s Row IV (PS3, Xbox 360, PC)
Once known as a poor man’s Grand Theft Auto, Saint’s Row has blossomed into a game that boldly satirizes not only the bluster of modern criminality but, with it, contemporary game mechanics. Here, the wild-eyed, frat-boy humor of the narrative has been exaggerated to improbable proportions: the game opens with the protagonist climbing a nuclear warhead as it sways into the stratosphere, to Aerosmith’s “I Don’t Want To Miss A Thing.” After disarming the nuke, he parachutes through the ceiling of the White House, where he ushers in a new Administration in which pimps occupy the most senior roles and new furnishings include dancing poles.
But the game soon reveals itself to be a postmodern blockbuster, pulling apart the “open-world” game premise and subverting expectations to glorious, often parodying effect. The game’s greatest accomplishment is perhaps in dispensing of the friction around play: there is almost no downtime between the action. Moreover, whether you’re throwing your character into traffic in order to file a false insurance claim or running to drop-kick an alien from the top of a skyscraper, the action is rarely less than thrilling. It is endlessly silly, but stronger for it.
8. Candy Box (Web)
This ASCII-art role-playing game, designed by a nineteen-year-old student from France, is freely available for anyone with a Web browser and an Internet connection. The designer Sid Meier says that “a game is an interesting series of choices,” but this is a maxim largely ignored by Candy Box, at least in its early stages. At first, it’s unclear whether it is a game at all: you simply accumulate one “candy” per second, and it’s not clear why or for what use.
But, over time, the game reveals itself, and by its latter stages (which can take days to reach) you are able to take on quests, battle monsters, and equip items. Detractors claim the game is little more than a skinner box, employing those same irresistible compulsion loops used by much-maligned Facebook games, such as Farmville. Candy Box’s early stages could even be viewed as a mild critique of that style of game design. But there is more craft and interest here than is first understood, and its meme-like popularity is well deserved.
9. The Legend of Zelda: A Link Between Worlds (Nintendo 3DS)
Nintendo’s Zelda is a recurring myth, a series whose set, props, lead characters, and rhythms of play have remained resolute in the face of new adventures. In this year’s entry, the link to the past is clearer than usual: the game is a reinvention of the venerable Super Nintendo classic from 1991, but the play shifts between contemporary 3-D polygons and 2-D sprites. The entry’s structure is also one of the most unusual in the series: you can tackle its dungeons in any order, and each one has been designed around a central conceit, so that the familiarity of its maps and tools is challenged by a fidgety, thrilling design.
10. Tearaway (PS Vita)
The Vita, Sony’s handsome hand-held games machine, is overburdened with ingenious technological foibles—gyroscopes, cameras, a microphone and, most unusually, a touch-panel on the rear of the screen. Tearaway, a beautiful fable from the British studio Media Molecule, is one of the first games to make effortless and appropriate use of the Vita’s features, by asking you to take specific photographs in the real world to complete in-game missions, for example. Yet, Tearaway’s aesthetic and playfulness are what make the game memorable, while its conclusion, which lingers long after the game has been set down, was perhaps the strongest of the year.