Oh yeah, I have a blog! Lots has been going on in the intervening months (see my Twitter feed for short attention span details), but I figured a video game post during NaBloPoMo would be a good way to get back on the wagon, even if I’m not actually posting every day during November.

While visiting my Little Brother this weekend, I noticed a rather unusual magazine cover… a (very pixelated) monster from the original Doom. This turned out to be the latest issue of Game Informer, specifically Volume XIX, Number 12, Issue 200. In honor of this decimalist anniversary, they published their Top 200 Video Games of All Time list, which unsurprisingly is linkbait for any video game fan who likes to rant about what should and should not be included in such a list. I ran through my opinions quickly with my Little, mostly fixating on why so many recent games were already on the list, but decided a deeper analysis was in order.

Instead of complaining about the contents of the list, I thought I’d use it to track my personal video game history (much as my father has in the past used the Rolling Stone 500 Greatest Albums of All Time and Rolling Stone 500 Greatest Songs of All Time to guide his music purchases). I’ve also done some histogram breakdowns of what’s on the list. I would say that my guideline for inclusion on any such list would involve adjectives like “innovative” and “influential”, and explicitly avoid conditions like “critically acclaimed”, “popular”, or “best-selling”. This in turn means that inclusion must be viewed through a somewhat temporally distant lens, for sufficient perspective on a particular cultural artifact’s import.

How many of these have you played? Do you strongly agree/disagree with any of the rankings?

The columns are Game Informer rank, game title, platform(s), and year of publication from the original article; I believe using this data for commentary is covered by Fair Use. I added platforms in a few places to account for the particular port of a game that I played. I have also added columns for myself, for Played, Owned, and Completed. The full table and further analysis is below the cut.

Columns

A brief explanation before the table: I count a game as “Played” if I personally controlled the game for at least one significant play session (enough to see one full level, game, etc.); I count a game as “Owned” if I purchased the game or received it as a gift; and I count a game as “Completed” if I finished the primary plot levels for games with solo play, reached a reasonably high or maximum level in games with increasing difficulty level play, or played a simulation game to a goal threshold. Ownership and Completion are both subsets of Played, with some overlap, but not identical subsets.

Top 200 Video Games Table

Overall Breakdown

From browsing the list, I was expecting it to be skewed towards more recent offerings. A few quick histograms to some extent confirm this for the full list, but disprove it when you consider only the Top 20 games on the list. Click to embiggen any of the graphs.

Bar graph histogram of the Top 200 and Top 20 games by publication year

Bar graph histogram of the Top 200 and Top 20 games by console platform (including PC)

Bar graph histogram of the Top 200 and Top 20 games by console generation.

As you can see, the Top 200 list (in red) is skewed towards PC games, since that category is not further broken down by OS or era. It also seems to be skewed towards more recent consoles, particularly the Playstations 2 & 3 and both Xboxen.

However, if you consider only the Top 20 (in blue), a more historical perspective is available. Nintendo is more favored, and the breakdown is more even by by both year and generation. To me that implies that Game Informer recognizes Nintendo as an early innovator (particularly on the NES and SNES), but more lacking in recent offerings for the GameCube and Wii, especially compared to what’s available on the Xbox and Playstation.

My Breakdown

So, in total, of the 200 games, I’ve played 89 (44.5%), owned 25 (12.5%), and completed 26 (13%); however, I’ve only completed 11 of the games I’ve owned. There are three factors here: first, I’ve played games to completion on friends’ consoles/computers; second, I played several classic console games via emulation in high school, where I had downloaded the ROMs; third, I have purchased some newer games on the list that I’ve yet to finish.

Until the Wii, I never owned a console myself (with the exception of the short-lived Virtual Game Station PlayStation emulator for Mac), so all the other games I owned are listed under PC (which I mean to include DOS, Windows, Mac OS 9, and Mac OS X versions of games). PC is nearly impossible to split into “generation”, and since it includes multiple hardware/software combinations, I can’t easily get good stats for it. In spite of all of this, I feel like I’ve experienced most of the key points in video game history from the Nintendo revolution on. In that regard I’m in a historical sweet spot, I suppose. Click to embiggen any of the graphs.

Bar graph histogram of the Top 200 games broken down by my Played, Owned, and Completed lists organized by publication year

Bar graph histogram of the Top 200 games broken down by my Played, Owned, and Completed lists organized by console platform (including PC)

Bar graph histogram of the Top 200 games broken down by my Played, Owned, and Completed lists organized by console generation

As you can see, my own gameplay is heavily skewed towards the PC, although until recently that was almost exclusively games that were available on Mac. This makes sense, given that my mother didn’t allow game consoles in the house, but non-violent and arguably educational games my sister and I could sneak onto the computer.

There’s also a strong “bump” for games in the mid-’90s; this is when I would have been playing lots of console games at friends’ houses (for sleepovers and such), but it also includes the non-trivial number of SNES and Playstation games I played via emulation on my Mac in high school. (Incidentally, that very Mac is now functioning as the webserver displaying this blog entry.)

My ownership numbers have unsurprisingly gone up since 2005, given that I now have disposable income and can indulge my video game habits more easily than when I was living at home or in college. Additionally, I have added a Wii (my first console I can call my own!), a gaming-capable phone (first the original iPhone, and now a 3GS), and with the advent of Intel-based Macs, a drive booting into Windows 7 that I use to play various Windows-only games, such as Half Life 2 and Borderlands.

Conclusion

Overall, I’d say this list is skewed towards recent years, which I think is explainable largely by the target audience of the magazine: roughly, my age group (and a little younger) who probably started playing on SNES (4th-gen) consoles and are currently playing Xbox 360. The breakdowns for the Top 20 however makes me feel a little better, in that games that are more influential (or arguably started a genre) are reflected there.

There are definitely a few “classics” on here that I’d like to pick up and play for historical reasons, and a few I’d go back to for nostalgia, but most of the games I haven’t played aren’t in genres I particularly care about. A number are relatively obscure Japanese releases that only the hardest of hardcore video game fans would have seen in the US.

My biggest complaint about the list is a few items that had been out less than a week at the time of publication of this Game Informer issue! (I’m looking at you Modern Warfare 2…) I don’t care how good your opening sales weekend numbers are, or how good the previews are, you don’t deserve to be on this list yet if you came out in 2009. Give it time!

What do you think? How do you measure up?

I was inspired by a recent tweet by Doc Searls to play with Wolfram|Alpha and get some stats on how old I am. In particular, if you make a query of the form [<month name> <day of month>, <4-digit year> birthday] Wolfram|Alpha (why is there a pipe in the middle of the name?) will calculate your age in a number of differen units, and how many days until your next birthday. You will not be surprised to learn that I am a total statistics addict, so this got my brain juices flowing.

First, I’m 9,720 days old. I recently got a good laugh by pointing out that I was “twenty-six and a half!” after someone commented on how young I look; I think the “and a half” made me sound too much like a 4 year old being ever-so-proud of being closer to 5 than 4 :oD.

Quick aside: someone (I forget who) on a SWIL mailing list suggested the notation of writing search queries demarcated by square brackets, since this is not something that is typically in search strings. This was in response to people saying things like “You should just google “search string”", which leads to nasty quote-nesting problems and also induces some ambiguity as to whether to quote (and therefore group) the specified search keywords. I’m not going to post the full BNF notation for this, so I hope that [<search term> ...] is a clear enough explanation of the format.

Second, I realized that I’m pretty close to 10,000 days old. While I usually am not a big fan of celebrating arbitrary anniversaries, particularly those that favor Base 10 (that’s for all you decimalists out there), I missed 2¹³ days a while ago and I have a ways to go until 2¹⁴ :oD. Another quick Wolfram|Alpha search ([today + 280 days]). I guess this means I’ll celebrate my 10,000th day of existence on March 12th, 2010. A quick glance at Wikipedia doesn’t indicate anything particularly auspicious about that date, but hey.

Third…

I don’t have a problem

I am of course referring to World of Warcraft. Seeing my age in days reminded me of the /played command in WoW, which gives you how many days you’ve played a particular character. I have only one primary character, which I had a vague recollection of being at over 100 days; however, I have two other level 80 characters (as of Wrath of the Lich King, the level cap), plus a number of mid-level alts as well as some very low-level alts rolled on various other servers either as experiments

I didn’t feel like mathing this all myself, so I grabbed the addon AllPlayed to do the hard work for me; all I had to do was login on each of my characters so that it could accumulate the data. This addon also has some other nice features, including allowing me to see which of my characters are fully rested (giving them the optimal XP bonus while leveling). I enjoy all of the character classes, and while sometimes I’m in the mood for one class or another, I try to make leveling as fast as possible given my play time (which I’m sure is more than most casual players, but less than a lot of people I know and play with, primarily because I’m limited to a few hours in the evening, possibly with longer sessions on the weekends).

The cold, hard total is 179 days, 4 hours, the vast majority of which (61.2%) is on my main Kjallstrom (109 days, 15 hours). That means I’ve spent about 1.84% of my entire life playing World of Warcraft. I’m pretty sure I could have done some amazing things with that time (which probably does not include writing the great American novel), but on the other hand, it’s entirely after work entertainment which most people would spend watching TV (about 13.5% on average over a 65 year lifetime). I would argue that it’s a bit different, given that it’s interactive and social, but I know a lot of people disparage online socialization as “not as good as the real thing”. I contend that I’ve greatly expanded the diversity of my friends on a number of axes thanks to long-term involvement in the guild community.

I’ve been playing WoW since October 2005 (I don’t have an exact date), and I’ve been playing on Kirin Tor (and a member of Mellonea) since November 2005. I did play non-trivially on other servers with real-life friends well into 2006, and briefly convinced them to join me on Kirin Tor, although they eventually gave up on the game. If we isolate the percentage to just the time that I’ve owned WoW, the past 1300 days or so, that gives about 13.7%, which is on par with the typical American’s TV usage.

Even more absurd details below the cut.

I can quit any time I want

Here’s the full data table of my characters, and how long I’ve played each of them; where available, I’ve added a link to their Armory profile. You’ll note that I play almost exclusively on the roleplaying server Kirin Tor; this is where I am guildmaster of Mellonea, and where I also spend most of my WoW-based socialization time. The table is in descending time-played order.
 

 
A few things to note: the old abandoned characters on other servers took much longer to get to their level, for a number of factors: Blizzard has significantly sped up leveling; I’m a more experienced player (knowing where stuff is); and on PvP servers there’s more death while soloing. Another odd thing: Thrun the Hunter was the very first character I rolled (because I had heard hunters were easy, and a good way to learn the game, and I liked that Tauren felt more alien than other classic fantasy races), but I don’t have any hunters I’ve leveled with any attention after switching to Alliance on Kirin Tor. Also, the character Mellobanka is a guild bank mule with bags, so I only log into to buy and sell items for the guild.

As you can see, the play time falls off pretty quickly, down to “just trying the class” and “just checking on people on that server”. Another thing to keep in mind is that Death Knights, as a hero class, start at level 55, and are also insanely easy to level. I have deleted a few characters, so I don’t have data on them, but all were below level 20. The nubs on other servers basically don’t affect the total, compared to my mains who raid at the level cap. Also, these values are only valid at the time of this post; I’m still playing, after all :o).

Conclusion

I would say that I do play too much WoW, but I find it to be a fun source of entertainment, a social activity, and a good way to unwind after work. I probably do read less, although I always have a book that I read before bed; I certainly watch less TV (although I sometimes have shows or movies I don’t care about that much on in the background while playing, particularly if I’m soloing). I have forgone real-world social events to raid with my WoW friends; I don’t know what people think about that generally. I would guess the most significant problem is that between work, WoW, and assorted other computer uses, I spend nearly every waking hour in front of a screen. No doubt this is why I started going nearsighted near the end of college!

What is your dominant non-work/non-school and non-sleep activity? Feel free to judge me now :oP.