Gaming in a Hell Year: Top 10 Video Games of 2020

2020 was the opposite of a bad year for video games. It was an incredible year for games sales. Animal Crossing: New Horizons alone sold over sixty-million copies, double anything else in its franchise. Cyberpunk 2077 was arguably unplayable on launch and still sold thirteen million copies in days. Three months later I still cannot find a PlayStation 5, demand is so high for that thing. And that console basically doesn't have games.

Of course games did great in 2020. What else was there? Movies barely existed, sports leagues had bizarre seasons that seemed to barely matter, and politics was politics. You had Tiger King and video games, that is all of 2020's mass culture. So what could let you escape from the horrors outside?

Escape was the goal for people in 2020. There was nowhere to go but into a video game. The only meals out with friends I had in 2020 were in Yokohama in Yakuza 7. The only road trip was in Kentucky Route Zero. You couldn't date but you could flirt with Meg and Thanatos in Hades. Reality functionally had completely ceased. Life was on pause. Digital lives were about all you could create. Social groups held themselves together around Destiny 2 and Among Us.

Digital escapes were necessary to sanity for a lot of people in 2020. On the other hand, reality is unavoidable even in un-reality. Games still needed to be made by people made by blood and not pixels. A lot of these fantasies, no matter how pleasant, were created only after terrible costs and long brutal crunches. 2020 was a great year to sell a video game, but a really bad year to make one. Just ask CD Projekt Red. Or Naughty Dog. Or Ubisoft. Or the many more studios who delayed projects that may never be finished.

Or maybe it is just 2020. It is very hard to be happy about a lot of things right now. The storm is only just beginning to pass. We will be feeling the effects of it for years in this industry. If E3 2021 happens is really the least of the open questions for studios and critics and players. Games are doing better than movies are, but only after tremendous and still unappreciated effort to keep the wheels turning. There is no sufficient way to thank the people who gave up thousands of hours of their lives just so I could murder a zombie or two. I don't want anybody to forget that all this came at a cost.

However, I have no better way to thank those developers but to talk about how great their games are. Nothing I could say would be sufficient. So sadly, all I can offer is Top 10 List.

Hoping for a Better Future and The Top 15 Movies of 2020

2020 was 2020. The year's reputation speaks for itself. Perhaps for that reason, I believe this is my weakest Top 15 List in years. I was able to find about twenty movies from 2020 that I believe are truly great. But in comparison, in 2019 and 2018, I was able to find about thirty. Some of the movies on the 2019 list would be easy No. 1s if they had come out in 2020. Portrait of a Lady on Fire alone was better than this whole year combined, and that did not make my Top 5 last year. I don't want to call this is a "bad list" because these are not bad movies. These are great movies. Many deserve much more attention than they have received so far. 

Yet even while I beg for wider audiences, I have to admit to myself one important thing: I love this list less than the others. I loved watching movies less in 2020. Bear with me, I have a lot of thought in this opening, and there's a few paragraphs to go.

I still believe motion pictures as an artwork had value last year. Yet while 2020 was a bad year for many people, it was a worse year for the film industry. 2020 was a bad year to watch movies, a worse year to write about movies, and an apocalyptic year to make movies. The ongoing Coronavirus disaster threatens the industry in ways no crisis of in history has ever done. Even before hundreds of thousands of people were dying, studios and theaters were in flux, uncertain of their future while clinging onto shrinking ticket sales. When suddenly in March, every single theater had to close at once, studios had to somehow find a new way to survive. The answer looks like streaming. But who actually knows? I wonder if the smart money might even be wrong on that one.

For a good chunk of 2020, for the average film-goer, there was no movie industry. When theaters closed, the major blockbusters, the billion dollar bets that studios could previously make with very little risk, had to flee to safer waters. Something like The Way Back, a smaller adult drama, could drown in empty auditoriums. But Dominic Toretto was not going down with this ship. That meant a lot of the most exciting and popular movies were gone. If all you cared about was superheroes, you had very little to enjoy. And when the mainstream viewers disappeared, that only left me and film critics trying our best to tell whoever was left that would listen that, "look, Shirley actually is really great and you have Hulu anyway, please watch it! You have the time! Come on!". 

It felt like I was talking to nobody. That's painful if you're a writer hungry to be noticed, and somebody who really wants good art to thrive.