Was It Really A Bleh Year?

My Gamasutra colleagues and I (because it's the holidays and I'm sappy I'll say it's an honor to be on that staff) have decided among ourselves on our Top 10 Games of the Year.

I hear a lot of people -- gamers, friends, fellow writers -- say that in the end, the packed 2008 release year was ultimately fairly bleh.

Remember last year, how excited we were for all of the advances that 2008 would bring? We'd seen such vaunted industry growth that we all practically went headfirst into the champagne bowl, and with breaths bated, we couldn't wait to forge ahead.

But we took a lot of dings since then. A badly-timed E3 surrounded by ESA controversy failed to ring the knell of holiday eagerness the way it normally does. The Fall-Holiday release schedule was so stunningly saturated it felt like fighting one's way out under a plastic-sealed mountain of overwhelm and marketing spend -- and then, of course, there are economic factors, as the recession abruptly brought companies' deep-nested problems rushing to the surface.

Even if we'd had many year-end breakthroughs, it'd be a bit hard to feel good about them while Sony struggles to compete, EA stumbles hard, Take-Two's prospects are so-so, NPD numbers start taking minor climbs instead of the leaps and bounds we're used to, Midway enters critical condition, Gamecock gets bought, and Brash collapses. Those latter two didn't really surprise anyone, but those companies had deals with smaller studios like Factor 5 and Cyan, who now struggle to stay alive. We see layoffs at Funcom, Gearbox, Aspyr, Turbine, Silicon Knights, NCsoft -- too many to list.

In other words, there's a bad vibe in the air. Last year we celebrated; this year, we're worrying.

But aside from that, were this year's games really less exciting than last year's? Maybe. I've already said how last year, I had lots of round-ups related to stirring moments in games, interesting characters and captivating relationships -- this year I can only remember being excited by a few, and there've been very few new characters all year that I really feel are worthy of mindshare.

I've talked to lots of reviewers who, like me, are making their year-end lists, and almost all of them seem to agree it's been a challenge to create and sort a list this year, to put games in ascending order of superiority. Ultimately, we're all choosing our personal favorites subjectively, which still feels like a sin in reviewing.

But maybe the diversity and the complexity of the release slate, the difficulty in arriving at a single "correct" opinion, is a heartening sign among all of the dismal flags that, finally, games might be succeeding as individualized experiences.

Rather than titles being "good" or "bad," it seems we're finding them detailed palettes of factors, with different notes of appeal for different audiences. Check out my Variety editor Ben Fritz's convo with Chris Dahlen on why one of them is a "Fable II person" and the other is a "Fallout 3 person," for example.

We might not know how to interpret these differences. Games have never been a medium known for subtlety, and if you just watch the Spike VGAs, they're still not. We're not used to it. But it's pretty clear that opinions are split all across the spectrum on the year's biggest releases, and no one, neither reviewers nor gamers nor forum fans seems to be universally decided. That just might mean that games are finally achieving the level of complexity we've hoped they would -- not that they're bleh because we had no breakout "hits."

Next year: The era where we accept that a game review is well-informed and well-written subjectivity and that a score is shorthand for the opinion, not the decisive end-all? We can only hope.