Jay is Games Best of 2009 and Listicles

Over at Jay is Games, voting has opened up for their Best of 2009 with tons of categories and enough excellent games from browser based to freeware to literally melt your brain. Go vote NOW! Which brings me to the subject of listicles which has been weighing upon my mind lately.

I had myself prepared my own little “Best Of” list to celebrate the arbitrary passage of time given symbolic meaning by a shared social system. Then, as most bloggers have experienced some time in their career, Word Press ate my post. At first I was disappointed. I had put together thirty games, lovingly providing them with screen shots and 1-3 paragraph blurbs explaining why I thought these games were halmarks of a terrific gaming year. Then I found myself coming to peace with the mishap. After all, what difference do lists make, and besides, the last thing I needed was having to get into scraps with people who felt I shouldn’t have put this game on the list or I should have listed that game.

And then I started reading other listicles from sources I tend to enjoy, and a sort of frustration eased over me. Even as I go through the many solid games over at Jay is Games up for the running in their Best Of feature, there are some titles that aren’t up there that probably should, and some titles that will get knocked out of the running but I think still deserve recognition. And part of the frustration comes from the fact that I don’t really think it appropriate to say that these selections are wrong. I was a part of the selection process for JiG’s 2008 Best of feature and I can tell you from that experience alone that the process behind the scenes is intense and rigorous. As for the other online publications, I may not know what they went through to come up with their listicles, but I still respect their combined experience and processes.

So I’m sort of stuck. No, I probably won’t make my own “list”. Not in the same form as the one previously eaten by the internet and Word Press (part of this is because I have my suspicions as to why it was eaten in the first place). For one, the statue of limitations is already just about up when it comes to year end lists, and for another, I need to focus my time and energies on the present and the future as opposed to the past.

But the desire to still shine a spotlight on what I personally think of as the best games in 2009 persists and so I think I have found a happy medium. I have already decided that I wanted to regularly “Dig in the crates”. That is, I wanted to weekly go back and highlight older games (at least in part to help fill out my sparse archives). At least for January, I will make this weekly feature (to be posted on Fridays) focus solely on the best games of 2009.

So that seems to work out nicely, doesn’t it? No lists from me, but we’re still going to look at some of the best games available in 2009. Win win. Now go vote over at Jay is Games, and happy gaming.