hello Internet welcome to game theory where today it's all about taking a breath and looking back in this day and age of Internet discourse everything has to be hyper relevant all the time you need that hot take right now you need your review ready minutes after seeing the
movie or playing the game search trends rise and fall faster than ever before and if you're not ready for it well then too bad my friend the Internet's moved past you and you've been left in the dust you ain't getting those views you ain't getting those clicks and
your pocketbook is gonna suffer because of it and I don't know about you but for me at least it takes time to come to a well-informed opinion sometimes you just need a few minutes to stop and gather your thoughts I mean don't get me wrong there is definite
value in first impressions reacting authentically in the moment but those first impressions are always gonna lend themselves to being more emotional more extreme everything suddenly feels like it's either the best or worst thing in the moment but if you give it an hour a day a week suddenly
you're able to get a better sense of perspective a world that is always so focused on the here and now and the immediate is a scary world because you never have a chance to look back and learn from where you've come from or to truly appreciate just how
far you've grown how far you've come and especially when you're talking about big-picture stuff like life decisions or massive industry trends well those are made up of complicated webs of interconnected events like a ball of bunched up Christmas lights that require time and patience untangle anyway that's my
long-winded way of saying today's episode is all about untangling that ball reflecting for a minute as we cross over into the 2020s because guess what we are at the end of a decade guys I mean that is a huge deal and yes I know a handful of you
in the comments are gonna be smart buts about it and say there was no Year Zero matpat so technically the decade ends next year and yes you're right I respect your push for factual accuracy in fact I wish more of the world cared about the facts to the
level of diligence that you do but you know what at least for today in this silly little video that I'm putting together I and the rest of humanity are gonna ignore that because we're flawed creatures just small microscopic ants on a volcanic spinning ball in the middle of
a massive vacuum chaotically careening through the galaxy and in our limited experience full of billions of variables we cling to the arbitrary marking of time because a simple digit team not rolling over in its ceaseless march forward gives us comfort a fleeting sense of control a solid place
in the endless existence of time TLDR we like seeing the numbers flip over to zero it's easy to overlook just how long ten years of time is but at the start of this decade people still cared about the Jersey Shore for some reason they still thought the world
was gonna end in 2012 Disney had just bought Marvel and was just starting to figure out what to do with the surprising success of a little movie called Iron Man Star Wars forget about it it was a completely dormant franchise still two years away from being picked up
by Mickey's little mouse fingers on YouTube it was the heyday of the viral video as double rainbow and Bed Intruder song were some of the most popular on the platform where videos were still short enough that you could actually watch him on the toilet without causing loved ones
to think he had an intestinal problem and in the world of gaming well we were nearing the end of the wii era but motion controls were still the order of the day with the kinect and move just starting to hit store shelves farmville was crushing it over on
Facebook Angry Birds was crushing it over on mobile and both of them were paving the way of casual social gaming and little did we know it but we were standing on the brink of an indie gaming revolution with the release of titles like Super Meat Boy limbo and
braid and with that little bit of retrospective context out of the way what I want to explore now is this what were the most important games of this last decade notice that I didn't say the best I'm sure your feeds are gonna be filled with the best of
the year and best of the decade lists if they haven't been already honestly my list of personal favorites from the last 10 years would look a lot different from the list the games that we're covering today would include things like Witcher 3 Dark Souls Mass Effect 2 Doki
Doki literature club and beat Sabre all for very different reasons but what I want to answer today is if we look at where we started in 2010 and now where we ended up as we cross into 2020 which games shaped the world of gaming or heck the world
beyond just gaming which ones had the greatest impact on this medium by maybe or maybe not being good games but instead by reinventing the industry as we knew it and when I back into the research – games seem to really stand out for me in this decade before
we get to those let's first speedrun our way through the rest of this decade and through some quick honorable mentions that really exemplified the last 10 years in gaming let's start our honorable mention list where the last decade left off like I said by 2009 casual games were
all the rage we were nearing the end of the Wiis lifecycle an era of gaming defined by easy to pick up and play experiences suddenly my grandma who'd never picked up a controller in her life was dunking on me and we bowling at the time casual gaming had
started to seep into every phone every tablet and every no no I will not join your effin farm I will burn them to ash before I bother to click on your rutabagas long story short the definitions for both game and gamers had suddenly gotten a lot broader in
ways that truly skilled lifelong players didn't really appreciate there needed to be some differentiator something that separated the hard cores from the casuals enter our first honorable mention dark souls dark souls whether we realized it at the time or not was gaming's collective response to the social and
motion control trends from the previous decade at a time when gaming was increasingly becoming a series of gimmicks Dark Souls emerged as a truly gamers game it became a rite of passage to prove your gamer cred with its mottos of get good and you will die taking the
idea of old-school difficult and modernizing it for a new generation Dark Souls showed the gaming industry that there were still an audience who wanted to be challenged who wanted a high skill ceiling in the same way that Doom basically created the FPS genre and our concept of what
a fighting game looks like was shaped by Street Fighter 2 Dark Souls had given rise to an entirely new genre of game couple that with a beautifully intricate world design and implicit storytelling and you have yourself something revolutionary when every other moderately difficult game is suddenly labeled a
souls like whether appropriately or not you know that you've pioneered something special but that's not to say that casual gaming was completely out of the picture in fact there was one game that did the impossible gadis gamers out into the sunshine for some exercise oh and it also
managed to unite both the hardcore and casual gamer audience and that game was Pokemon go for one blissful summer in the middle of the decade we were all Pokemon trainers again Pokemon go took the simple concept of catching cute little monsters and United gamers and non-gamers alike in
a new way to play a our augmented reality not only did it show the power of this new form of game in a new direction for the relatively stale slate of mobile games it was the first spark of Nintendo's Renaissance after the disappointment of the Wii U era
while also serving as the Gateway for a whole new group of players to the world of Pokemon sure the gameplay just involved us mashing our screens a bunch and we were forced to sacrifice hundreds of piggies to the Polka candy grinder but for the first time in a
long time gaming felt pure and fun again as we were all once again compelled to catch em all it's worth noting that Pokemon Go wasn't just popular it raked in the cash in fact the huge influx of mobile and social gaming throughout the 2010s meant lots of money
flowing into the games market so much so that in 2012 video games finally became the highest-earning entertainment industry in the world topping both the revenues of movies and music finally US gaming nerds had won whatever imaginary war we'd been fighting against ourselves I guess cuz I don't think
the movies or music industry really cared that much anyway we were King DAB Anya movies tea bag on you music we had fought to earn the respect that our medium deserved and we have gotten it but with that success came some of the industry's worst impulses microtransactions pay2win
strategies loot boxes games engineered for addiction Kickstarter is delivering nothing but empty promises heck they were even expecting us to pay extra for save files and tight consumer practices were everywhere throughout the 2010s probably still into the 2020s and if there was money to be squeezed out of
players you can bet that there was some game out there trying to exploit that since this is a most important list rather than a best or favorite list I feel like I have to include Star Wars Battlefront 2 as an honorable mention here as well or maybe better
put as a dishonorable mention because it was the breaking point the straw that broke the camel's back and got the gaming community to lash back in a way that it had never done before I assume we all know the story so I'll keep it brief ea publishes a
game that is full of micro transit actions unlocking new characters as well as basic character progression were both tied to egregious pay2win mechanics and loot boxes at the time it was calculated that to fully unlock the game you either had to play over 4,500 hours or you could
short track that by paying $2,100 enough was enough and online community pushed back hard prompting ei to change the game and the global community to start critically assessing the ethical gray areas that existed in the industry's business practices and it's all thanks to battlefront to battlefront 2 is
and will always be the symbol of gaming's worst tendencies and a reminder of how bad it can get if we as consumers get complacent now it looks like we're back on a bit of an upswing heck EA even put out a great Star Wars single-player adventure earlier this
year that is unmarked row transactions but it was and will continue to be a hard-fought battle as US consumers try to force our industry to hold itself to a higher standard and fortunately for us there are alternatives now you see it'd be one thing if the big triple
a game studios were all we had but for the first time ever the 2010s introduced competition into the marketplace in the form of indie games sure indie titles had always existed but the 2010s was when indie development exploded as game development tools became more accessible an independent game
distribution became much easier there are so so many iconic transformative and hugely successful indie games that I could talk about here from Fez to phenom shovel knight to hollow no grade 2 binding of issac but if I had to point to one that made the most impact I'd
have to go with probably an unpopular opinion here but I'm gonna say it anyway amnesia the Dark Descent to truly understand why we have to rewind back to the beginning at that point in time survival horror was pretty much dead as a genre but Amnesia's release changed all
that released in mid 2010 Amnesia's launch happened to coincide perfectly with a massive surge of gaming content that was happening near on youtube it was a match made in heaven and history was made audiences poured in to watch their favorite online gamers get scared careers were made overnight
and suddenly and independently game was getting tens of millions of views and hundreds of thousands of sales with massive amounts of notoriety amnesia not only showed the gaming industry that horror wasn't dead but it encouraged a generation of budding developers to follow in its footsteps and consider how
a game gets washed just as much as how a game gets played Plus amnesia completely changed the face of YouTube not only didn't push gaming to the forefront it also supercharged the channels of familiar faces that continue to dominate the platform to this very day but also may
have paved the way for a certain game franchise that's been particularly important for this channel so you know YouTube's a core theme of the 2010s was that everyone can be a creator pick up your phone you film yourself doing something you put up a video you make a
tweet you throw up some photos boom suddenly you're a content creator without even realizing it and the next honorable mention mario maker was the perfect embodiment of that idea in the gaming space sure fan made mods were nothing new and yes the idea of giving players access to
your games toolset had definitely existed before but it was never as a user-friendly official release by the developer why make the games yourself and you can have the players make them for you Mario maker embodied the ethos of the 2000 teams it give fans the control so everyone
can hyper personalize the experience for themselves and the way they most wanna play Nintendo did it YouTube's revine tried to do it and if companies are smart Megaman and Sonic should do it in the early 2020s which then brings us to the end of the decade and the
last of our honorable mentions for tonight love it or hate it you gotta at least respect what this game is done sure it earns money hand-over-fist and yes it's helped propel the success of live streaming platforms and ways that few other games have but more than anything else
for tonight helped legitimize gaming for the masses when traditional celebrities are on ironically playing a video game in massive public forums just to be seen as one of the cool kids that's a big deal when a games top streamer is helping to host New Year's Eve broadcasts on
traditional TV Cringer no okay definitely cringy but still that is a really big deal when you're a big enough game to prompt yet another round of mainstream media asking the question of do video games cause violence that my friends is a big ye'll it's the game that taught
the world the importance of flossing the game that crossed over with a nose is part of the biggest collaboration in film history the one that got a gamer under the cover of ESPN magazine and the one that got Hillary Clinton to say oh c'mon go to the polls
okay that was a different game on this list but still you get my point this was a decade where gaming memes were no longer just gaming memes but mainstream memes and nothing was able to cross over or exemplify that better than fortnight what it does as it starts
to wane in popularity remains to be seen but it was a game that dominated the industry for a solid two years and for that at least it deserves an honorable mention and with that Wow this wound up being way longer than I anticipated so much for speedrunning my
way through this list anyway that's the first six games that I truly feel made a massive impact on or at least perfectly defined the gaming landscape throughout the 20 teens which leaves us with my final two and these final two games let's just say I separated them out
for a reason because they really really were impactful I mean sure a game like Dark Souls may have spawned its own genre or Mario maker may have exemplified a core trend at the decade but these final two games moved mountains they single-handedly gave rise to media giants they
changed the way that we consume content heck they changed the face of entertainment as we know it spawning multiple billion-dollar businesses outside of themselves so what are they subscribe so you can find out next week I know I know I honestly hate myself for having to leave it
on a cliffhanger to but like I said this script got really long and I need to wrap things up here so the editors can actually have a break during the holiday week plus diving into the impact of these two games isn't something that I want to rush through
at the end of another long script so tagging them here at the end would have just been disrespectful for the legacy that these two games are gonna have anyway in the meantime I want to know what are your choices for the most important games of the decade what
should I have included in my list that I might have missed what do you think my final two games might be let me know down in the comments below have yourself a great holiday and I'll see you all next week for our final episode of the year and
our final episode of the Dickie meantime remember that's just a theory Oh game theory thanks for watching and as a final disclaimer it really is truly a theory a game theory try not to get mad about either these two episodes try to be as fair as possible but
I guarantee that my list isn't the definitive one sorry if I missed your favorite or one that you think is even more impactful who knows maybe we'll be in next week's top two now if you excuse me I need to run and go get Stephanie some Christmas presents
because I have not had time to do that and Christmas is less than a week away and neither of us have any presents right now so just another reason that we need to cut this episode a little bit shorter than I would've liked it to be anyway thank
you all so much for watching bye you
