10(ish) games for the 2010s pt 10

#1 Skyrim

	A lot of people I’ve talked to and a lot of lists of “Best Games of the Decade” have one of Horizon Zero Dawn, Zelda: Breath of the Wild, or The Witcher 3 at the absolute top of their list.  And real talk: those games are all great.

	And a lot of those people have never played Skyrim.

	Skyrim is not the best game of the decade.  It’s barely a competent game in this year of our Lord 2020.  But by god, its impacts across gaming and culture have been bigger than nearly every other videogame.  Released in 2011, the Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim was the open world game that started off the entire open world craze.  Oh sure, it wasn’t the first, and many of its predecessors like Oblivion and Red Dead Redemption have been praised far above it, but Skyrim is truly a monolith of the 2010s in gaming and to deny it its place is folly.

	Like Undertale, Skyrim created new memes for people to enjoy as part of the in-group of those who had played it.  Like Amnesia, Skyrim created myriad Lets Plays and streams.  Few games have endured as long as Skyrim has, helped in no small part due to the propensity for Todd Howard to rerelease the damn thing every other year.  Even today, my friends and family will routinely go and play Skyrim again, saying “Oh I’m going to be a destruction mage this time” before inevitably falling into stealth archery.

	Looking back at the past decade, in the years after Skyrim it’s influence could be felt in ways both subtle and profound.  Most obvious was the explosion of open world games, with the aforementioned BotW, Witcher 3, and Horizon being some of the most impressive.  Each game improves upon the conceit that Skyrim popularized, but each owes its DNA to Skyrim.  And mind that word: popularized.  There were open world games before Skyrim, but few of them had mainstream followings, and the timing at which Skyrim was released coincided with the popularization of all things nerdy, likely leading to its breakout success.

	But the most important thing about Skyrim in my mind is its accessibility.  The controls are simple, the best way to play is intuitive, and the story is easy to understand: there’s dragons, go kill ‘em.  There are popular videos of grandmothers playing the game, and anyone can enjoy the gameplay loop of go into a tomb, kill a bunch of dudes, get loot, leave.  And once you get bored of playing the game in its base form, mod it until it breaks, then play again.

	Like how Iron Man and Avengers brought comic books to the mainstream, Skyrim did the same with videogames.  Was it a fluke, a coincidence of timing?  Maybe.  The game is a buggy mess, the main quests have mediocre stories at best, and the mechanics of the game are solved so quickly that its hard to understand why people keep coming back.  However, people do, and call is nostalgia, call it whatever, its place up on this list has been well earned.