Comment by rimunroe | Hacker News Reader

Comment by rimunroe | Hacker News Reader

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> There are 23 entries since 2015 on that page, Hollow Knight included. By definition, it's one of the best 23 games during that period, according to that specific list.

Okay, but that's an argument that it's considered one of the best games of the last decade. Hopefully you can understand my confusion.

> It sounds like you're making up bizarre exclusionary criteria to discount the fact that Hollow Knight is widely regarded by many people as one of the best games of all time, which explains the hype behind Silksong.

*shrug* I don't think it's that weird. This certainly isn't something I'm coming up with on the fly. I've felt like this for a long time, as have the authors of the many articles complaining about the meaninglessness of the even larger number of "best of" lists.

> This doesn't mean you have to like it

You've made several comments which make it sound like I'm arguing this because I don't like the game. I'd appreciate you not doing that both because I did quite like it and because it implies that my feelings about the game are biasing my argument. I'd make this same argument if you'd used that Wikipedia article to support your feelings about Red Dead Redemption 2. I'd probably personally consider that one of the best games I've ever played[0] but would object to using its presence in that article as proof that it was widely considered to be one of the best of all time.

[0] Honestly I'm still not sure if I should compare it to other games I've played or put it in its own category of interactive movie. It was incredibly good, but the parts I think of as being the best are the performances and the technical achievement and clever landscaping of the game world.

I feel like you're being pedantic here and transforming the statement "X is one of the best of all time" into "X is one of the top N of all time", where N is a number you've arbitrarily picked to exclude X. To go back to sports analogies, this entire comment thread has been analogous to:

Person: "Who was Kobe Bryant, why does anyone care that he died?"

Me: "He was one of the best basketball players of all time."

You: "No he wasn't. Michael Jordan, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Larry Bird, Oscar Robertson, and LeBron James are better."

Like, yeah your statement may be true. I, too, can pick N such that Hollow Knight is not in my top N games, because it's not my #1 all-time favorite game[0]. However, in the context of "why does anyone care about the sequel to Hollow Knight?" it's fair to say that many people consider it one of the best games of all time. It doesn't really matter that you, personally, may rank it behind 10, 15, or even 50 games.

[0] That title belongs to Doom 2.

> I feel like you're being pedantic here and transforming the statement "X is one of the best of all time" into "X is one of the top N of all time", where N is a number you've arbitrarily picked to exclude X.

> Like, yeah your statement may be true. I, too, can pick N such that Hollow Knight is not in my top N games

A) I haven't chosen a specific number. I've even been deliberately hazy about the range because that's how I hear most people discuss their "best ofs" and favorites.

B) As per my previous message I wish you'd stop acting like I'm fabricating this argument just to exclude Hollow Knight. My objection is with your reasoning. I've tried to be as clear as possible about this.

C) You have to bound your category of what qualifies as "the best" somehow, even roughly, because otherwise the term loses what little meaning it had in the first place. I tried to make this point earlier, though maybe I didn't do it well enough:

>> I'm willing to argue that judging something as being "one of the best" because it's in a list of a hundred things isn't very different from saying something is one of the best because it's in a list of a thousand things. I think most people--critics included--don't rank things in such large numbers, and as the numbers get larger then what little meaning the term had to start with diminishes even further.

If you want to say it's widely considered one of the best of all time, that implies some very large percentage of the general public or critics would say "I think X[0] is one of the best games of all time". If you asked a random person to list which games they personally believed to be the best games, they'd probably only come up with a handful. I think that list is probably a decent predictor of what people would respond with if you asked them for the best game in a specific year, but that it would do a much worse job of predicting agreement across all time.

[0] you can take this to mean either an arbitrary game or the Egosoft one :p

> I think that list is probably a decent predictor of what people would respond with if you asked them for the best game in a specific year, but that it would do a much worse job of predicting agreement across all time.

You must have missed the criteria for inclusion that list, which states that games are only eligible if they appear on "all time" best lists, e.g. not just "Best Game of 2017" or "Best PC Games".

> The games are included on at least six separate best-of lists from different publications (inclusive of all time periods, platforms and genres), as chosen by their editorial staff.

i.e. there already is agreement across all time.

> You must have missed the criteria for inclusion that list, which states that games are only eligible if they appear on "all time" best lists, e.g. not just "Best Game of 2017" or "Best PC Games".

I, in fact, did not miss that. If you look at that article, it references over 90 lists. By my count, a bit under half of the lists were written after the release of Hollow Knight. Of those lists, Hollow Knight appears in only seven of them, which is tied for the lowest number of appearances of any game in that list released in 2017 onward other than Baldur's Gate 3, which was released in the last year the list has entries for.

> i.e. there already is agreement across all time.

Eh, fewer than a fifth of lists with what appear to usually be 30-100 games each doesn't seem like good evidence of agreement to me. There are degrees of agreement, and I think "widely" implies a pretty high one.

I think GamingBolt having Hollow Knight on their 2022 list at #14, but then it being completely absent from their 2023 and 2024 lists is testimony of how silly these lists are in the first place.

Again, you don't have to believe the people who are sharing their sincere opinion, but A LOT of people regard Hollow Knight as one of the best games ever made. I'm one of the people. I grew up in the SNES era, and I think Hollow Knight is an all around better game than every SNES platformer I've played, including Super Metroid which it's directly comparable to.

> Again, you don't have to believe the people who are sharing their sincere opinion, but A LOT of people regard Hollow Knight as one of the best games ever made.

Why do you think I don't believe that? It's undeniably popular and was critically acclaimed. I never said it wasn't. What I did say was that that Wikipedia article didn't support your assertion that it was widely regarded as one of the best of all time. Just because there are many people who think it's one of the best doesn't mean that most people (or even a large percentage of them) think it is.

You're right. I guess I just think you're being really pedantic, and that pedantry is what I was reacting to.

I appreciate the response! I have no defense against the charge of pedantry. I do stand by my points, but I definitely didn’t need to argue it for so long

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