Ranking Stuff, Awards Shows, and My Top 10 RPGs of All Time

Plus the Dice Exploder podcast covers lyric games in our longest episode yet

I have complicated feelings about ranking things.

We get into this some on this week’s Dice Exploder podcast with David Block while discussing lyric games and experimental art. (It’s maybe my favorite episode of the show yet, and also the longest. Check it out.)

When you start ranking art, you start deciding what makes one art “better” than another, and that often leads to trouble.

Ranking Things Is Bad?

I grew up loving High Fidelity, a John Cusack romcom in which a 30-something music nerd discovers what empathy is for the first time and learns to treat his girlfriend with a basic level of respect and dignity. John and his dude bro record store buddies (including Jack Black) love ranking things. They are a herd of loud men yelling. It takes them a whole movie plus the 30+ years before the movie beings to understand why other people find them difficult to be around.¹

Whatever you think of the act of ranking things itself, in my experience it’s those guys most often making lists. There is a culture, especially among young men, of turning art into a competition: there must be a Best Art. There must be an objectively correct opinion to have. And we must fight about it.

It’s an aggressive and isolating way to exist. It can cause people with thoughtful opinions about art to choose not to engage with you, or worse, decide they actually don’t have thoughtful opinions about art because their opinions don’t match what the groups considers “correct.”

Rankings and ratings often destroy nuance. Is this movie three stars because it was relatively uninteresting? Or was it incredibly interesting but I have very mixed opinions about what it was saying? The most important thing must be that it’s better than this other piece of crap two and a half star movie!

Pitting art against other art hurts everyone involved. When you create metrics by which to judge things, you diminishes the importance of whatever you leave out. When you imply that art can be assigned a value, you shut down worldviews that don’t agree on your version of value, worldviews you might have otherwise learned from and come to appreciate, or even love.

If you want to be extreme about it, maybe ranking things is a form of violence: you’re saying one person’s self-expression is better than another’s. That’s a more dramatic way of putting it than I typically believe in, but there’s definitely something unsettling about ranking a bunch of arts when you know all the artists involved.

And forget about it if we move on to ranking people. What does ranking people get you other than dehumanization? And how can you even compare a beloved character actor who plays only one character in every movie but plays the hell of them to a consistently fun to watch action movie star? It’s apples and oranges.

But also…

…secretly, in my head, I still make ranked lists of my friends. I don’t know why I do it, it just happens. And if you’ve ever chosen bridesmaids or groomsmen, haven’t you done the same? Apples and oranges are both round fruits—why shouldn’t we compare them?

Ranking Things Is Good?

Here’s a quote I love from pro Magic: The Gathering player Luis Scott-Vargas:

If I had to rank things, ranking things would be very high on the list. Of course, you never have to rank things, but that’s part of why it’s so great. It’s never useful, it leads to inane arguments, and it’s utterly subjective—at least when other people do it.

That’s the thing about ranking things: once I realized ranking things was a supremely silly act, ranking things became great again.

If you lower the stakes of a list to less than nothing, suddenly the act of making it becomes a fun little activity. It’s a conversation framework and a discussion tool: “I see you put Tenet higher on your list of action movies than John Wick. What’s up with that?” It’s a means of self-expression and communication like any other art form.

Once I left behind the idea that some movies were objectively better than others, it left room for the idea that some movies are subjectively better than others. I’ve found ranking things to be a great tool for interrogating what it was that I responded to and value in a piece of work. When five of my top ten movies of all time are breakup movies, that says something about my taste that I might not have already known. When I’ve decided there’s only room for one Pixar movie on my list, I have to think about what I responded to in each film and why. Ranking things is self reflection.

Plus, like, it’s fun! At least with the right people in the right time and place. My partner might hate ranking things, but it’s fun to yell with my music nerd friends. We know it’s silly, and we enjoy ourselves. We burn off testosterone by antlering over which John Cusack movie is his best.

And of course none of this means that people shouldn’t be doing criticism of art. Talking about what a work was trying to accomplish, what it actually accomplished, and what contributed to that success or lack thereof is a great way to learn about other people, about yourself, and about art. Sometimes ranking things can be a tool for making that happen.

Put another way, maybe ranking things is a game. It’s a structure and process that I find entertaining and useful to engage with. The problem with ranking things is less the act of ranking things and more people using that act as an excuse to be an asshole.

Coda 1: Awards

I may write a longer form version of this in the future, but it feels disingenuous to write about how silly I think ranking things is without mentioning that I was judge for The Awards in 2022.

Awards shows are gaudy and often gross. Most crown one winner, the Best of the year at a thing. Meryl Streep is the Best actress because she has the most Oscars. White men are the Best directors because no one else ever wins best director. Were video games even a real artform before they got a proper awards show?

But an awards show can also be an opportunity to bring love and attention to small works that deserve the shout out. Moonlight! And at their best, annual awards shows are a celebration of art, a checking in on the state of a medium and reveling in what it had to offer over the past year.

I don’t think it’s possible to balance the good and the bad of awards shows. You’re going to get both or neither. But maybe you can balance towards the good.

I know we tried to with The Awards last year. 20 winners, unranked and uncategorized. A wide variety of winning objects d’art. No awards to anything that made six figures or more when crowdfunding. I think we took a good crack at recognizing a bunch of weirdo work on the edge of the hobby, and I’m proud of that.

Did we also fuck up some? Sure did.² I would change a lot, starting with making it clearer that this was a very silly endeavor. Who the hell did we think we were handing out awards?

The best award I ever got was a Woodie, an award given by my college theater community. I believe I shared “least believable chemistry” with a young woman, and we both richly deserved it. The Woodies are a great evening of handing out superlatives written on popsicle sticks (thus the name) to everyone who got up on stage that year. Truly none of the ranking and all of the celebration.

May all our award shows be the Woodies.

Coda 2: My Top 10 RPGs of All Time

Did I just write 1200 words so I could justify posting a list of my top 10 RPGs? You betcha.

Is it best RPGs for teaching new players? Or games I’ve had the best moments in? Games I most respect or admire? Games I love holding in my hand?

No. It’s objectively the best 10 RPGs ever made. There can be no question about it.

1. We Are But Worms: A One Word RPG

2. For The Queen

3. Apocalypse World

4. Blades in the Dark

5. Dread

6. Fiasco

7. That homebrew horror one shot Steven Henry ran when I was a Sophomore in college that I still have my “for your eyes only” character letter for in a box under my bed

8. Dream Askew

9. Fall of Magic

10. Factory Reset

11. The Exiles

12. Wanderhome

13. Volume 2 Monsters &

14. Into The Odd

15. i’m sorry did you say street magic

16. Hieronymous

1. I’m harsh on it for I think good reason, but also High Fidelity does remain one of my favorite movies.

2. Podcast with Gem Room Games is coming in two weeks. Wish me luck in writing that intro.