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Simon Parkin’s best video games of 2018

The critical cachet of games continued to grow, Tetris got a Japanese makeover and Fortnite delighted everywhere. See our top five list below

• Read the Observer critics’ review of 2018 in full here

The Canadian journalist turned award show host Geoff Keighley tweeted, the morning after he hosted the Game awards in Los Angeles in early December, that he “built this show” to “demonstrate the power, potential and influence of this medium”. The annual event, which debuted in 2014, is Keighley’s attempt to establish an Oscars for video games. This year’s effort featured a clutch of luminaries, not only from the game industry, but also, with performances from composers such as Hans Zimmer, from film. “Gaming,” Keighley continued, boldly, “has been marginalised and dismissed for far too long.”

The use of the loaded word “marginalised” was careless, but Keighley captured a feeling, shared by many who play games, of ongoing ostracism. Indeed, the general resistance to video game criticism in mainstream newspapers and magazines has contributed to the siloing of the form in culture, adding to the sense, particularly in young men, that their interest is somehow inferior to an interest in music, film, dance, and maybe even Broadway musicals.

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from Culture | The Guardian http://bit.ly/2Rt93w2

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