To mark the end of the 2010s, we're celebrating 30 games that defined the last 10 years. You can find all the articles as they're published in the Games of the Decade archive, and read about our thinking about it in an editor's blog.
It's hard to think of a game that's been subject to just as much revisionism as Skyrim. Maybe that's to be expected, given its dizzying success. The game is everywhere and its cultural reach is almost insurmountable - so much so that the jokes about climbing mountains, taking arrows and porting to toasters have all been unfashionably irksome for much longer than they were ever funny in the first place. And with all that success comes the inevitable and insufferable "not that good actually" crowd.
But they are wrong! Skyrim is good, actually. Exactly as good as everyone says it is. And it is good for a lot of reasons but none of them as truly special, I think, as its world - or rather, more specifically, the ineffable rules that bind it. There is an intangible realism to Skyrim's world that I haven't really felt in a game of its budget and scope since. It's in the mechanics of it - the literal mechanics; the basic billiard balls of the physics - and the best example I can think of, for some reason, is pushing people off a ledge.