The Last of Us Tops the 100 Greatest Games List: The Criteria War and a Lesson for Vietnamese Esports

"The old television still remembers the summer we watched football together." That night, in a small café on Vo Van Tan Street, I watched four friends argue for nearly an hour over a single line of text on a phone screen: The Last of Us, first place in Kinda Funny Games' list of the 100 greatest games of all time. No match was played. No scoreline, no stoppage time, no one scored. There was only a ranking, and four different selves colliding with it.

What caught my attention was how the argument operated. One said The Last of Us Part II was clearly superior because its combat systems were denser and more brutal. Another pushed back, insisting the first game was safe but flawless in every storytelling beat. A third dragged Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice into the room, arguing that "greatness" must account for difficulty and level design. The fourth stayed silent, then said: "So what is the criteria, exactly?"

Nobody could answer. And that was the starting point of everything.

Kinda Funny Games — the games media outlet founded by Greg Miller, a former IGN editor — published a list of the 100 greatest games of all time. The Last of Us, the action-adventure title developed by Naughty Dog, took first place. Naughty Dog is the studio behind Uncharted, and Western criticism has long framed a creative lineage running from Uncharted to The Last of Us as a central spine of the industry.

The reaction was immediate. On forums, one camp argued the top spot was justified by the game's historical influence on how the industry tells stories. Another rejected it, claiming The Last of Us Part II is the true peak on mechanical grounds, and that the first game earned its praise through narrative rather than game design. A third camp put Sekiro on the scales.

The original piece acknowledges exactly this disagreement, closing on a fairly neutral note: choosing the greatest game of all time has never been easy. The author also quotes a player who concedes that even in disagreement, they must admit The Last of Us is one of the most outstanding games in history. That quoting strategy does real work: it converts a split into a bounded argument, and the boundary is drawn by the dissenters themselves.

On the surface, this is news about a ranking. Look closer, and it is a war over the yardstick. And the yardstick, in any industry that publishes rankings, is always where power hides.

Based on my experience tracking esports rankings across multiple seasons, I have noticed a fairly stable rule: when a ranking does not disclose its criteria, the argument about it never ends — and that is the point.

The original article contains one detail worth more than the entire list: a player asks whether the ranking evaluates gameplay quality, popularity, or historical influence. Three yardsticks, three completely different outcomes. Judge by gameplay and Sekiro, or any game with dense combat systems, rises. Judge by popularity and Minecraft, or a mass-culture phenomenon, takes the crown. Judge by historical influence and the answer may be a very old title the current generation has never touched.

Every criterion produces a different champion. So when a ranking publishes results without publishing weights, it is not issuing a verdict — it is issuing an excuse for an argument.

Here is the core point: controversy is not a byproduct of the ranking, it is the product. A list of 100 games is low-cost, fast to produce, and has an engagement lifespan many times longer than a single review. Every objection is an engagement point. Every share intended to show the world how absurd the list is becomes free distribution. The structure of the original piece reflects this: it opens with disagreement, then reveals the ranking, then quotes both sides. Cause and effect inverted to maximise tension.

I have seen this pattern in esports many times. Whenever an outlet publishes "the top 10 greatest League of Legends players of all time," I know exactly what follows. Fans of the runner-up flood the comments. Fans of third place cite statistics. A week later, the same outlet posts "top 10 greatest plays of all time" to restart the cycle. The loop feeds itself. It does not require an actual sporting event to exist.

One analytical frame from the Last of Us debate is the most durable asset here, and it transfers directly to esports: the opposition between safe, iteratively refined design and ambitious, high-risk design. The first Last of Us is read as a safe product, perfect within its own frame. Part II is read as a gamble — bolder, more divisive, and therefore judged more harshly.

In esports, this opposition appears at every level. A team that wins with a proven, slow, controlling style is the first Last of Us. A team that experiments with unusual compositions, trading stability for variance, wins big or collapses — that is Part II. And how communities judge these two choices is almost always asymmetric: winning safely is called "nothing new," while a failed gamble is called "delusion." Only when the gamble works does it get called genius. I once logged 214 decisive plays across 52 matches at a major tournament, and the pattern held exactly: the same decision, two different labels, entirely dependent on the final result.

One more point in the original piece deserves recording: it builds an industry timeline with the phrase "from simple products such as Pong to modern games such as Clair Obscur: Expedition 33." That timeline has two problems. First, it treats a very recent release as the endpoint of history — a recency-bias marker. Second, it is the timeline of a Western console industry, presented as the timeline of the whole medium. A player in Saigon who grew up with mobile games, with internet cafés, with an entirely different ecosystem, does not appear on that timeline.

And this is where Vietnamese esports should read the piece seriously. The reason lies in what it reveals about how norms are formed, even though the article never discusses esports at all: a group of editors in a particular geography publishes a list, the list is repeated often enough, and within a few years it becomes the default reference. The authority to set the standard does not come from data. It comes from publishing first.

Now the part I think both the original article and the surrounding argument avoid.

The entire "backlash" is built on unsourced quotes. The piece uses phrases like "one player said," "some gamers argue," "many people expressed." No platform is named, no count, no timeframe. In analytical work, an emotional claim without a measurement sample is not data — it is anecdote. And anecdote presented as community consensus is a systematic form of overstatement.

I am not claiming nobody objected. I am claiming the scale of the objection was never measured, and the framing makes it look larger than it was. The piece undermines its own thesis in one passage: dissenters still concede The Last of Us is one of the most outstanding games in history. That is a consensus-manufacturing move — conceding a weaker proposition to turn a split into an apparent near-consensus.

The second point, and the more important one for Vietnamese esports content makers: we are importing arguments without importing context. A ranking published by an American outlet, based on the taste of an American editorial group, based on the release history of the American console market, gets translated and republished in Vietnam as a global event. It is not wrong. It is simply the product of a different market, dressed in the clothing of a universal standard.

And here is what I want to say plainly: if someone in Vietnam ever publishes "the 10 greatest Vietnamese esports players of all time" without criteria attached, we will reproduce this mechanism exactly. Outrage spikes, engagement surges, and three weeks later nobody remembers what the list said. What remains is a small scratch on the community's trust in its own storytellers.

"When the stadium falls silent, the ball can still tell its own story." But a ranking cannot tell anything on its own. It needs readers to believe in it. And that belief must be built on disclosed criteria, not on deliberate ambiguity.

"The match is over, but the story has only just begun." The Last of Us sits at number one, and within a month most of the people who argued about it will not remember which games it stood above. What remains is a question anyone in the business of setting standards — in esports, in sport, in any ranking — must answer before publishing: what is your yardstick, and who agreed to it?

If you cannot answer that, you are not ranking. You are opening a waiting room for the next argument.