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

Kinda Funny Games has published its list of the 100 greatest games of all time, and the first comment to appear was not a congratulation for Naughty Dog. It was a short question: which scale are we ranking on?

The top slot went to The Last of Us. Within hours, two camps formed. One defended the pick, leaning on the game's historical influence and on the development lineage running from Uncharted into The Last of Us. The other camp split in two: one wing argued that The Last of Us Part II is the better work if you measure by combat systems, the other that a different title — Sekiro was named — deserves the chair. Across the whole argument, almost nobody could cite a single data point. No completion rate, no sales figure, no average playtime. Only feeling.

Kinda Funny Games is a games outlet founded by the presenters themselves, running on the creator-driven model typical of the North American market. Its top-100 list is an editorial product, not a research paper. But the way it is framed deserves attention: the piece opens with the controversy, then reveals the ranking, then quotes both camps. That order inverts cause and effect — the reader is made to feel the argument preceded the list, when in fact the list produced the argument.

Alongside the article, the outlet ran a block of esports headlines: K/DA and the row over a new look, LCK viewership rising after six years of franchising, VCT Pacific 2027 with GAM Esports involved, VCT Champions 2026 featuring LOUD, and MLBB Vietnam's potential to reach the global stage. All of them are headlines only, with no figures, no measurement window and no sourcing. They are a lead list awaiting verification, not evidence.

Name the thing correctly: this is an argument about scales, not an argument about data. Four scales are being mixed together — mechanical quality, narrative quality, popularity and historical influence. Each produces a different answer. Measured on mechanics, The Last of Us has no path past Sekiro. Measured on historical influence, it wins comfortably. The problem is that Kinda Funny Games published no weighting at all.

This list is controversial because it discloses no rubric — and that ambiguity is an engagement engine, not an editorial oversight. A ranking with a published rubric ends its argument in two days. A ranking without one lives for two weeks, generating thousands of comments and hundreds of response videos. For an outlet that lives on interaction, that is efficiency.

In esports, the same structure repeats almost intact. Every greatest-player-of-all-time poll makes the identical mistake: it blends trophy count, individual statistics, peak longevity and cultural influence into one table without stating weights. Fans of one player and fans of another end up arguing from two different frames of reference, and neither side is logically wrong.

The data in the piece also needs to be read at the right level. The headline about LCK viewership rising after six years of franchising is a signal worth tracking, but it lacks a baseline and a measurement window. If viewership rose because the platform changed how it counts, or because co-streaming is now included, the franchising conclusion collapses. Likewise, the report that GAM Esports becomes a VCT Pacific 2027 partner — if accurate — marks a rare cross-title organisational move, a Vietnamese MOBA-rooted organisation entering Riot's FPS circuit. That belongs on a tracking list, not in a conclusion. A signature on a contract is only the moment a long silence ends.

The most transferable element here is the safe-versus-ambitious pairing: The Last of Us Part I is read as the polished execution of a proven formula, Part II as a high-risk experiment. In esports that pairing appears every transfer window, between the team playing a structure that already won and the team choosing high-variance play. People call them the weak team. I call them a poem nobody has bothered to read aloud.

The easiest place to over-romanticise is the claim of a divided community. The article supports it with phrases like one player said, many people think, some gamers. No count, no platform, no date. Methodologically that is anecdote, it cannot be measured, and it should never be used as a sentiment indicator.

One detail matters more: even the opposing camp concedes that The Last of Us is one of the finest games ever made. Rhetorically this is a consensus-manufacturing device — conceding a weak proposition to create the impression that almost everyone agrees with the strong one. The real dispute is far narrower than it looks.

And two layers must be separated: this ranking is canon built by media, not competitive achievement. It does not say who won a title, or who was stronger at any given moment. Confusing media canon with competitive results is a classification error, and that error spreads into every dataset downstream.

I once got called out by my editor for turning a match into poetry. I am sorry — but poetry is what holds the moment. That said, poetry does not replace a scoring rubric, and an article with no rubric is neither poetry nor reporting.

For Vietnamese esports the lesson sits elsewhere: if the domestic community does not publish its own scales — for GAM Esports at VCT Pacific 2027, for MLBB Vietnam on its regional climb — someone else will write our history with theirs. A single play is never just a play. It is where a fate turns. A ranking works the same way: it ranks, and it defines what deserves to be remembered.