Twenty-three favorites,
one genre, two selves.

Sort the canon by what kind of game each one is and the breadth collapses immediately. Sixteen of the twenty-three titles carry a role-playing tag — JRPG, action-RPG, CRPG, open-world RPG — and the seven that don't are mostly childhood arcade-and-platforming (Sonic, Jak, Smash) or the two functional outliers, Portal and Call of Duty. This is not a person who likes "games." It is a person who likes one genre, deeply, and tolerates a small amount of everything else.

The studios concentrate just as hard. Nintendo and Square Enix together are nine of the twenty-three, and the top four publishers more than half. Square Enix anchors the highest tier (Kingdom Hearts, both NieRs, the Final Fantasy VII reimagining), and one creator, Yoko Taro, is the only name to appear twice — now with both his games, Automata and Replicant, in the canon, the only auteur I deliberately went backwards for, chasing Replicant after Automata had already broken my heart.

There is no play-count to expose the head of the curve the way the music data could, so the ranking has to stand in. Read the top five and the pattern is unmistakable: Kingdom Hearts, Clair Obscur, NieR: Automata, Skyrim, Baldur's Gate III — five role-playing games, four of them story-first, three of them about loss. The single most-loved game on the list is a Disney–Final Fantasy crossover I first played as a child; the second is a 2025 release I finished as a resident. Twenty-three years separate the top two slots, and they rhyme. Four more — Elden Ring, The Witcher 3, Cyberpunk 2077, and NieR Replicant — were elevated into this top tier after the list was first written; they belong here as much as anything beneath them.

Games carry two timestamps, and the gap between them is the most revealing thing in the dataset. By release year the collection peaks hard in the 2000s — nine of twenty-three canon titles — because that is when the formative library was published: Dreamcast and Game Boy and PlayStation 2, the hardware of a specific childhood. But by when I actually played them, the shape changes: not one peak but three, with thin valleys between.

The first wave is a childhood, played on the hardware of its time. The second is the pandemic — the med-school years, when a confined and frightening stretch of life turned into the densest gaming of my adult life: God of War, Breath of the Wild, Xenoblade, and Pokémon Legends: Arceus, all long single-player worlds entered while the real one had narrowed to a few rooms. The third wave is now, in residency — and it is no longer a footnote. What first looked like a small bump (Clair Obscur, Baldur's Gate III) resolved into a full third peak once the recently discovered loves — Elden Ring, The Witcher 3, Cyberpunk 2077, NieR Replicant — earned their way into the canon. The renaissance is as tall as the childhood that started it: the appetite didn't just survive the least free years of my life, it came back at full height.

Ask what each game is fundamentally for — the thing that makes me load it again — and four answers cover the whole canon. Story is the largest; a world to get lost in is a close second; systems and mastery are real but secondary, appreciated as challenge rather than chased; and the social pole is small and, as we'll see, lives a separate life. This is not my guess at my own taste — it is what I told the interviewer, and the games agree with me.

How it plays, and from where.

The camera tells its own story: nearly two-thirds of the canon is third-person, the over-the-shoulder framing of a protagonist you follow through a place. First-person is rare and belongs to the immersive open worlds (Skyrim, Cyberpunk), the multiplayer shooter (Call of Duty), and the lone puzzle box (Portal). I do not, on this evidence, like to be the character so much as to accompany one.

Twenty of the twenty-three canon entries belong to a franchise; only three — Clair Obscur, Skies of Arcadia, and Cyberpunk 2077 — stand entirely alone, bookending a quarter-century from Skies of Arcadia (2000) to Clair Obscur (2025). Everything else is a series I bought into and kept returning to. The clearest case is The Legend of Zelda, which appears as four separate games spanning a quarter-century: Ocarina and Majora's Mask in childhood, Breath of the Wild in med school, Tears of the Kingdom in residency. One franchise, three life-eras, a single unbroken thread.

This is the same shape the music data showed — a loyalty to whole records over scattered singles, here expressed as loyalty to whole worlds over individual games. When something earns my trust, I don't sample the next thing; I go deeper into the thing that already worked. The replay behavior confirms it: I revisit a chosen few rather than constantly chasing the new, and when a long role-playing game truly grabs me, I see it through to the end even in the time-poverty of residency.

The negative space is as sharp as the music list's was. Whole genres are quarantined to the honorable mentions and never once crack the canon: strategy (only Age of Empires), life-sim (only The Sims), the MMO (only RuneScape), sports (only Rocket League). These are games I have played, sometimes for hundreds of hours — but never games I would call a favorite. The pattern is exact: the things that survive into the canon are single-player worlds with a story; the things that stay in the mentions are systems I socialized or decompressed inside.

Beyond that, there are categories I simply don't live with at all — horror, racing, rhythm, fighting beyond the party-game exception of Smash. And most tellingly, the canonical pillars of my own favorite genre are missing: I have never played Chrono Trigger, Persona, or Final Fantasy X. My JRPG identity was built from Skies of Arcadia, Golden Sun, Tales of Symphonia and Xenoblade — a personal canon, not the received one. The same is true of the existential games the rest of my taste predicts I'd adore: Outer Wilds, Disco Elysium, and the profile-perfect Red Dead Redemption 2 and Death Stranding are all unplayed.

The takeaway is the same one the music gave me. "Favorite," operationalized as "what I commit to and finish," is a much narrower category than "games I would enjoy." The first is governed by depth, habit, and the search for a world to disappear into; the second by curiosity. This list is reporting the first.

Read as a single object, my favorite games are a way of disappearing into somewhere else — not to win, not to compete, but to inhabit a large, coherent world long enough that the real one recedes, and to be told a story that usually ends in loss.

The genre is almost beside the point; the function is the constant. A role-playing game is simply the most reliable machine for the thing I actually want — a place to be a person who is not me, accompanied through a long arc by characters whose ending matters. That the highest tier keeps landing on grief — Automata, Clair Obscur, Majora's Mask, The Last of Us — is not something I set out to seek. I told the interviewer as much: I don't chase sad stories, but those are the ones that lodge and stay. The melancholy is emergent, a gravity rather than a goal.

There are, in truth, two collections here doing two different jobs. The single-player canon is for disappearing — solitary, immersive, narrative, finished only when it earns the ending. The multiplayer streak — Call of Duty, Counter-Strike, Rocket League, Smash, RuneScape — is for company and for comfort: a way to be with friends and a low-stakes place to put my hands while my mind unwinds. It is not a competitive self; it never was. Like the music that turned out to be a tool for thinking, these are tools for two distinct needs, and the tool fits the hand.

The two waves explain the rest. A childhood imprinted on Dreamcast and Game Boy set the palette; a pandemic spent in long single-player worlds proved the palette still held under pressure; and a residency-era renaissance — Baldur's Gate, Elden Ring, Clair Obscur — proved the appetite survives even the least free years of a life. If there is a self-criticism to extract, it is the negative space again: the map clearly points toward Outer Wilds and Disco Elysium and the FromSoftware games I keep saying I'll get to, and I keep not going. The data, helpfully, draws the arrow for me.

The point of building a taste fingerprint is to test it, so we did — and the honest result is that the model predicts a cluster of games my list does not yet contain. Grouped by how confidently the profile points at them, and flagged by what I said when each was offered: