As a kid, the way I'd show my love for favorite games would be to just replay them a ton. I probably replayed a lot of Square's PS1 RPG's more than a reasonable person should, and taken the time to glean everything out of them that I possibly could.
And Final Fantasy IV's probably the game I've played to completion the most, so I was pretty psyched for it's speed run to be capping off ADGQ. And the things I learned about the guts of that game, the programming quirks and glitches (now I know why Asura's Cure 4 never healed her!) were remarkable.
The last game I played that I loved so much that I dug into a little more was Undertale, but with that it was the soundtrack. It was the only music I listened to for a week after I finished it, and before I'd even known what a leitmotif was (when I finally checked out the soundtrack info on the Undertale wiki) I was finding all the connections between the songs.
I played only 10 of the games that ended up at least mentioned in the full Best Game debate (I'm including Xenoblade Chronicles X). Which is actually an improvement over the past couple years!
Witcher 3 wasn't one of them. So at least the GB crew are better than me!
EDIT: um maybe 11 or 10.5 if you include Taken King?
The GOTY game discussions are usually my favorite GB content each year, but the actual decision making of what's the winner and top 3 in each category... not so much.
But I'm not about to tell them what they should play and how much of it. What I like is getting them all together so that every remarkable game of 2015 gets at least some shout out from someone for what they did best (or did the worst!) and what was noteworthy in games. But this year has been the absolute muddiest as far what everyone did and didn't play and how that affected deciding the awards, to the point that it was kind of hard to ignore.
I think @the_atomic_dumpling is on the right track with the idea of scrapping a lot of the GOTY awards. My idea would be to keep all the categories as areas of discussion, but there doesn't have to be official winners. All that can then lead into the GOTY and Top 10, where we can still have the dirty, muddy, filthy, gross hashing out of the BEST GAMES that we can be happily angry about!
Talon64's comments