Ranking everything — characters, fast food, people — on a scale from S to F. Game logic applied to the world.
Literal meaning: A tierlist is a ranking format in which subjects are placed into tiers from S (superior/special) through A, B, C, D, and F (failure) — borrowed from fighting game competitive communities, where character viability was assessed on such scales. The format has spread to ranking virtually everything: fast food chains, Pokémon, films, political figures, universities, and people.
Origin: Tier rankings originate in fighting game communities from the 1990s–2000s, where players assessed the competitive viability of characters in games like Street Fighter and Super Smash Bros. The format migrated to YouTube content from around 2018 — “tiermaker” websites enabled anyone to create and share tierlists — and became a dominant content format, generating hundreds of millions of views. The S tier designation (for “special” or “super”) denotes the highest category above A.
A ranking format imported from competitive gaming and applied to the social world — where the game’s evaluative logic follows the vocabulary into contexts that were never games.
The Appeal: Tierlists are entertaining, shareable, and generative of debate — the ranking is rarely agreed with, which produces engagement. They impose satisfying order on complex subjects. They are also a form of taste performance: your tierlist is your aesthetic position, made visible and discussable.
The Friction: Gamification Creep — game logic entering non-game contexts — is the mechanism: the tierlist format imports the assumption that complex subjects can be objectively ranked, which is appropriate for character viability in competitive games and inappropriate for most other subjects. When tierlists are applied to people — as they frequently are — the format imports SMV (Sexual Market Value) logic: the ranked hierarchy of human attractiveness or value made visual and participatory. Looksmaxxing culture uses tierlist aesthetics extensively. Comparison Culture is intensified: tierlists provide a ranked vocabulary that makes comparative evaluation of people feel natural and appropriate, because it is formatted like a game.
Why This Matters: Tierlist / S-Tier makes visible how game formats carry game assumptions into non-game territory. Once you see the format as imported rather than natural, you can ask: what assumptions about measurability and comparability does this ranking format bring with it — and are those assumptions appropriate to this subject?
Related terms: Gamification Creep · Aurafarming · Looksmaxxing · Comparison Culture · SMV (Sexual Market Value) · Situated Knowledge
Read more:
- Rethinking Gamification — Fuchs, M., Fizek, S., Ruffino, P. & Schrape, N. (eds.) (2014), Meson Press.
- How fighting games kicked off a bizarre YouTube meme — Webb, K. (2020), Inverse.
Solid journalistic source on the origins in fighting-game culture and the later spread as a YouTube/internet format. - S Tier Meaning: What does S Ranking stand for? — TierMaker (n.d.), TierMaker.
Practical source on S-tier as the highest category in tier-list formats