You think they didn't really like Gone Home, they just deliberately set out to pick a game no one else would* and just randomly picked a game they actually didn't like, but they went with it anyone just to deny Joel Banderas a win? This seems pretty insane.
* plenty of other people did in the press (not necessarily as #10, but in contention) and on GAF (and it'll be in my top 10)
Couldn't an alternate explanation be that the kind of writers attracted to working at Polygon have an approach to games that meshes well with games built around empathetic/emotional, personal, emancipatory, expressive type experiences? I mean, if you disagree you disagree, that's cool.
But it's like if someone picks Geometry Wars as game of the generation. You could accuse them of having a secret agenda to undermine gaming and too cool for school and hipster to the power of ten I bet you wear leggings instead of pants!!!!! ... or you can recognize that that person probably prizes twitch reflexes, sort of zen-in-the-zone gaming, arcade experiences, score attack, and that logically flowing from the things they like, Geometry Wars is a pretty good fit.
And then if someone else picks, say, Mario Kart because they are approaching it from someone with young kids and they found that nights that used to be spent with everyone doing individual things are now spent as a family and there's so much content you can actually keep playing that long and it reminded the person of their own experience playing Mario Kart as a kid and never being able to beat 150cc... you could accuse them of being a delusional idiot propping up Big Nintendo, or you could assume that the reasoning they're giving you explicitly in their text represents the kind of experience they were looking for and so the game delivered for them.
Gone Home isn't my game of the year. Neither is The Last of Us. And I don't think the text in the A Link Between Worlds summary at all jives with my own experience of the game,
which I mentioned in this thread. But I assume that when people vote for them, it's because it's the games they liked. Not because they're trying to posture and look cool.