It’s been a good year. Here are thirteen of the things that were in it:

1. Silliness

I shifted most of my ad-hoc blogging to Medium.com. One of the most popular posts there has been What do you think of when you think of Batman? It was a very silly write-up of a totally unreliable survey, refuting something foolish that a games publisher said in an interview.

2. Schadenfreude

What has EA done now? was a blog that I was updating regularly for a couple of months when EA seemed to be perpetually upsetting people.

3. Heroism

On Gamesbrief this year, I started writing some feature-like articles based on interviews with developers. One of my favourites was a write-up of how 5th Planet Games kicks ass at community management.

4. Worldiness

I can't do this list without mentioning Dreamcast Worlds, the book I crowdfunded in 2012 and published in September.

5. History

I also started Memory Insufficient, an ezine exploring games history from perspectives that are normally ignored. I think I did some of my best writing here, covering digital games, board games and folk games from personal and documentary perspectives.

6. Heritage

I also got to write historically-informed articles in traditional magazines. I've written a few pieces for Comics and Gaming Magazine, an outlet that focuses on writing about geek culture for a grown-up audience. One of my more art-historical articles there was about three games that use "retro pixel graphics" in a way that goes beyond nostalgia to something complex about craft and culture (preview link dead but maybe it will work again one day?)

7. Legacy

Then at Australia's leading gaming magazine Hyper I wrote about games that address an anxiety over leaving a legacy for future generations. If you're keen, you can get issue #242 through the Android and iOS newsstand apps.

8. Solitude

On a more personal note, I was feeling lonely for much of this year. Sometimes I had this strange sense of being with people but not really being with them, both online and in real life. One piece explored how that could be better represented in games.

9. Ambivalence

During re/Action's pre-crowdfunding phase, I contributed two articles. One of them was a complicated response to the state of queer games discourse at the time, called "Why invisibility isn't a superpower": which is not to say that invisibility is not a privilege, but that it is an ambivalent state that lends itself to a sense of isolation and hopelessness.

10. Community

Those feelings did start to change. In a Borderhouse post about Gaymer X,  I mentioned feeling less isolated, and discussed safe spaces and different approaches to queer games community building.

11. Attraction

Samantha Allen and I started writing queer readings of romance games together in a Borderhouse series called Bunk Bed, where we share our different experiences playing the same games.

12. Complexity

Then I had the amazing honour of speaking at Queerness and Games Conference about queering histories, by disabusing them not just of great men, but also of grand theories. I wrote up the talk here.

13. Transformation

More recently, I wrote about Twine game Pure Again, discussing why it feels like such a good representation of much of my experience of transition.