So many of my friends seem to’ve had a tough 2013, so it feels kind of in poor spirit to “celebrate” my own. Let’s just say, then, that I’ve had an incredibly lucky year. The sense that I’m daily drowning in an embarrassment of tiny miracles becomes almost anxious-making — some karmic debt collector is surely out there, and he will come for me. Every day I peek out from behind my blind, dreading the sight of his shadow on my lawn.

But it hasn’t fallen yet, and for now, I feel, as a highly-secular person, not blessed, but fortunate. Some people use that kind of language as graceful codification for I made money. It’s definitely not that, for me.

Just things like this:

The English afternoon sky, steel and lemon, framing a distant steeple. The hundred-plus kinds of roses that live in the park by our house. Being invited, being on the list, having a place setting. A companion that always knows how we get home at night. The waitress who saw I’d left my purse at the bar last night and brought it to my table before I even noticed it missing. Everyone who is hastening behind me when I’ve lost something, whether it’s my bank card or the way to the right answer, or my way, or myself.

Alongside all this and more, that I am recognized for helping shape the conversation about video games seems small sometimes. But when I rattle round the inside of my head wondering what I’ve done to deserve the happiness and opportunity I have, the only thing I can come up with is that small things mean lots to me, and I want them to mean lots to others, too.

And play isn’t small, really. It’s where we find our joy, when we’re too lonesome to marvel at the whipping of branches in the rain, when we feel blanched and small as a nut and not very huggable at all, when a hard, musty trench of sleep debt just keeps getting longer and deeper, or when you reach deep into yourself and your fingers brush something unknown and unsettling.

This is what I’ve got. So yeah, here’s some of the work I did in 2013 that was defining for me, or that I simply felt  some measure of love towards. Maybe you did, too.

Wait — I actually think I wrung some of my best words this year out of the games I did not love.  I wrote a critique of GTA V, a game that angered me. It was republished in Slate, but I think the satirical ‘review‘ I wrote before playing the game became even more popular. I performed it as a slam poem, and then Jonathan Mann turned it into a song, This is Why We Video Gaming.

I was surprised how much it took off, and also surprised at how many people frowned upon my fake-review — they thought it was real, or they thought it was a statement on a game I hadn’t played, rather than a statement on review culture. It’s ironic that they missed the satire, because most of my criticisms of the game hinge on the fact fans defend it as ‘satire’, but it fails as satire. In the Guardian, I’m pleased to’ve written about some genuinely-edgy games that actually had something to say.

Now that some time has passed, people seem to have realized that BioShock Infinite is not good. I have seen some articles here and there wondering why reviewers so broadly failed to miss that fact when applying the scores. Honestly, I don’t know if I’ve ever hated a game so much. It’d be poor form of me to use it as a litmus test for other people’s critical lenses, so I’m trying not to. I haven’t succeeded yet.

One thing I will always love is writing in collaboration with others; people still tell Kirk Hamilton and I that they liked our Final Fantasy VII Letters, or our Deus Ex letters. This year, I tried a new kind of game: indie pen and paper RPGs, along with Quintin Smith of Shut Up & Sit Down — we’ve covered three so far. We also wrote several feature-length series of correspondences at Polygon: about Far Cry 3, Persona 4, adventure games, relationship games, and The Last of Us.

I attended and covered more conferences this year than I can remember — PRACTICE, GameCity and Different Games were favorites — and I also gave more talks this year than ever, probably. My favorite experiences: I gave a keynote at Games for Change; I did a Nine Worlds keynote on games culture and the 1990s (it was reprised at GameCity, where Quinns and I also presented on sex in games). I had the enormous honor of appearing on GDC’s #1ReasontoBe panel and of giving one of the annual microtalks, on how old views of marketing create obstacles to progress. You can watch or read about all of those at the links provided.

This year I’m happy to have made a little progress toward my goal of bringing more high-level games and culture conversation to non-gaming publications; I did a piece on Gone Home for The Atlantic, I looked at the politics of Papers, Please for the New Statesman, and the intimacy of Luxuria Superbia for Slate. I discussed the fascinating shortcomings of virtual worlds in a book review for the Columbia Journalism Review, and in The New Inquiry, I wrote about the rise of individual games and the necessary shift away from ‘fun’ as games’ highest or only purpose.

It’s also important to me that I don’t write only about video games. I did plenty of deviation this year, but it was most fun doing recaps at Boing Boing — I did Eurovision again, a couple of Black Mirror episodes, and dedicated myself obsessively to Game of Thrones. Hopefully they’ll let me keep doing GoT in the year ahead, even though I still haven’t written about the anti-climactic, post-Red Wedding Season 3 finale.

My favorite non-gaming work this year was this swanky-photoed hymn to Domino’s Pizza in the Atlantic, and this personal essay exploring my own mixed race-ness.

I feel incredible gratitude to all the amazing people making and writing about games these days. Yes, I get frustrated at the cultural problems, at the consequences sexism and bigotry still create for me and others. Or at the consequences of my own visibility in this space, however ameliorated those consequences are by my own privileges.

But this year games have ultimately felt like a wonderful place for me to be, and I appreciate that more than I can say. In the year to come I want to find new ways not only to discover and celebrate independent creators, but to do the kind of criticism that interesting games deserve. I want to find ways to help make joyful spaces for talking and thinking about play. And for playing. It’s not small. None of us are small.

Happy New Year. Most of all I’m grateful for your support, readership, kind emails and Tweets, for sharing my articles with friends and family, because without you I’d have none of this. Thank you.