As a form, games have spent a long time considering what to borrow from and learn about other media. We’ve embraced the idea that interactive entertainment is a form in its own right, not some illegitimate cousin to something else. But we also get that insularity doesn’t make us healthy, and games that only borrow from other games are limited.

Over at Kotaku, Kirk and I reminisce about Phantasmagoria 2 and the “dark, gritty”, film-chasing FMV game heyday. I’m in love with these weird warped relics more today than I ever have been; they deserve to be revisited as art just as much as melted 1980s VHS tracks have been for music over the past few years.

I look at how the art world is influenced by tech — bot poets, Emoji galleries, the romantic fixation on the rough edges of the Geocities-era internet — and when I look at coarse old FMV games I start to finally see the possibility for modern aesthetic schools to start adopting other things from games besides 16-bit sprites and bleep-bloops.

The Bear Stearns Bravo FMV showpiece seems like a neat start, and would have been on my GOTY list for the concept alone, if I’d been able to spend more time digging in. The games press should do a January wave of “in case you missed it,” for all the games we fall in love with in the free time we suddenly have after the year-end stuff is over.

Relatedly, my newest Edge column is about how some theatre concepts have and should continue to have a positive influence on the games space.

And while sensationalized “dark, gritty” attitudes to violence will probably not make games seem like they are for grown-ups no matter how much people keep at it, honest, thoughtful explorations of violence that respect the purpose of the medium and communicate complex things will.

Please-please read my interview with Merritt Kopas on her Consensual Torture Simulator, a fascinating act of personal expression wreathed in commentary on games that questions what else violence could mean in interactive entertainment.

I care less and less about the traditional consumer games business, and more and more about where the weird and interesting games are (I wrote a critique of Tearaway, ICYMI).

Tomorrow I’m going to be publishing my personal games of the year list, so keep with me. I also recently contributed to Gamasutra’s Top 10 Game Developers of 2013, so check it out if you’re interested in hearing who the ~world’s best industry trade site~ thinks are defining our space right now.

We are gonna make it through December, all of us.