I’m making this post for a few reasons.

First, this year was really rad. I got hooked into a few online communities that have made me a lot cooler, and a lot better, as a person–you all know who you are. I’m going to hit everything else in list format:

• I released four games this year. I think they are all at least interesting, and some of them are even good, so check those out if you want.
• I released a diagram of principles that sums up both myself and this blog.
• I wrote a series of posts about horror games called “Designing Horror” that was well-received.
•  I ran a kickstarter. It succeeded. I released the game. IT IS MORE SUCCESSFUL THAN MOST HUNDRED THOUSAND DOLLAR KICKSTARTERS.

Second, this year I made a post every Monday through Friday for the entire year. It was a lot of work, but I think that the strength of the writing on the blog has become powers stronger. Additionally, I have been able to be in conversation with myself in a really specific and articulate way–I make far fewer 3,000 word posts and a lot more small explanations of ideas that have returned over and over again. So what I am saying is that there is a lot of work that goes on here, and I think a post of posts is the best way to demonstrate that.

Third, it is helpful for new readers. I want a page that I can point to, like SEK’s “Best of Acephalous” series, that shows off what I have been doing. Also, like SEK, I plan for this blog to continue on, mostly unchanged, into the future. At most, I would limit my post count, but my class schedule next semester sort of demands constant blogging–there will be more on that early in the year.

In any case, also ripping off SEK, I am going to split this up by month. I think it is pretty clear when the quality of the blog picks up–sometime in the Spring–and I generally believe that I have kept that up for the rest of the year.

JANUARY

• On Moorcock’s “Starship Stormtroopers”
• Why Bulletstorm Was Actually a Good Game
• Pigs Playing Games
• Bogost’s Unit Operations and the Strangeness of Simulation
• On Bifo’s “The Soul At Work”

FEBRUARY

• The Bioshock Series So Far
• A Slightly More Theoretical Take on To The Moon
• Stories That Suck
• Can Gamification Be Saved?
• I Am Not Hardcore
• On Fighting Games

MARCH

• Talking in Video Games
• On The Authority
• On Sophie’s Choice and World Design
• What Do Gamers Want to Feel?
• On the Efficacy of Design “Truth Teams”
• Video Games and Parochialism

APRIL

• Two Kinds of Video Game Death
• On Rise of the Videogame Zinesters
• Crossed and the Reduction to Meat
• On the Authorship of Games
• Is the Aura the Same as Affect?
• Abjection and the Video Game

MAY

• On Games of Empire
• Jita, Burning
• “Creators are more important than fictional characters and corporations”
• I Am Not Going To Play Diablo 3
• Playing War
• On Truth: Red, White, and Black

JUNE

• On Indie Game: The Movie
• Flat Ethics, OOO, and Politics
• On the New Mass Effect 3 Ending
• On Wonder Woman
• Why Short Games?

JULY

• On Prometheus
• On New Games Journalism
• On The Dark Knight Rises
• Boris Groys, Ernst Junger, and Agent 47: Identity and the Hitman Franchise
• On The Crunch
• On Dead Space

AUGUST

• Looking For A Face
• Laure and the Sacred [1] [2]
• Philip K. Dick and the Living Image
• The Money Problem in Video Games Writing
• Praising Difficulty, Opacity, and the Incomprehensible

SEPTEMBER

• On Dys4ia and Lim
• On Thirty Flights of Loving
• In Praise of the Worst Design Moment in Final Fantasy 7

OCTOBER

• Glissant and Opacity [1] [2]
• On Richard Skelton
• On Dishonored
• On Digestate: A Food & Eating Themed Anthology

NOVEMBER

• On Black Hole
• James Kochalka’s “In Defense of Meat”
• On The World
• On Shank and The Butcher
• On Final Fantasy VIII
• On Game Centered Criticism

DECEMBER

• On Bifo’s The Uprising: On Poetry and Finance
• Final Fantasy IX: Destruction
• Interview With Theron Jacobs
• Lived Nonhuman Ethics
• On Killing is Harmless
• In Case You Missed It
• On Losing a Game of Civilization V

So that is it. Thanks for reading. Thanks for showing up.