This week, our partnership with game criticism site Critical Distance brings us picks from Eric Swain from the entirety of 2014. From the year's biggest releases to social and cultural issues affecting games, let's see what had the critics talking!

We at Critical Distance have gone back over the last year and put together a compilation of what we feel best represents what has passed year. We compiled the most important, most memorable and most representative critical pieces of the year to give an idea of what 2014 was all about. Now, Critical Distance is proud to present the 2014 edition of This Year In Video Game Blogging!

Culture Blogging

Every year, we have a section devoted to pieces that focused on the community that surrounds our medium. This year, more than ever previously, such pieces dominated the conversation. The biggest events might have been directly addressed above, but it was only one in several interlocking pieces where critics tried to break with the status quo.

Based on an article he penned for Polygon from earlier this year, Tropes vs Women in Videogames producer Jonathan McIntosh produced the video "25 Invisible Benefits of Gaming While Male" for the Feminist Frequency's YouTube channel, getting 25 men of the videogame industry to label their privileges.

Anita Sarkeesian also released her two part dissection of the Background Decoration trope, which should be considered essential viewing. A content warning, however, for graphic violent imagery present in the videos.

At Paste, Cara Ellison explored the 17% figure in video games, a recurring number in media studies as the percentage at which men judge the gender ratio of men and women to be equal. Anything more than 17% and men start to perceive women as the majority of a given crowd.

Switching gears from gender to race representation, Jed Pressgrove hosted a conversation with Sidney Fussell on race in video games, focusing on the representation of blacks and their coded fantasy counterparts.

Shivam Bhatt tackled the Far Cry 4 cover art controversy using it to explain how South Asians are represented and treated.

At US Gamer, Daniel Starkey spoke with Doom developer John Romero and others to discuss the treatment of Native Americans in video game development. From Custer's Revenge to this year's Never Alone, Starkey said, they are "More Than Shamans and Savages."

On his blog Stay Classy, Todd Harper explained the dichotomy of The Subtle Knife: as a gay man, when does he want being gay to matter in a game? "Always," he said, and "never."

Samantha Allen -- in one of her final pieces of her games writing career -- expressed a disbelief in the so-called split between "short form, single author queer games or long form works that are developed by teams but weighed down by the trappings of dominate culture." She believes the gap can be closed -- and is already closing.

The subject of representation goes beyond the content of games, into the makeup of the industry itself. Jenn Frank wrote about The Rolodex and how the normal processes of business networking can be a self perpetuating system of exclusion if it isn't recognized and actively countered.

Responding to well-meaning but confounded readers, Leigh Alexander wrote a few Dos and Don'ts on combating online sexism.

Squinky, aka Deirdra Kiai, delivered an impassioned talk at this year's #1reasontobe panel at the Game Developers Conference, namely on the challenges of being gender non-binary in a highly gendered industry like video games. "Making games is easy. Belonging is hard," was the refrain of their talk, as republished here on Squinky's professional site.

Stacy Mason attended her first GDC this past March and found that she did learn a lot, just not what she was expecting. The game industry wants to have rock stars, she observed, but copies the worst aspect of other mediums in its quest for legitimacy.

Maddy Myers concluded her GDC experience with an epilogue and how the dominate culture seeks to discredit the work not already appreciated, both at industry social events and within the hiring process. Later in the year, Myers also held a talk at AlterCon about the myth of "objectivity" and the need for Gonzo Journalism.

Daniel Joseph argued that we must Let The Enthusiast Press Die for its stagnation, while Javy Gwaltney pointed out that while we may laugh at some of the coverage on mainstream game news sites, we should take it seriously for how it comes to represent games journalism to the rest of society.

Tadhg Kelly explored the brave new world of Patreonomics, in which more and more creators are turning to Patreon and other crowdfunding sites to make their livelihood. (Critical Distance is itself funded by its readership via Patreon, so we're part of this trend ourselves!)

Our own Lana Polansky worried about that if the legitimate anger from activism can be so easily twisted, so can the new form of support for the most in need. The anger is necessary in the face of little other support, yet can easily turn toxic and people against one another.

Along those lines, Critical Distance alumna Mattie Brice commented on how she and so many others are more than their pain, but often that is all that gets noticed for that is all that is marketable about minority writers.

Further demonstrating Polansky's point, Leigh Alexander wrote The Unearthing, a creative narrativization of the excavation of the ET cartridges in the New Mexico desert earlier this year. The event itself is less important compared to the mindset of the critic in this space, feeling constantly under siege.

Ian Danskin's video "This is Phil Fish" -- made prior to Fish's complete departure from the industry -- discussed the strange obsessive cult of celebrity concerning the titular figure and others like him.

Developer Liz Ryerson used the video as a jumping off point to talk about Indie Entitlement based on already outdated notions of what the indie community is -- and the harm these notions cause to those outside the "norm." Industry problems abound.

Mike Joffe at Videogames of the Oppressed brought up Conflict Minerals in Games. (Content warning: discussion of rape and sexual slavery.)

Back on Paste, Ian Williams and Austin Walker critiqued a recent Blizzard Entertainment recruitment video and how it subtly preyed upon the dreams and aspirations of new developers.

Also, Jared Rosen details GAME_JAM: How the Most Expensive Game Jam Crashed and Burned in a Single Day. The original article is lost to time, but it is archived for now through the Wayback Machine.

Actual ethical debates were brought up and ignored. For instance, Eurogamer's Simon Parkin asked "Are YouTubers breaking the law?" With prominent personalities doing advertorials and promotions for their subjects, this is a question we're bound to return to in the new year.

Claire Hosking explains the whole Grand Theft Auto V being pulled from Target shelves in Australia thing from the perspective of Australians, contrary to the mainly American outcry which has dominated the conversation.

Rami Ismail, developer and business guy at Vlambeer, explains how even in a world of code and systems, being English speaking is an enormous advantage in this world.

This also carries over to the field of criticism, as Memory Insufficient's Zoya Street dove into the Japanese video game criticism and brought back some translations and insights in these three pieces. The inaugural Critical Proximity -- organized by Zoya Street -- was held this year just ahead of GDC.

Joshua Comer was inspired by a number of the talks to examine "Criticism's Difficulty Settings." Meanwhile, Mike Joffe "Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Myriad and Nebulous Concepts None of Us Can Agree On."

Another digital based conference, Indie3, happened later this year, as a "counter-conference" to the AAA-focused E3. Cameron Kunzelman and Austin Walker wrote a Postscript for Paste on the floundering that happened in a space that didn't define up front what it was all about.

Speaking of conferences, "'Everyone Was There' And You Weren't" wrote Dan Cox, on the exclusionary rhetoric that gets thrown about at events like conferences and conventions. He wondered: if everyone was there, then are those who couldn't make it nobodies?

And we can't go without mentioning Cara Ellison's Embed With... series, in which she travels around the world visiting important names and faces in the field. Her visit to Paris-based, American ex-pat developers Katharine Neil and Harvey Smith is a great place to start.

Finally, you want objective game reviews? Here's a whole site of them. Be careful what you wish for.

Theory Blogging

Some criticism focuses on the specific instance, a single game or other work. Other pieces look to broader conceptions and understanding of both game design and criticism. Earlier this year, Stephen Beirne started off a grand conversation about capitalistic design in RPGs and whether it was inherent in leveling up.

Austin Walker responded that Beirne's assertions "sacrifice complexity for strategic power." He saw papered over cracks and wanted to explore them, while Zack Fair figured we should be careful with definitions and distinction regarding in game resources.

Our own Mark Filipowich explored the "Narrative and Abstraction of the Camera in Games." What we see is not literally there, but a representation of something we are meant to understand is there.

Austin C. Howe defended the notion of games about games as it he finds it severely reductive and ignored so much they actually have to say and denouncing them dangerously results in asserting that games exist in a vacuum.

Touching on the critical reception to Vlambeer's Luftrausers (with its Nazi-inflected aesthetics), Craig Stern took to task the saying "no interpretation is wrong." While it may not have been the case here, not all interpretations are valid, he said, especially those that discount and ignore the material in the actual work being discussed.

Brendan Vance delivered a one-two punch on our assumptions regarding games this year in "The Cult of the Peacock" and "Form and its Usurpers." The first article concerns design dogma while the latter focuses on the ideology of form and content divorced from their artistic roots.

Writing for Indie Haven, Joe Parlock asserted that the "What is a Game?" debate is not only pointless and annoying, but actively damaging to the medium at large.

At Videogame Tourism, Eron Rauch noted the echoes of history as the current rhetoric around the art revolution of indie games matches up so well with that of the Impressionists some hundred and fifty years prior.

Play the Past's Gilles Roy explored how strategy games are changing our understanding of popular history. The ludic rhetoric that gets used, he argued, alters perception of events and realities.

David Hayward of the YouTube channel Feral Vector took us for a walk in the countryside, a parable of space fascists caving each others heads in and, more broadly, the ridiculous seriousness with which the games press discuss games.

Speaking of video blogging, Errant Signal's Chris Franklin had several significant contributions