This was a troubled year in video games. The difficulty started in March, when some of the organizers of the 2014 Game Developers Choice Awards received a bomb threat. The target, according to an anonymous e-mail, was Anita Sarkeesian, a feminist media critic who has been vocal about sexism and misogyny in video games, and who was due to receive an award for her work. The threat turned out to be bogus; Sarkeesian accepted her prize in safety and earned a standing ovation from many of the same game makers whose work she has spiritedly critiqued. But the threat foreshadowed further harassment later in the year, when Sarkeesian and some game developers—many of whom are women and create games that stray from conventional themes—were harangued online in a series of coördinated ad-hominem attacks.

That episode raised again the hoary question of whether video games have a hand in inspiring violence among those who play them. But, this time, the cliché was voiced not by conservatives, who have long assailed video games as a menace to the young, but by liberals, who see the assault on Sarkeesian and others as a reaction against increasingly progressive commentary around the medium and increasingly diverse themes within it. (The game at the epicenter of the controversy, for example, is a flawed but interesting examination of depression.)

Video games deal primarily in the language of combat: the victor is often the last man standing (indeed, this idiom is explicitly used in many games). No wonder, then, that some players view aggression as the natural response to a challenge, whether it’s been issued by a virtual army or by a feminist critic. The surrounding conversation appears to have had an effect on the art itself. There seem to have been fewer overtly political or countercultural independent games in 2014 than in previous years, and perhaps fewer that challenge their audiences in existential ways rather than merely muscular ones.

The blockbusters didn’t escape problems, either, though theirs were largely technical. As more major titles embrace online functionality, there has been an increase in launch issues related to server lag—one thinks of Sony’s DriveClub and Activision’s Destiny. Meanwhile, Assassin’s Creed: Unity, a game that is set in Paris during the French Revolution, was plagued by so many glitches that its publisher, Ubisoft, had to issue an apology. (Spare a thought for the Ubisoft artist who reportedly spent five thousand hours building a scale replica of the cavernous cathedral of Notre-Dame, the game’s centerpiece, only to have her work somewhat tragically undermined.) [#image: /photos/59096053c14b3c606c105be6]

There were jewels amid the dross, however, such as Never Alone, a straightforward game that is elevated by its attempt to preserve Inuit cultural heritage, and Elite: Dangerous, which seeks to make our galaxy not only observable but also available for exploration. Sega, one of the oldest publishers of video games, launched Alien: Isolation, a meticulous tribute to Ridley Scott’s film, while Rockstar’s 2014 update to the Grand Theft Auto series, which allows players to view the fictional city of Los Santos from a first-person perspective, has provided the most vivid and lifelike world yet seen in a game, an eager tribute to Los Angeles that blends the real and the imagined. Though Ralph Baer, the man who first reimagined the television set as a canvas for interactive entertainment, died just this month, parts of the industry that he helped create continue to grow and thrive. Here are the finest examples of the year.

Mario Kart 8 (Nintendo Wii U)

Gamers are familiar with the law of diminishing returns—more even than Hollywood’s most sequel-ready film franchises, video games inspire iteration. Yet Nintendo’s latest update to its twenty-two-year-old racing series is a revelation undiminished by familiarity. The additions to the template may be broadly inconsequential (TV-style race replays, tracks with sections that rise into the air and twirl, drivers’ pigtails that flap in the wind), but the execution is unrivalled—the humorous animations, the high-contrast vistas, the nimiety of customization options. Video games have been this detailed before, but rarely to such unwaveringly joyous effect.

2. Dark Souls II (PC; PlayStation 3 and 4; Xbox One and 360)

The sequel to Hidetaka Miyazaki’s dark fantasy classic provided video games with perhaps their most memorable locale of the year: Majula, a numinous cliff-top homestead, a place of refuge chiselled by a ceaseless virtual wind. The game has a unique rhythm, inviting players to quest into darkness with only the occasional bonfire as a way station, and the story unfolds not in tiresome reams of exposition but in snatches and fragments. A player’s rate of progress is dictated as much by careful observation as by fighting skills. There is no hand-holding; neglect to talk to a particular character or explore some murky corridor and you may miss great swaths of this world.** **

3. Threes! (Android, iOS, Xbox One)

An elegant mobile-phone game that has been unscrupulously copied and resold by less imaginative developers, Threes! instructs its players simply to “Swipe to combine tiles.” (The directions seem to echo the nineteen-seventies Pong koan: “Avoid missing ball for high score.”) Each of the tiles bears a number that is a multiple of three, and like-numbered tiles can be combined into solitary ones, thereby freeing up space for more. Threes! is not a game of addition, however—the tiles could display any symbol and its rules would still work. Rather, it creates a Tetris-like environment in which you must work to eliminate your mistakes before they overcome you. For a game about clearing space on the screen, it does an admirable job of filling it in the day.

4. Desert Golfing (Android, iOS)

Don’t be fooled by the early-eighties Atari aesthetic, with its geometric lines and two-tone landscapes. Desert Golfing offers a fresh experience, thanks to its removal of an elementary feature of most video games: the ability to try and try again. Here, among the forsaken dunes, you must guide a golf ball into an endless procession of holes, using a drag-and-release aiming mechanism that was popularized by Angry Birds. There is, however, no chance to replay a hole if you go over par. Rather, you must live with your bogeys and the rest and make the arduous side-scrolling journey toward hole five thousand and beyond, your tally accruing with each swing of the virtual club.

5. Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor (PC; PlayStation 3 and 4; Xbox One and 360)

One does not simply walk into Mordor; one skulks through it, terrorizing Uruks. This year’s chapter in the ever-expanding “L.O.T.R.” saga makes use of a newly minted myth: the player is a phantom who is avenging the murder of his family. The story has all the bloat of the books from which it draws inspiration, but the underlying game is svelte. Mordor is something of a drag to look upon, like a rugby field at the end of a particularly wet season, but there’s an undeniable appeal to roaming its dreary contours while you sew mayhem in Sauron’s ranks. What truly elevates the game, however, is the enmity that forms dynamically between Sauron’s commanders as you upset the balance of power—say, by creating drama between two captains who are both afraid of fire, or by setting a hive of bees on a portly war chief. Here is a rare example of a blockbuster game that accommodates its players’ choices rather than forcing them to color within the scriptwriter’s lines.