With few outsiders left to fight, perhaps it was inevitable that video game players and creators would turn on one another. Before this year, the large and disparate group of people who love video games embraced the fiction that we all belong to a common subculture. Video game players supposedly liked not just the same games but also the same movies, the same books, the same fashions, the same highly caffeinated drinks and the same nacho-cheese-flavored snack chips.

But as video games have undergone a kind of Cambrian explosion in diversity of form, the medium has become too large to be contained by its old stereotypes.

That was the thrust of Ms. Alexander’s Gamasutra column that so angered some video game players: “Gamers are over.” But it would be more accurate to say that gamers are everywhere.

As Zoe Quinn, the creator of the game Depression Quest and one of the women who has been hounded by angry players beholden to an outdated and reactionary view of video games, said on MSNBC this year: “If you play Candy Crush, you’re a gamer. If you play Call of Duty, you’re a gamer. If you play weird games about depression and feelings, you’re just as much of a gamer as anybody else.”

Image The critic Anita Sarkeesian, above left, received death threats after challenging how women are portrayed in video games. Credit... Jim Wilson/The New York Times

My favorite game of 2014 was Left Behind, a short prequel to The Last of Us, a PlayStation game from 2013. (You can download it on a PlayStation 3 or play it as part of the 2014 version for the PlayStation 4, The Last of Us Remastered.) On its surface, Left Behind is a conventional big-budget video game. It takes place during a zombie apocalypse, and you have to kill infected humans as well as healthy ones to survive. But in flashbacks, it tells a tender and moving story about two teenage girls, and in the process transforms the tension and terror of its zombie killing into a girlish romp through a shopping mall.