Game Theory: Surprises and Challenges for Video Games in 2013 As 2013 winds down, we're starting another edition of Game Theory, a look at the year in video games with the regular gaming critics for The New York Times and other contributors. This was an odd year, one that feels like a prelude to some grand changes. The typical way to convince nongamers that video games had a good year is to mention money. You'll see that in news reports on television about how the new Xbox One or PlayStation 4 sold. You'll hear it from the gaming industry or read about it. Someone will stack the dollars earned by the gaming industry against those hauled in by Hollywood and declare, creative counting aside, that this is proof that video games matter. Pity the poorer patrons of poetry or the theater, whose box-office returns can't compete. To those who measure relevance in dollars, they must matter less. Let's risk an omission, then, as we dare to declare this a wonderful, surprising and special year for video games. Let's do so without mentioning how many copies were sold of the new version of Grand Theft Auto or the speed with which the new models of PlayStation and Xbox left store shelves. No one was really ever impressed by a money braggart, anyway. The year was unusual and interesting from the start. It would be a year defined by the rise of unexpectedly creative people and the struggles of the large corporations behind commercial games. Barely two weeks into 2013, a three-person development team led by a married couple in North Carolina released one of the year's most-played games, the ubiquitous Temple Run 2. Also in January, one of the biggest gaming publishers to fail, the 24-year-old THQ, went to auction, its games scattered to other companies in an industry of ever fewer titans. The feel-good story of the year was the continued rise of indie games. An indie video game about stamping passports called Papers, Please shone brightly. So did the interactive short story Gone Home, an unusual game about nothing more exotic than a teenage girl who decides to run away. Sony turned its love and support for indie games into a PlayStation marketing slogan that sent the Xbox-makers at Microsoft scrambling to remind people that they loved indies, too. But in this industry, companies also make art. Sony's own non-indie studio Naughty Dog produced a beautifully upsetting game about fatherhood and postapocalyptic survival called The Last of Us. It took the transglobal several-hundred-person-strong sequel factory behind Assassin's Creed to produce a gorgeous, exciting, culturally rich game about being a pirate in the 18th century. And an equally sprawling crew made the latest eccentric Grand Theft Auto epic. The year was partly defined by two humiliations. The giant Electronic Arts released its newest version of its city-building Sim City series, this time requiring an online connection for vaguely defined reasons. The news coverage about EA's poor planning, strange design decisions and failed servers in the spring now read like rough drafts of the coverage in the fall of the rollout of the health care law. Before the Xbox One came out, Microsoft infuriated potential players by planning for all games on the machine to be inoperable if the user couldn't connect to the Internet within a day of playing them, one of several drawbacks it said was necessary to give people broader digital access to its games. Microsoft backed off those plans after a few weeks of furious feedback. It was no coincidence that the EA and Microsoft situations involved the Internet. The tendency to make more games connect to the web enables gaming to feel more social and for games themselves to evolve and improve for days and weeks after their release. That same reliance on the Internet, however, also raises the question of whether today's popular games will even run in a decade when the servers they connect to are shut off. Individual video games have never felt more ephemeral. Whether that's good or bad is up for debate. There is no common price tag for great video games anymore. The year's best ranged from free to $60. That initial $0 tag is becoming more popular and is affixed to a model of gaming that cajoles players to pay more for more content or to make progress more quickly or more easily. The year saw a rise in games like this and growing momentum for so-called free-to-play games. That is the money-related topic worth considering for all gamers and game critics out there - not how much the gaming industry made, but how much each game should cost and whether gamers in the years to come will still have a zeal to pay for them. Stephen Totilo is the editor in chief of the gaming website Kotaku.com. He also writes video game reviews for The Times.