It's been quite the year for gaming, and thankfully, there's been a lot more good than bad to write home about, with the landscape of the medium changing in several notable ways over the last 12 months. Sure, we've had our share of controversies - just try looking at the top image without your blood suddenly coming to the boil - but on the whole it's been a productive, encouraging year that has seen the future of the industry be moulded in some very intriguing ways. What 2012 makes clear for 2013 is that we can expect more indie gaming than ever before, more episodic content, and new ways for players to interact with the medium that they cherish so much. Here are the 10 biggest moments of 2012.
10. Doritogate
Anyone who follows any quarter of the gaming press will be well aware how questionable the relationship between publications and publishers can be; there's the infamous Driv3rgate scandle - where several UK publications gave the game ludicrously high review scores in order to publish an exclusive - as well as the Jeff Gertsmann incident, where he was summarily fired for poorly reviewing Kane and Lynch, because its publishers contributed significant advertising revenue to the site. It all kicked up a gear in 2012, though, with the controversial above picture of games journalist Geoff Keighley standing amid a slew of video game-related food and drink tie-ins, reflecting the mutual means of survival that the gaming press and gaming publishers glean from one another. It went up a step when Eurogamer's Rob Florence stuck his neck out by criticising the UK's Games Media Awards, which he purported only reinforces the overtly friendly relationship between the gaming press and publishers, which denies them journalistic distance and therefore integrity. Florence criticised journalists who took part in a "Tweet-off" to plug games in order to win a PS3, yet after complaints from those involved, Eurogamer edited the article, causing Florence to resign in protest. As a result, the gaming press has been forced to re-examine its role in order to hope that they can still retain the trust of viewers; otherwise, what's the point?