Lincoln Center, 1:31 P.M.

James Estrin/The New York Times

The Big Apple Circus performed at Lincoln Center on Christmas.

Now in 3-D, Christmas With the Queen

For the first time, Queen Elizabeth II marked Christmas in a third dimension. Speaking from London, the queen videotaped her traditional holiday address to the British public in 3-D, and even donned 3-D glasses to watch it from Buckingham Palace. In the remarks, which she writes herself annually, the queen paid tribute to servicemen and women whose “sense of duty takes them away from family and friends” over the holidays, and highlighted a year that included the 60th anniversary of her reign and the London Olympic Games, The Associated Press reported.

“It was humbling that so many chose to mark the anniversary of a duty which passed to me 60 years ago,” she said, as footage showed the celebration of the Diamond Jubilee along the River Thames. (Though the message was taped just after the world learned of the pregnancy of the former Kate Middleton, wife of Elizabeth's grandson, Prince William, the queen did not mention the anticipated arrival of a great-grandchild.)

Several other prominent British figures also amplified their means of communication this year. The archbishops of Canterbury and York each delivered their Christmas sermons simultaneously in person and on Twitter, perhaps inspired by technological savvy of Pope Benedict XVI. John Sentamu, the archbishop of York, and Dr. Rowan Williams, who is serving his last year as archbishop of Canterbury, live-tweeted t heir sermons complete with a hashtag, #cswc, for “Christmas starts with Christ.”

Game Theory: Challenging the Industry

Helen,

Back in March, I had a chat with Jade Raymond, the leader of the mega-publisher Ubisoft's Toronto studio. I've interviewed her on and off for several years as she's moved from project to project. Her current gig involves overseeing the creation of a new Splinter Cell game. Splinter Cells are Tom Clancy games that let you control a stealthy agent through a series of sneaking, neck-snapping missions that tend to involve some shooting, some hiding in the shadows and the occasional violations of the Geneva Conventions.

Ms. Raymond seemed bothered by something one of the younger developers had said to her recently before quitting her studio. It's something she was hearing from other younger developers as well. “They don't like the idea that every game is a war game, that we're reinforcing this,” she said. And she added this curious observation: “A lot of the younger people who are in the industry, one of the things that really matters to them, is they d on't want to feel like they're making games …” I headlined that interview, “What if the next generation thinks video games are stupid?”

That interview and that line about what feels like a game stuck with me all year. We know what she meant, right?

I don't think she meant that any of her uneasy developers were worried that what they were making felt too much like chess or poker or even Pac-Man or Angry Birds. If only more modern video games felt more like games and less like wannabe movies!

Ms. Raymond was sharing a more pressing concern: creators of gaming blockbusters have so frequently clothed their work in the garments of power fantasy and virtual bloodlust that they too often feel like propaganda for a militaristic or at least antagonistic way of life. That howl from within is as crucial a concern for diversity i n gaming as there's ever been. It's an urgent call not only for diversity among game creators and game characters but also among the themes that games are about.

Ms. Raymond's interview raised the prospect that younger people would look at big-studio development and throw up their hands, declaring it a homogenous, retrograde factory for lowest-common-denominator projects that are out of touch with a modern, socially engaged society. In other words, they'll look at Big Video Games and call it Hollywood.

The game designer and author Anna Anthropy, whose Dys4ia I praised on Monday as one of the year's finest games, wrote the year's most important book about video games. It's about this very thing. Magnificently titled “Rise of the Videogame Zinesters: How Freaks, Normals, Amateurs, Artists, Dreamers, Drop-outs, Queers, Housewives, and People Like You Are T aking Back an Art Form,” the book gives me more hope for the future of games than anything I played in 2012.

The march toward better, smarter games will be a stumbling one.

Who really trusts corporate video game designers to explore complex themes in their action-packed games? The level of action needed to make a game pleasurable to interact with is already an obstruction to the calm that might help explore a more complex idea. But there's also the lack of experience among big-time game creators of deftly making complex work. Instead they too often exhibit knee-jerk defensiveness. They routinely express an aversion to controversy or even thematic complexity that assumes a level of intelligence and curiosity among players somewhere south of seventh grade. How else to take that Tomb Raider “rape” controversy that swirled out of an interview that we publish ed on Kotaku? The game's creators said that a scene in their coming game involving a man sliding his hand down the side of a bound, struggling woman before tackling her to the ground was “incorrectly … referred to as an ‘attempted rape' “ despite my reporter's revealing that he had one of the game's creators on tape using just those words. (Watch the scene yourself, at 2:15, and make of it what you will.)

Not to worry, the game's creators said. “Sexual assault of any kind is categorically not a theme that we cover in this game.”

Which might compel some of us out there to say: Why not?

And others to say: Maybe it's time a major game did cover that.

But would a game like that - a Tomb Raider that addresses the trauma of sexual assault - be fun? Probably not. Doesn't a video game need to be fun?

T hese are tough questions and the kind of questions that, hopefully, more smart forward-thinking people will get into gaming in order to answer.

-Stephen

Join the discussion here.

Ben Affleck Says No to a Senate Run

Any Massachusetts residents dreaming of having an Oscar winner who publicly rubbed up J. Lo as their Washington envoy are due for disappointment. Ben Affleck declared that he would not compete for John Kerry's Senate seat if Mr. Kerry is confirmed as secretary of state. “I love Massachusetts and our political process, but I am not running for office,” Mr. Affleck wrote on his Facebook page.

Speculation about a run emerged after Mr. Affleck, a Democratic-leaning star who has been widely discussing Middle Eastern and national politics as he promotes his film “Argo,” did not rule it out during an appearance on “Face the Nation” with Bob Schieffer. “One never knows,” he said, sounding dis tinctly politician-like.

But on Christmas Eve, Mr. Affleck took to Facebook to deny his non-denial. He said he would continue to be active with the Eastern Congo Initiative, a charity he founded to promote peaceful development. (He testified before Congress about it last week, his 10th appearance there on the issue.)

He also wrote about “supporting our veterans, drawing attention to the great many who go hungry in the U.S. everyday and using filmmaking to entertain and foster discussion about issues like our relationship to Iran.”

“We are about to get a great secretary of state,” Mr. Affleck concluded, in reference to Mr. Kerry's nomination, “and there are some phenomenal candidates in Massachusetts for his Senate se at. I look forward to an amazing campaign.”

Spike Lee Goes After \'Django Unchained\'

He may not have seen it, but the director Spike Lee already has an opinion about “Django Unchained.” In a recent interview with Vibe, he said he would not watch Quentin Tarantino's latest film, set in the pre-Civil War South, which opened in theaters on Tuesday. “I can't speak on it 'cause I'm not gonna see it,” he said. “The only thing I can say is it's disrespectful to my ancestors, to see that film.”

Over the weekend, Mr. Lee, whose most recent film, “Red Hook Summer,” deals with race and class in that Brooklyn neighborhood, took to Twitter to e xpress some more opinions. “American Slavery Was Not A Sergio Leone Spaghetti Western. It Was A Holocaust. My Ancestors Are Slaves. Stolen From Africa. I Will Honor Them.”

His statement inspired a lively debate, which Mr. Lee engaged in, weighing in and retweeting commenters on Saturday evening. He has taken issue with Mr. Tarantino's work before, particularly his use of a racial epithet. “Django” includes at least 100 instances of the slur.

In another interview with Vibe, Jamie Foxx, who plays Django, said Mr. Lee told him at the BET Awards in September that he would not speak out about the film. “You know Spike, he'll let you have it whether it's good, bad or ugly,” Mr. Foxx told the magazine. “And he said, ‘I'm not going to say anything bad about this film. It looks like y'all are getting it.' ”

Still Working the Streets, but Now to Combat a Plague of Gun Violence

Michelle V. Agins/The New York Times Rudy Suggs, 48, who was once a drug dealer in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, now works in the neighborhood trying to prevent violence.

Rudy Suggs, 48, has already lived one life, and now he is on his second. The first was as a gun-toting drug dealer in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, a few blocks from where he grew up. The second is as an anti-gun-violence activist, working the same streets he used to roam late into the night to prevent gunshots before they happen.

On and around the street corner where one of his friends was once gunned down, Mr. Suggs now breaks up fi ghts before people run home to get their weapons. The neighborhood kids who saw him selling and fighting when they were young are now teenagers whom he counsels not to go down the same path.

Mr. Suggs's services as a “violence interrupter,'' one of four who work for Save Our Streets Crown Heights, part of the Crown Heights Community Mediation Center, are in high demand, with shootings still prevalent in the neighborhood. There were 44 shooting victims in the 77th Precinct, where the mediation center is, through Dec. 10 this year, down from 47 last year, according to the center. The neighborhood's summer ended with a bloody Labor Day weekend: two men were fatally stabbed and two more people were wounded in shootings around the area after the annual West Indian American Day Parade.

When Mr. Suggs and his family first moved to Crown Heights in the late 1960s, he said, “you didn't have to worry about nights. But now it's hard to come out and sit on your stoop with your kids at 2 a.m. Every five minutes now, you hear gunshots.” A colleague's daughter's boyfriend was shot on the corner of Utica Avenue and St. John's Place in mid-August. Several days before that, he saw a man carrying a military-caliber assault rifle.

With other violence interrupters, Mr. Suggs canvasses street corners and parks, residential blocks and commercial strips several nights a week. They cultivate relationships with local residents who know to call them at the first sign of tensions brewing on their block and mediate between would-be antagonists.

They tell people to think of the consequences of firing a bullet, aiming to change community attitudes toward guns as if combating a disease - a public-health approach, as the center's director, Amy Ellenbogen, puts it. Rarely do they get the police involved, preferring to build trust in the community by handling things themselves. They never carry guns.

Mr. Suggs has stepped in between business owners and unruly customers, or between neighbor and neighbor, earning him smiles and waves as he walks down busy streets in Crown Heights. Occasionally he deals with a much larger conflict: On July 4, a traditional high-water mark for violence, Mr. Suggs and other Save Our Streets staff found more than 150 gang members from three gangs milling around Brower Park, eyeing each other. Tensions were rising. A few violence interrupters were mediating between the gangs' leaders, while the rest worked the crowd, calming people down.

“When I speak to an individual, I say, you have a problem with this individual over here, you shoot him, he's dead,” Mr. Suggs said. “You have family; he has family. You shoot him, you go to jail for 25 to life. Your kids without a fa ther. Your wife without a husband. But they have to take care of you. He's dead. His mother and father has no son. So now you're both in the same situation. The only difference is, you're alive. So now.” He spread his hands out, palms up. “We have to change the mind-set. It's like a disease, like cancer.”

Mr. Suggs says his message works because he is what Save Our Streets calls a “credible messenger”: someone who has been there.

He used to have two guns and access to many more through friends. He dodges the question of whether he ever shot anybody, saying only, “I'm so fortunate a lot of things I did, I never got caught for. Just put it like that: Things happened.” Once, during a drug deal, he was robbed, then dragged behind a car until his left leg was broken in 15 places.

He grew up with four brothers and three sisters in a household in which he always had enough food and clothing, but he was restless. After getting his G.E.D., he worked as a stock clerk and in data entry before realizing that the fast money, as he put it, was better. There was money to be made, first in marijuana, then in crack and cocaine. “Why spend money when we could sell it?” he remembers thinking. “I wasn't always this honest.”

But he knew his time as a dealer was coming to a close when he was sent to prison for 15 months in 1992 after selling 125 grams of cocaine to an undercover officer, he said. He still remembers his prison ID number, 92R4905. He vowed never to go back. But he continued the same life for several years, until he realized his daughter and her son were making the same sorts of choices he had made as a teenager.

Eventually, he started picking up an honest job here and there. Now he works a day job as a cook in a senior citizens' center. When the violence interrupter program was founded in December 2010, he was one of the first.

“I did a lot of damage to people, so this is my way of giving bac k,” he said. “I had to give something back.”

Game Theory: Making Room for the Women

Epic Games, via Associated Press“Gears of War 3.”

Women! You must have heard of them. They're like real gamers, only with little hands and silly, squeaky voices and constant gripes about being marginalized and hypersexualized and threatened with rape in online multiplayer settings.

To me, 2012 felt like the year that gaming culture really began to get to grips with being a mainstream commercial behemoth rather than a niche nerdy backwater. And a big part of that was sometimes agonizing struggles about the role of women in games - making them, playing them and being featured in them.

If there was one thing I had to say far too often this year, it was this: “Games aren't a boys' club anymore.” Next year might be the one in which women finally outnumber men as players. (The split is 47 percent to 53 percent, according to the Entertainment Software Association, up from 42-58 in 2011 and 40-60 in 2010.) That development has been encouraged by the explosion in popularity of tablet and smartphone games, which have made every commute or evening in front of a TV show another opportunity to whip out Bejeweled or Contre Jour.

Unfortunately this rise in so-called casual play has upset some of those who see themselves as guardians of the true flame. There's been a definite backlash against the idea that women are entering the hallowed citadel, dropping in a few scatter cushions and ending all the fun. Particular ire is reserved for anyone who dares to point out that female characters in g ames are often unsupported in the bra region for no apparent reason; given boring, bland supporting roles; and totally absent.

Take the Hitman: Absolution trailer, released in May, when an ultimately disappointing game was sold in a leering, objectifying way that would have had the “Mad Men” Roger Sterling and Don Draper murmuring “steady on.” It featured a group of sexy assassin nuns, with the camera following their buttocks as closely as a subway groper's hand.

I wrote an article for The New Statesman about the trailer, headlined: “I love you video games, so why do you keep doing this?” A procession of men lined up in the comments to tell me to keep my mouth shut. “Here is a surprise,” one wrote, with more feeling than attention to spelling and grammar. “A lady does not like us (men) looking at ladys bottoms. Please get a clue, this is nothing to do with feminism, sex sells and this game uses sex to sell itself, so please, please get over yourself.” Another had a more simple put-down: “Yet another 5/10 getting irate about sexy women being sexier than she is.”

Every female games journalist gets this, and does it get boring quickly. (Tom Bissell doesn't have to put up with this stuff, I think every time, as I sit on my hands to stop myself from replying.) But that kind of knee-jerk, make-me-a-sandwich comment pales against what can happen if you really kick the hive.

I spent the summer chronicling the abuse directed at the blogger Anita Sarkeesian for starting a Kickstarter project aimed at exploring the way women were depicted in games, and it still terrifies me to think that it could happen, really, to any of us. Angry fumers tried to hack her Twitter and Google accounts; they e-mailed her drawings of her being raped by video game characters; one even created a Flash game where you clicked the mouse and bruises and welts appeared on her face. As she explained in a recent TEDx talk, they effectively “gamified” misogyny: returning to the forums they all frequented to award each other “Internet points” for the worst outrages.

But there was another side to Ms. Sarkeesian's story. Her Kickstarter project far exceeded its fund-rais ing goals. Thousands of people stood up and said to the perpetually incandescent sexists: You are nothing to do with us, or with gaming. And that has been the same throughout the year.

For every depressing piece of news that made me feel that a community I love doesn't want or value me - simply because I'm a woman - there's a flip side. For example I was so disappointed when I heard that the new Lara Croft title would feature her fending off a rape attempt, because it would be “character building.”

Later I heard that the scene had been described in correctly, and that, even better, the writer who would be bringing Lara back was the talented Rhianna Pratchett. Similarly, even though women make up fewer than 1 in 10 people working in game writing or development, there are now some prominent success stories to point to, including Kiki Wolfkill, the executive producer of Halo 4, and Siobhan Reddy, the s tudio director of Media Molecule (the outfit behind Little Big Planet).

Some of the most alienating practices are also being stamped out. The Eurogamer Expo in October announced that it didn't want “booth babes” - scantily clad women hired to pander to the belief that gamers are gaping dudes who can't be interested in anything unless it has joyless breasts draped over it. Meanwhile both Ms. Wolfkill and the 343 Studios leader, Bonnie Ross, made clear during their publicity tour for Halo 4 that they would do everything they could to make Microsoft take seriously the problem of sexist abuse in multiplayer voice chat.

Patricia Hernandez wrote a beautiful piece for Kotaku.com about how, as a rape survivor, she had learned to stop jokingly telling people she had “totally raped them” in the game Gears of War.

Of course this new, grown-up approach won't make everybody happy. There are clearly some players who enjoyed having a part of their lives where they could rant about bitches and kitchens and sandwiches. But they're outnumbered, and they are going to have to learn to play nice.

Game of the Year

Although I enjoyed Fez, Proteus and Johann Sebastian Joust for showing what could be done with the medium, I'm afraid my game of the year is a little more mainstream. Xcom: Enemy Unknown is an update of a 1994 turn-based strategy game, and it has become my go-to title because my boyfriend (who hates the twitchy reactions needed for first-person shooters) can play it alongside me. The idea of making games that are fun for people of different competencies to play together - or even fun to watch - was behind the Borderlands 2 lead designer John Hemingway's ill-advised reference to making a “girlfriend mode” for less experienced players. While I didn't thank him for once again assuming that real gamers are straight men, the point is a good one. I'd love to see more games next year that “conquer the living room.”

Helen Lewis is deputy editor of The New Statesman, a British current-affairs magazine.