When I got my first job on a games magazine, there were a few games on constant rotation at my grubby office, and at after-pub gatherings in the even grubbier flats my colleagues and I lived in: Pro Evo, Bomberman, and Street Fighter. Street Fighter was especially embarrassing for me, as an eager-to-prove-myself 16-year-old, because I could just never get my hands around the movesets and controls for all the different characters. I was a perennial button-masher, and I was humiliated so regularly that it put me off fighting games for life. That said, I have always greatly admired Street Fighter, and its players. It is a stunningly energetic game full of stylish caricatures whose movement and swagger are fascinating to look at, especially in the hands of skilled competitors.

If 2021 was a bit of a nothing year for video games – the tentative first year of a new console generation, the second year of pandemic disruption, a year of delays and false starts enlivened briefly by the amateur traders giving Wall Street a shoeing via the medium of GameStop "meme stocks" – then 2022 has seen the games industry gradually get moving again. Our picks for best games of the year was published this week, and there are some proper greats among them. It's also been an interesting year for games news. The stories below are my highlights – the memorable moments from another year on this niche, unpredictable beat. No company is ever pleased when information about an in-progress game gets out ahead of time.

Believe it or not, this issue marks a year of Pushing Buttons. However long you've been a subscriber, I wanted to say thank you so much for reading. Whether I've been chewing over the week's gaming news, philosophising over what games can offer us in times of crisis or just writing (again) about how brilliantly creepy Zelda: Majora's Mask is, putting this newsletter together has consistently been a highlight of my working week. I try to bring you a balance of analysis, opinion, reminiscence, recommendations and good old-fashioned journalistic storytelling, but if you have any thoughts on what you'd like to see more of in this newsletter, hit reply and tell me. And if there are any guest writers you'd like to see in your inbox in 2023, let me know who they are and I'll try to make it happen. When the first issue went out, the world was still emerging tentatively from Covid-19 lockdowns, when video games had been a vital social lifeline for millions.

This interactive paper aims to provide an intuitive understanding of the self-calibrating interface paradigm. Under this paradigm, you can choose how to use an interface which can adapt to your preferences on the fly. We introduce a PIN entering task and gradually release constraints, moving from a pre-calibrated interface to a self-calibrating interface while increasing the complexity of input modalities from buttons, to points on a map, to sketches, and finally to spoken words. This is not a traditional research paper with a hypothesis and experimental results to support claims; the research supporting this work has already been done and we refer to it extensively in the later sections. Instead, our aim is to walk you through an intriguing interaction paradigm in small logical steps with supporting illustrations, interactive demonstrations, and videos to reinforce your learning. We designed this paper for the enjoyments of curious minds of any backgrounds, it is written in plain English and no prior knowledge is necessary. All demos are available online at openvault.jgrizou.com

All around the media world, 2022's games, albums, films et cetera are being coralled into contentious rankings for everyone in the office (and the comments section) to argue over. Our own Guardian games list is prepped and ready, but I want to hear what games you've been enjoying over the past 12 months. Hit reply on this newsletter and write me a few sentences on your favourites, and I'll compile them for an end-of-year special issue. If you've been reading for a while, you'll know that I have not been the luckiest when it comes to introducing video games to my children. My stepson, now 17, always loved games, but his taste diverged so massively from mine that we rarely intersected, bar a few treasurable months when Minecraft first came out, and a year of shared Destiny adventures before he got good enough to comprehensively outplay me.

Recently some members of the video-game community were enraged by news that FromSoftware's oblique open-world adventure Elden Ring has been nominated in the best narrative category at the forthcoming Game Awards. Like the developer's other titles (the Dark Souls series and Bloodborne, for instance), this complex game tells its story through short snippets of dialogue rather than long cinematic cutscenes, and via objects in the world, rather than endless scrolls, audio messages or emails. The player has to do most of the work in assembling a cogent narrative, which suited me fine, because, through the 200-hours I've spent with the game, I simply do not care about the plot – I have my own. I wander the dangerous lands of Caelid and Dragonbarrow as an existential assassin, like Clint Eastwood in High Plains Drifter or Mad Max, not bothering to try and make sense of the world, just keen to explore and fight and survive. I like this story better – especially when my son joins me and we take on foes together, revelling in the story that builds of is own accord as we play.

Nintendo's designer Shigeru Miyamoto – one of gaming's earliest superstar creatives, and the mind behind Super Mario Bros, Legend of Zelda F-Zero and many, many other wonderfully inventive games – has turned 70. Miyamoto, who has had a hand in the development of most Nintendo games and consoles, is the most influential game designer alive. Nintendo is part of the creative marrow of the games industry: there is barely a game developer today who has not played, and been influenced by, Miyamoto. He has worked at Nintendo for 45 years and, since the 1990s, he has been the face of the company. Alongside the late, great former president Satoru Iwata, and the genius hardware designer and Game Boy architect Gunpei Yokoi, he laid the foundations for the company's enduring success, and helped established its fun-first approach to video games.

When I was a kid, I was only allowed to play video games on Fridays and Saturdays – an attempt by my parents to keep my gaming passion under control. For the rest of the week, I was happy doing other things and reading my Nintendo magazines, but come Friday evening, I was ready to pick up a controller. I would stock up on Haribo and fizzy juice on the way home from school in preparation for an evening in front of the TV. My parents, presumably grateful for a few hours of peace, would throw a Pizza Hut delivery through the door of the spare room where our games consoles lived and leave my brother and I to it. We would sit and play Zelda or Diddy Kong Racing or another parent-approved, non-violent obsession of the day until we were commanded to go to bed.

Halloween might be over, but the scary memories last a lifetime, at least for me. I do not like horror. I am one of the world's biggest wusses, and feeding my imagination with nightmare fuel will keep me up at night for weeks. I was recently so disturbed by a simple bus advert for the movie Smile that I read the Wikipedia summary of the plot, and just that was enough to screw with my sleep. My partner, meanwhile, cannot get enough of disgusting films and terrifying games, so he's delighted to be living through something of a golden age for video game horror.

Where I live, the leaves are falling in droves and the Glasgow rain is turning them into slippery mulch that makes every trip to the shops an obstacle course. But one hallmark of autumn is missing: a promising run of new video games to cosy up with as the nights lengthen. Usually this is when the end-of-year rush starts, but not in 2022. It's as if the video games industry is giving us a little extra time to watch the absolute circus that UK politics has become in recent months. The actual reasons for this relative drought are manifold, boiling down to the delayed effects of Covid-era development and, well, money.