The Best of 2024 in Games and Media

This is what I watched, read, and played over the last twelve months. Some of it was really good.

This week’s update is a special post due to the pending new year. I’m on vacation and assiduously avoiding the news, so it’s time for the annual roundup of my year in media.

Like many obsessive nerds, I keep close track of the movies I’ve seen, the books I’ve read, the games I’ve played, and pretty much all the media I have consumed. So here are the unnecessary details and my picks for best of the year.

Quick links to each medium: Film, Television, Books, Video Games, Roleplaying Games, Podcasts, Music, Miscellaneous.

Film

This year, my biggest change in consumption was movies. In 2023, I had a full-time office job, and in 2024 not so much. So thanks to my beloved Alamo Season Pass, I saw 30 different films in an actual theater, up 36% from 22 the year before. (My all time record, set during the work-from-home pandemic year of 2021, was 45 showings of 42 different films.)

Here’s my picks for the best movies I saw in a theater:

I also watched 37 movies at home that were entirely new to me. Some of them are quite old or quite bad or both (shoutout to How Did This Get Made) but they’re still on my list. Highlights include that I finally saw Coco and it made me cry, and Conclave ⁱ was so good I regretted missing it in the theater.

Television

I watched fifteen new TV shows this year on streaming services. I consumed the entire run of the show if it was available, or the newest season if it’s an ongoing series.

I finally got to watch The Expanse after reading the entire book series ⁱ last year. I highly recommend both versions. This may be the best TV adaptation of a book series ever… and it stood in stark relief to much more disappointing new releases (cough cough House of the Dragon cough cough).

Books

I read significantly fewer books this year than I usually do, averaging about 1 every 10 days. That surprised me a little, because I assumed not having to go into an office would give me plenty of time to make a dent in my tsundoku, but instead I spent more time re-watching old episodes of Parks & Recreation, Taskmaster, and Law & Order.

Video Games

You also might assume that a self-employed, work from home writer would procrastinate by playing lots of video games, but my consumption of such dropped precipitously, dominated by just a handful of games that I obsessed over.

Roleplaying Games

This was a big year for tabletop RPGs. Dungeons & Dragons, the grandaddy of them all, updated its fifth edition ruleset after ten insanely successful years. And the booming popularity of roleplaying games in general has kicked off a new golden age of indie RPGs.

Podcasts

I listen to a lot of audio, and it’d be impossible to pick a single episode, so per my convention in previous years, here’s an alphabetical list of the podcasts that I am currently subscribed to and regularly enjoying:

Behind the Bastards, Blank Check, Bonanas for Bonanza, Cautionary Tales, Comedy Bang! Bang!, Conan O’Brien Needs a Friend, Doughboys, How Did This Get Made?, If Books Could Kill, In The Dark, Search Engine, Taskmaster: The Podcast, The Lonely Island and Seth Meyers Podcast, Threedom, Two Jons Dont Make A Right, When We Were Wizards

Music

Like most people my age (Old), I mostly listen to the albums that loved when I was growing up and developing my tastes. But I still occasionally manage to find new music that excites me.

Miscellaneous

So that’s it for 2024. Here’s hoping that 2025 will bring us enough amazing media to distract and enlighten us amidst what looks like it will be an increasingly chaotic and difficult time. Have a happy new year, and thanks, as always, for reading.

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Ludo Ergo © 2024 by David M. Ewalt is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International

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