Sunday Special: The Year in Gaming

The Daily

The New York Times

Daily News, News

4.4 • 102.8K Ratings

🗓️ 2 November 2025

⏱️ 54 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

This year has been a banner year for video games, with an abundance of surprise releases and unexpected hits. On this week’s Sunday Special, Gilbert Cruz talks with two fellow gamers — Zachary Small, a culture reporter, and Jason Bailey, an editor on The Times’s culture desk — about the state of the industry, the biggest releases and the games they loved playing in 2025. They also share their predictions for Game of the Year.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to the Sunday special. I'm Gilbert Cruz.
0:11.6	Over the past few months, we've talked about many different art forms, music, film, TV, theater, fashion.
0:20.6	But there's a big one that we haven't touched yet.
0:22.7	And in fact, it's one of the most popular artistic mediums in the entire world.
0:27.9	It is a medium that some, perversely, still don't consider to be an art form at all.
0:33.9	I'm, of course, talking about video games.
0:36.5	I love video games.
0:38.3	I grew up playing them.
0:40.0	I play them with my child.
0:41.9	I play them for fun and relaxation.
0:44.5	And sometimes, incredibly, I get to play them for work, which I did this week to prepare for today's show.
0:50.9	And with a game of the year set to be crowned in December, there's no time like the
0:55.1	present to talk about this year in gaming. With me today are two people who are eminently qualified
1:00.9	to do that. Zachary Small is a culture reporter for The Times who covers art and video games. Welcome
1:07.0	Zach. Thanks. And Jason Bailey, a culture editor here at the Times.
1:11.9	Edits all of our video game coverage.
1:14.1	Jason, welcome.
1:15.2	Thank you.
1:15.7	Excited to be here.
1:19.3	So before we dive in, I think it would be great to talk about each of our relationships with gaming, how we got into it, what we love about this medium.
1:28.7	I think I could easily talk for half an hour about my history, but let's start with y'all.
1:34.9	Zach?
	...

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