Tonight the 9th British Academy of Film & Television Arts (BAFTA) Games Awards take place in London. Founded back in 2003 when BAFTA announced that it would be splitting its games from the BAFTA Interactive Entertainment Awards, they seek to reward innovation and excellence in computer and video games.
Over the years the categories have changed within the industry and this year sees nominations in 18 categories such as Artistic Achievement, Performer in a Game, Mobile Excellence and more. British interest lies in the eight nominations for superstar UK studio Rocksteady's Batman: Arkham City, which is up against multiple award-winning games such as Portal 2, L.A. Noire and Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim. It's been a great year for outstanding games and the awards will have definitely been hard to judge.
The back-drop to the awards is also fascinating. The principle sponsor, the high-street chain Game, has hit the headlines recently for being at risk of entering administration. Earlier this week the BBC's Rory Cellan-Jones blogged:
"In May 2008, its share price peaked at £2.96, as the Wii, the XBox 360 and Sony's PlayStation 3 created a booming market for console games. Today, the shares are trading at about 1p - which says the market has recognised that the firm is worth virtually nothing."
So how has this happened? And what next for the industry? Has the digital disruption that has shaken up the film, TV and music industries caught up with blockbuster gaming?
In the UK, which boasts studios responsible for huge grossing games like GrandTheft Auto and is home to major in-house developers for Microsoft and Sony, recent industry campaigns have focused on the 'brain drain': foreign government subsidy for games development is cited as drawing talent from these shores to centres in Canada and France. This year alone we've seen studio closures and redundancies rise dramatically as the high-investment 'AAA' boxed games struggle to sell enough to remain viable.
This is often talked about in the same breath as the fear that the younger generation isn't being given the grounding in computing that the BBC's Computer Literacy project in the 1980s did. The BBC Micro, part of that initiative, arguably created a generation of games developers and software engineers and gave the UK a lead in the visual and interactive arts.
Today's efforts designed to try to get some sense of digital creation (rather than consumption) into curricula. Giving the next generation the inspiration and tools to create digital art and applications is seen as key to the British economy and exports in the 21st century. Recent signs of this include the Government response to the Livingstone-Hope report, with the suggestion of reforms around computing in schools, the brilliant £25 charity computer RaspberryPi and wonderful events such as Hack to the Future and Young Rewired State.
Other market disruption, such as the proliferation of new devices and ways to play and pay for games, continues to put pressure on the traditional console and boxed product market. Some have proclaimed that the console is dead. Others disagree.
And what of games culture and interactive art? You may already have heard marketing departments throw around terms like 'gamification' - looking for user engagement and building loyalty and relationships with people in whatever way they can. Sometimes it's beautiful. And sometimes it isn't. There are serious games that teach soldiers how to handle complex situations in peace-keeping; others that aim to give you a structure to change your life; and art games that simply give you a story to explore (Dear Esther, below).
Games seem to be entering every facet of our lives: the majority of the 25 billion apps downloaded to Apple devices are games: $775 million was earned in five days by Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3; and there are games and gadgets to make you run that extra mile to keep fit.
So what about games based on the news? Well, yes actually. Fancy being a war reporter? Try Warco, which offers "different story elements you can film and combine in your own ways". Or how about a system to generate games for news? Game-o-matic is being developed to allow the creation of games that can be used to educate or comment on world issues.
And what of the BBC? We already have games and quizzes online, much the same as we have gameshows and quizzes on TV and radio. We use interactivity to let people learn and revise with products like BBC Bitesize. We help youngsters to learn to count and experience new languages (fun fact: Welsh is the most popular language) on CBeebies.
My job is to provide a common set of tools that underlie these games (such as leaderboards, cloud-based game saves and achievements), to provide ways to link between games and preserve the audience experience across interactivity and introduce them to things they might like.
It is early days but we're looking at how we might support new ways to navigate across and between experiences, and allow players to keep track of what they practice, achieve and learn. We're very interested in how games are evolving, and whether there are new ways to allow people to play with concepts - look at the wonderful Universe Sandbox, for example - to spend more time with characters and places from their favourite shows, create their own stories, and to learn new skills and concepts by participating and interacting. So you might want to join characters on an adventure while learning Italian. I'd be really interested in people's ideas about what we should explore.
So what will next year's BAFTA Games Awards feature? And who will sponsor the show? Will Game reinvent itself to embrace a new digital revolution? Will we all be using online stores to download - or just stream our games, like we use iPlayer, to the nearest device?
The beautiful thing about this industry is that no year plays the same twice.
Si Lumb - @si_lumb - is the BBC's technical product manager for games grid in BBC Future Media Children's.
