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.

Oscars? Who needs all the razzmatazz when we've got the Royal Television Society Journalism Awards.

I was there ... on the judging side.

Last week, 18 grateful recipients went away with a plastic trophy. Many did not.

But just how do you get an RTS?

First, it pays to have talent and ability; whether you're a reporter or a producer. It shines out from an early age - look at John Irvine on ITV News or James Reynolds at the BBC. But talent plus hard work is the winning combination. Laziness shows on screen.

Second, make sure your best work gets entered for the awards. Persuade your bosses: surprising how many do not. If all else fails, pay for your own entry (as at least one I judged this year did!).

That's all you can do.

Then you are at the mercy of the judges: people like me (also the proud recipient of an RTS, which sits unnoticed on my shelf).

We get a parcel with all the entrants on a couple of DVDs and we have to watch them all. (In my case, seven hours solid on Christmas Day and Boxing Day ... how sad is that?) As a judge, it pays to score and shortlist for yourself.

The great judging day comes at RTS Towers and, as a (nearly) humble judge, you are in a room with the TV Great and Good. Biscuits and coffee and polite chit-chat first, but then down to business, which is surprisingly formulaic and transparent.

We lay (or semi-lay) members of the jury, making up about half the number, get first dibs - so we can set the tone for each entrant. 

The broadcasters come after us, championing their entrants. Usually, they are gung-ho, but sometimes they read the tea leaves and get very lukewarm about their own boys or girls!

Any horse-trading is not open. Everyone is polite about each other's entrants, with only the odd aside displaying their true views. 

Finally, after two hours, time for the secret ballot to decide the shortlist.

And after that, the choice of the winner from the shortlist.

But who is that? We don't know until the big night when the envelope is opened on the podium. It really is a surprise for the judges, too. 

Me? I've done my RTS duty. Off to another jury: for the Regional Press Awards. Am I a juryoholic?

John Mair is a senior lecturer in broadcast journalism at Coventry university. He is an RTS journalism winner and was a judge for the RTS Journalism Awards this year.

From East:

It's been quite a week...

- Barack Obama invited me to sign up for a clean energy future

- Richard Branson told me about the planned Elephant Corridor in South Africa

- Sarah Brown is writing a book provisionally called 'Behind the Black Door'

- Pierre Omidyar, the founder of eBay, is worried about human trafficking in Hawaii

- Bill Gates has been filmed with his sisters and father for Father's Day

- Ivanka Trump recommended a French onion soup recipe

- Arnold Schwarzenegger marked Flag Day with a Stars and Stripes jacket lining 

- Oprah Winfrey is inviting people to audition to host their own TV show

Who needs journalists when you can hear so much on Twitter?  

What do Britney Spears and a turkey sandwich have in common?

Or, to put in another way, when was the last time you were taken in by a fabricated story about a celebrity? And were you even aware you were being duped?

Film director Chris Atkins wanted to find out if it's easy to get a newspaper to print a made-up story without checking the facts. The result is a film, Starsuckers, which threatens to do to tabloid journalism what Supersize Me did to the fast-food industry.

Atkins was interviewed on BBC 5 Live Breakfast along with Chris Horrie, a journalist who's written a number of books about the tabloids.

"If it's about a serious public matter of public concern, then you definitely do have to check the facts," observes Horrie.

In case you haven't heard, when the guitar of a Nova Scotia musician got broken on a United Airlines flight and the airline refused compensation, it set off a chain of events that must have cost United far more than the $1,200 its passenger was claiming.

Dave Carroll's YouTube video of the protest song he recorded (the first of three he's promising) has been seen by 3.8 million people - and that doesn't include the millions more who have seen or heard it during the many US and international media appearances he has made (such as BBC Radio 4's Today programme yesterday.)