The Writers Guild of America, West (WGAW) and the Writers Guild of America, East (WGAE) have announced the nominations for outstanding achievement in writing for videogames during 2013. Winners in the videogame and other writing categories will be honored at the 2014 Writers Guild Awards to be held on Saturday, February 1, 2014, at simultaneous ceremonies in Los Angeles and New York. The nominees include the scribes of such hits as Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag, Batman: Arkham Origins, God of War: Ascension, The Last of Us, and Lost Planet 3.

The Last of Us, Tearaway, and Gone Home are the front runners when it comes to nominations for the 2014 Game Developers Choice Awards. Leading the pack with five nominations each are Naughty Dog's post-apocalyptic PS3 action-adventure game The Last of Us and Media Molecule's PS Vita-exclusive platformer Tearaway. The Fullbright Company's PC environmental storytelling game Gone Home also had five nominations. Rockstar's open-world crime game Grand Theft Auto V and Galactic Café's first-person game The Stanley Parable, each had nominations in four categories.

Finalists for this year's Independent Games Festival have been announced. The list of nominees for the biggest prize of the show - Seumas McNally Grand Prize - include such notable indie games as The Stanley Parable (Galactic Cafe); Papers, Please (Lucas Pope); Don't Starve (Klei); Device 6 (Simogo); Jazzpunk (Necrophone); and Dominique Pamplemousse in "It's All Over Once the Fat Lady Sings!" (Deirdra Kiai Productions).

Harvey Smith's book, "Big Jack is Dead," has been honored as one of the Best Indie Books of 2013 (in the general fiction category) by renowned book review service Kirkus today. The book written by Smith (who is best known for his work on hit games such as Dishonored, Deus Ex: Invisible War, Deus Ex, Cybermage, and Ultima VIII) tells the story of an executive returning home to deal with his father's funeral and confront the past.

A University Campus Suffolk (UCS) computer games design student and a graduate are the winners of a prestigious national games award, much to the delight of the UK-based school. Brad Smith, currently studying at UCS, and former student Joe Kinglake, were the overall winners in the Walking Dead 48-hour game jam – held in October 2013. The two students teamed up to enter The Walking Dead’s ‘All-out War’ themed Game Jam where they competed with 140 other game jam teams.

Skylanders Giants, the second game in Activision's popular series of games that requires action figures in order to play, has won a BAFTA award. It was named game of the year at the 2013 Children's BAFTA awards, beating out the likes of Lego City Undercover, Luigi's Mansion 2 and Animal Crossing: New Leaf. Despicable Me: Minion Rush by Gameloft was chosen as the winner in the BAFTA Kids' Vote - Video Game in 2013. The award was voted on by children ages 7-14, who picked Gameloft's free-to-play game over Minecraft and Just Dance 4.

Five students from universities in Canada were recognized on Tuesday night for research achievements that advance industry innovation, creating new products and services and transforming the lives of Canadians.

Each of the students received an award at the third annual Mitacs Awards Reception, held to honor the contributions of researchers, who have participated in Mitacs programs aimed at fostering research and innovation, as well as forging stronger bonds between academia and businesses across Canada.

Winners include:

Voting is now open for the Saxxy Awards, Valve's annual film-making awards competition. This year, the competition is exclusively based on the Source Filmmaker tool. The animation suite from Valve has been out long enough so that the community is familiar with it enough to create some amazing shorts - like the Team Fortress 2-based short about a mini-Pyro called 'Lil Guardian Pyro.'

You can check out the video to your left, and if you like it, you can vote for it here.

Organizers of the Golden Joysticks awards announced that Bioshock creator Ken Levine will be honored with a lifetime achievement award. This is the first time in the UK based awards show's history that it has honored an individual for his or her body of work. Levine will be honored for his work on the BioShock series, the classic sci-fi themed action role-playing game System Shock, and other notable games (on a personal note Freedom Force will always have a special place in my heart - ed.).

This week the Entertainment Merchants Association (EMA) presented Amazon, Netflix, and the online campaign for the video game “Injustice: Gods Among Us” with its Digi Awards for outstanding achievement in digital entertainment content, innovation, and retailing. The EMA also recognized Morgan Spurlock with its Visionary Award. The awards were presented at EMA’s Digital Media Pipeline, held at the Skirball Cultural Center in Los Angeles this week.

Gamescom is officially over, and the winners of the annual awards for the European gaming event have been selected. This year's big winners were the PlayStation 4 - which took best hardware category, and the Xbox One exclusive Titanfall - which was rewarded best next-gen console game.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) announced the winners of the 2013 Pioneer Awards. This year's winners include late digital rights activist Aaron Swartz, international access to knowledge advocate James Love, and journalists Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras – who broke the story about Edward Snowden and the U.S. National Security Agency's overbroad spying activities.

Developer Czarcade was the big winner at the first annual North American Indie Prize Showcase which took place this week at the Casual Connect Conference in San Francisco. Czarcade's mobile game Clobbr took the top prize, being named Best in Show. Other big winners were East Side Games' Dargon Up for mobile devices, ClickShake Games' The Ballads of Reemus, Barking Mouse Studio's Lost Toys, and Muse Games' Icarus Online.

Stefan Svallfors, a professor of sociology at Umea University has submitted former NSA contractor Edward Snowden as his pick for the Nobel Peace Prize. Recently he sent a letter to the Norwegian Nobel Committee nominating Snowden because of his leaks on several secret NSA surveillance programs being run in the U.S. and in Europe.

The Canadian Video Game Awards will be held in Toronto next year, organizers announced this week. The awards that honor the Canadian video games industry and the games they create took place in Vancouver for the last few years. The change in venue is the natural progression of the event, say organizers.

"The intention has always been to have this a travelling awards show," said Nicole Emmett, director of business development for Reboot Communications which co-produces the awards show.

Respawn Entertainment's Titanfall managed to score six honors for this year's Game Critics Awards. The sci-fi themed shooter won Best of Show, Best Original Game, Best Console Game, Best PC Game, Best Action Game, and Best Online Multiplayer. The Game Critics Awards select the best game in various categories shown off during the Electronic Entertainment Expo that took place in Los Angeles in June. The awards are selected by 30 media outlets. Because Titanfall won so many awards this year, no other game managed to get more than one award.

The Entertainment Merchants Association (EMA) today presented Independent Home Entertainment Awards to four video titles for being the best in their respective categories. The awards were given out during EMA’s 2013 Independent Product Market at the Marriott Marina del Rey in Marina del Rey, California.

The Entertainment Merchants Association Scholarship Foundation has announced the two individuals that will receive academic scholarships of $1,500 per year for up to four years. This year’s recipients are Haadjer Benmerzouga and Emily Sargent. Haadjer Benmerzouga is a pharmacy technician for Giant Eagle graduating from Cleveland State this year with a 3.8 GPA. Benmerzouga has been accepted into Northeast Ohio Medical University to study pharmacy science.

The Entertainment Software Rating Board (ESRB) was recently honored by the Telly Awards' Silver Council and the International Academy of Visual Arts for public awareness campaign that featured San Francisco Giants players Buster Posey and Ryan Vogelsong who explain in a simple way how parents can check a game's packaging to understand what a video game contains before they make a purchase for their children.

Games for Change announced the finalists for the Games for Change Awards, to be presented at the 10th Annual Games for Change Festival. The special 10th anniversary event will take place over three days from June 17-19th at New World Stages in New York City.

The Games for Change Festival is dedicated to bringing game creators and other individuals together to discuss and celebrate the positive social impact of games. Over the years, the festival has played host to speakers ranging from VP Al Gore to retired Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor.

The Peter Thiel Foundation (founded by the former CEO and co-founder of PayPal) announced the third set of young entrepreneurs to be awarded 20 Under 20 Thiel Fellowships. These new "Thiel Fellows" will receive $100,000 from the Thiel Foundation as well as mentorship from the Foundation’s network of entrepreneurs over a two year period.

German game developer and publisher InnoGames announced that its online browser-based strategy game, Forge of Empires, has been named the "Best Browsergame" by the "Deutscher Computerspielepreis" (or German Computer Game Award) and has won a 50,000 Euros prize. While that is exciting news for the developer, the company also revealed that it will divide the prize money up amongst its employees. Forge of Empires beat out Skylancer: Battle for Horizon (Chimera Entertainment) and The Great Jitters - Haunted Hunt (kunst-stoff) to win.

It looks like Electronic Arts has delivered a lethal blow to Bank of America in the grand finale of the Consumerist's 2013 Worst Company in America tournament. EA slaughtered Ticketmaster earlier in the week to get to the finals. It garnered 78.89 percent of the vote, compared to Ticketmaster's 21.11 percent in that battle.

EA COO Peter Moore may have wanted to defend his company in the wake of possibly winning The Consumerist Worst Company of 2013 award, but his defense of the company's practices and his contention that conservative groups are doing most of the voting does not sit well with the site.

Dead Shark Triplepunch has been named the winning team at Make Something Unreal Live 2013, Epic Games announced. The team has won a variety of hardware prizes in addition to the main award of a commercial Unreal Engine 4 license. The team from Belkinge Institute of Technology in Sweden won with their game Epigenesis, which was developed with Epic’s Unreal Development Kit (UDK), the free version of the Unreal Engine 3.

The AbleGamers Foundation has been named a finalist in the MS Society Da Vinci awards for its game accessibility guidelines - Includification. Includification is a 48-page fully-illustrated game accessibility guidelines document for developers to make games more accessible to gamers with various disabilities.

Electronic Arts has earned the dubious distinction of being named a contender again this year (it won last year) for the annual Consumerist award, the 2013 Worst Company in America award. EA will have some stiff competition this year including Bank of America, AT&T, Ticketmaster, Comcast, PayPal, and Sallie Mae - amongst many others. Some notable inclusions for this year include Carnival Cruise (for its “Poop Cruise”), JC Penney, and Anheuser-Busch.

Game Connection America and [a]list daily today revealed nominees for the Best in Video Game Marketing Award, to be handed out at Game Connection America 2013 and Riot Games, Telltale Games, and Microsoft lead the pack with nominations. Winners will be announced at an awards ceremony on March 25, 2013, held from 4:30 to 5:30 pm at San Francisco’s Sir Francis Drake Hotel.

Media Molecule co-founder and studio director Siobhan Reddy has been named Australian Woman of the Year in the U.K. for 2013. The award is sponsored by Qantas Airways and the networking organization Australian Business.

Reddy was born in Sydney but migrated to the United Kingdom in the 1990s. She is in charge of the Guildford, U.K.-based studio that developed the LittleBigPlanet series and is hard at work on its latest IP called Tearaway. She was honored with the award last night in London.

Jake Solomon and the team at Firaxis Games have put together a video asking the community to watch them at this year's Game Developers Choice Awards at the Game Developers Conference in late March. From there the video kind of goes off the rails.