The winners for the 15th Annual Interactive Achievement Awards are decided on by members of the Academy of Interactive Arts & Sciences. (Just like the Oscars are voted on by members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.)

The ceremony covers mostly hardcore genres across console and PC, including action games, massive multiplayer games, adventure games and more. It also has categories for casual, mobile and social. (Update: See a list of some winners at the end of this post.)

The event is taking place in Las Vegas at the Red Rock Resort, a swank location way off the Strip, where industry leaders gather annually as part of the games conference called DICE.

DICE, which stands for Design, Innovate, Communicate, Entertain, is a three-day summit featuring a number of talks by bigwigs from game studios like Bethesda Softworks, which published The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, and Rocksteady’s Batman: Arkham City, which were both wildly successful over Christmas.

Because the show is far off the Strip and only has a few hundred attendees, it allows people to speak intimately about recent trends and key issues facing the industry. They even get to pat each other on the back; this morning, one grown man got on stage and bowed in front of some of the original game developers who worked at Atari back in the 80s.

The event tonight will be hosted by actor and stand-up comedian Jay Mohr, a former cast member on “Saturday Night Live” and self-described games enthusiast, who is known for roasting some of the industry celebrities being recognized.

The ceremony kicks off at 7:30 pm PT. To follow along, GameSpot will air a live Webcast of the IAAs here.

Update: Here are the winners from some of the major categories:

• Game of the Year: The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, Bethesda Softworks
• Action Game: Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3, Activision
• Online Game Play: Star Wars: The Old Republic, Electronic Arts
• Mobile Game: Infinity Blade II, Epic Games
• Sports Game: FIFA 12, Electronic Arts
• Social Networking: The Sims Social, Electronic Arts
• Casual Game: Fruit Ninja Kinect, Halfbrick Studios

(By the way, before we get there: I didn’t watch “SNL” last night, and no one in my Twitter stream seems to have been interested, either. But the reason I’ve seen these is because I got an email this morning from “social media agency” New Media Strategies, which NBC is using to promote yesterday’s show. I believe I’ve noted this before, but we’ve come an awful long way from NBC’s befuddlement over “Lazy Sunday” showing up on YouTube. Then again, it’s been six (!) years.)

A reminder that typing and texting is dangerous/funny:

And a weird one that mocks the Internet audience that it hopes will end up watching and talking about this. “I have no shame or self-awareness”:

Except that it wasn’t much of an apology at all.

Instead, Baldwin played the role of an American Airlines captain who apologized to him.

During a Weekend Update skit with Seth Meyers, the mustached captain called Baldwin an “American treasure,” explaining that the actor was justified for refusing to stop playing Words With Friends on his phone.

“What harm was he causing to play his game?” the “captain” asked. “And not just any game, but a word game for smart people?”

Ultimately, it wasn’t the Scrabble-like game that got Baldwin booted. He also slammed a bathroom door. According to the very forgiving captain, “Words With Friends can be frustrating.”

The original saga, which played out very publicly via Baldwin’s Twitter account, provided a high-profile boost to Zynga, the game maker behind Words With Friends, which is getting ready to stage the largest Internet IPO since Google.

Here’s Baldwin’s — a.k.a. the captain’s — account of how it all went down:

This weekend, “Saturday Night Live” did a fantastic mocking of the recent quickie divorce of the sham marriage of Kim Kardashian and Kris Humphries.

The reality show famebots are — let’s all admit it — media and digital geniuses at making their traffic-accident lives into audience gold (-plated).

Here’s the “SNL” sketch, with the genius Kristen Wiig as the spotlight-stealing Kris Jenner:

This did not make it onto “Saturday Night Live” last weekend, but it is still very funny — a mock interview by Charlie Rose of Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, the Huffington Post’s Arianna Huffington, Reed Hastings of Netflix and the world’s oldest “mean girl,” Rupert Murdoch of News Corp., all talking about Apple’s Steve Jobs.

Heh:

So here’s the hysterical spoof from “Saturday Night Live,” in which his comic double unveils the iPhone.

Very funny:

“It’s expected to sell well among parents who always buy the wrong thing,” Meyers quipped about the $199 tablet during his Weekend Update news sketch.

It’s good, but I still prefer the Pyramid tablet from this week’s episode of “The Office.”

(The Kindle item comes in about 45 seconds into the clip, for those who can’t watch an entire two minutes of fake news.)

Google’s music store, meanwhile, did just fine. Because Google doesn’t have a music store. It had planned on opening one, but after nearly a year of negotiations Google launched its music service this month without a store because negotiations with the labels broke down.

Bummer for Google and Gaga, I think. Because if Google did have a store, my hunch is that it would have a pretty good promotion lined up.

Here’s a hint of what could have been–a Gaga/Google ad promoting her new album and the search giant’s Chrome browser. It ran over the weekend, during her appearance on “Saturday Night Live,” and it’s easy enough to imagine a slightly tweaked version telling fans to head to Music Beta to grab the new album. Alas.

This is strangely funny–Will Ferrell, who did that genius impersonation of former President George W. Bush on “Saturday Night Live,” returns to Funny or Die to report from a Sizzler buffet bar about a gopher raid.

And, oh yes, that Osama bin Laden thing too.

How did the community of analysts–who usually are pretty good about this sort of thing–miss their forecast of Intel’s sales by more than a billion dollars? How did they also miss Intel’s earnings per share by 13 cents? Is it really a case of what Intel CFO Stacy Smith referred to on a conference call last night as two blind people describing different parts of an elephant? Analyst Doug Freedman with Gleacher and Co. tried to explain it in a note to his clients today. He says two things contributed to the mass misjudgement.

First, everyone misjudged the number of chips consumed in the sales channel during the third and fourth quarters of 2010 ahead of Intel’s big launch of its latest Sandy Bridge generation of PC chips in January of this year. Having burned through their inventory of older chips, Intel shipped more of the newer chips than most people had expected, as distributors bulked up their stocks after cutting them down more than usual. Freedman says he thinks the same thing is still going on, which means that the guidance that Intel gave for the second quarter may turn out to be conservative.

Second, there was an extra week during the quarter. If you listened to the conference call, you heard several references to Q1 having 14 weeks. If you add a week’s worth of revenue–about $818 million–plus the additional revenue brought in by Intel’s acquisitions of McAfee and the Infineon wireless unit, which works out to another combined $496 million, you end up with about $1.3 billion, which is almost exactly the difference between the Wall Street consensus revenue number and Intel’s actual revenue.

Whatever the reason for the disconnect between the forecasts and the results, Freedman boosted his price target on Intel to $28 from $27 and maintained his Buy rating. Even so, other analysts weren’t quite so willing to change their stripes. Michael McConnel of Pacific Crest Securities, continued to insist that the slowing market seen by Gartner–who Intel’s Paul Otellini criticized in not-so-veiled comments during the conference call last night–will catch up to Intel sooner or later. Another, Stacy Rasgon of Sanford Bernstein, wrote that he’s not buying Intel’s story, period. Tiernan Ray summarized the day’s scorecard on revisions and recriminations by Intel analysts.

Whatever they said, Intel’s share price roared by nearly 8 percent to close at $21.41, the highest levels it has seen since March. Never mind all that pessimism from yesterday. Come on, analysts, it’s time to work your Emily Litella impersonations. Say it with me now: Never Mind!

Here’s a clip from Saturday Night Live circa 1975, courtesy of Hulu, to get you started. Better luck next quarter.

But the $114 price point for the e-reader brings it that much closer to being disposable, unlike the iPad, which starts at $499, or even the regular Kindle version at $139.

Sure, price tolerance varies, but the Kindle is now far more economical than most full-priced smartphones, making it much more manageable–maybe even forgettable–to lose.

And, you’ll have Visa or Olay to thank for that.

The reminder came after watching last week’s Weekend Update on “Saturday Night Live,” which showed just how easy it is to lose a Kindle.

A stewardess recounted her harrowing experience on the fateful Southwest Airlines flight, where a five-foot gap opened up in the ceiling of a Boeing 747 when they were at 37,000 feet.

“I was passing out peanuts, when I noticed I could see my breath. Then, I noticed everyone’s Kindles were lifting off their lap and headed upward. And then, I looked up an–when I saw one go out of the hole in the roof. And I screamed ‘I hope you are done reading “The Girl who Played with Fire,” because you aren’t getting that back.’”

Next time, maybe she’ll scream, “I hope you saved $25 by getting the ad-subsidized version.”

Because a Kindle for free seems completely out of the question.

Watch the video for yourself:

Not bad, but I’m certain I’m not the only one hoping that somehow “Saturday Night Live” gets in on the action by reviving its old “Celebrity Jeopardy” sketch from a few seasons back. Perhaps Sean Connery could hack Watson’s programming? You know what would happen.

PREVIOUSLY:

• Done With Silly Game Shows, IBM’s Watson Finds a Job
• All Humans Bow Before the Mighty Watson, Master of “Jeopardy”
• IBM “Jeopardy” Challenge Day 2: Very Different From Day One
• IBM “Jeopardy” Challenge Day One Ends in a Tie
• That Human Vs. Machine Practice Round of “Jeopardy” Didn’t End the Way You Heard It Did
• “Final Jeopardy” Question: Would You Buy an E-Book Without an Ending?
• This Supercomputer Defeated Human Champions of a TV Game Show in 2011
• I’ll Take Computer Company PR Stunts for $1,000,000

Excellent!

Although they did not do their patented line–”Schwiiiing”–Wayne and Garth (also known as Mike Myers and Dana Carvey) of faux cable show “Wayne’s World” were back on “Saturday Night Live” this weekend.

And it was a welcome visit.

Featuring their top picks for the upcoming Oscars, this retread from the late-night television sketch comedy icon was funnier than a lot of stuff on SNL now.

Enjoy:

What he can successfully do is go on “Saturday Night Live” and be a good sport, appearing alongside two men who have played and parodied him: “The Social Network” actor Jesse Eisenberg and SNL’s Andy Samberg. Here’s the clip from tonight’s show:

Without Aaron Sorkin writing his dialogue, the real Zuckerberg is lacking in zingers. His review of “The Social Network”: “It was… interesting.”

“That guy’s like my evil twin and that’s just Andy Samberg,” Zuckerberg tells SNL creator Lorne Michaels while being mock-sequestered backstage. “Those guys are such nerds….C’mon, I invented poking.”

Meanwhile, Eisenberg admits, for all the sticklers in the room (and one of them in particular), “I wasn’t really ‘doing’ Mark Zuckerberg; I was interpreting a fictional character in a movie script.”

Please see the disclosure about Facebook in my ethics statement.

The five range in age from 15 to 26 and were arrested in early-morning raids on their homes. They’re accused of being involved in distributed denial-of-service attacks, where groups of users flood a Web site with more traffic than it can handle, thus slowing its performance to a crawl.

!n 2010 the group claimed responsibility for attacks on several Web sites, in apparent sympathy with WikiLeaks–the secret-exposing site that last year unleashed a barrage of previously confidential U.S. diplomatic cables. Targets of Anonymous included the Web sites of PayPal, Mastercard and Visa Europe after those companies stopped financial contributions from going to accounts belonging to the WikiLeaks organization. The action was dubbed “Operation Payback.” The police declined to say which attacks the five arrested are alleged to have taken part in.

Amazon was thought at one point to have been a target when its service went down briefly in December at a moment that coincided with chatter that Anonymous wanted to attack it. The company later said it had suffered a brief hardware problem.

Calling Anonymous a group is a bit misleading. Most of the people who chose to participate in one of its attacks did so by downloading software to their computers called the Low Orbit Ion Canon. Attacks were organized on the channels of Internet Relay Chat, and coordinated orders for all participants to “fire” their weapons were issued on Twitter. The software running on each desktop would then simulate legitimate Web requests to the target site, inundating it with so many requests that it would be overwhelmed and effectively rendered useless.

Earlier this month the group had trained its sights on Web sites belonging to the government of Tunisia, following civil unrest there, and just yesterday it was said to be attacking sites in Egypt.

This is the second round of arrests related to the attacks. Two teenagers in the Netherlands have also been arrested–one said to be connected to the attacks on Visa and Mastercard, the other allegedly involved in an attack on the Web site belonging to a Swedish prosecutor investigating sexual assault charges against WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange.

And speaking of Assange, CBS just announced that he’ll be interviewed by Steve Kroft of “60 Minutes” this Sunday. Here’s hoping that prompts a new Assange sketch from “Saturday Night Live,” like the one below from December.

For starters, it’s getting everyone–or at least everyone I pay attention to on Twitter*–to talk about LivingSocial. (Groupon who?) And given that Amazon has already handed over a big chunk of money to the daily deals start-up, this sort of seems like the two sides are just swapping dollars, anyway.

Still, this gives us an excellent opportunity to rerun the classic “Saturday Night Live” Bubble 1.0 ad, which didn’t even run during the first bubble. It dates way, way back to 1988. And technically, it’s not about a money-losing operation, but one that doesn’t make any money (at least on a per-transaction basis).

Still, the “the answer is simple: volume” catchphrase became one of the signature lines of the Kozmo.com, Pets.com, etc. era a decade later. And it seems like we may have to revive it again.

Bonus clip! Here’s the first one of the ads. Catchphrase-free, but still awesome.

*An admittedly small subset of the world. But still.

Free bonus clips! (And please, if you want to tell us that you can’t see these outside of the U.S–we know! But as always, we also imagine that you can get them in some form, with some digging. More important, I think some of you are going to need to consult Wikipedia in order to figure out who people like Colin Ferguson and Tammy Faye Bakker are.)

Here the WikiLeaks leader comments on Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg recently beating him out for Time magazine’s Person of the Year.

The faux Assange is not happy that social networking beat out classified documents.

This skit–the third so far–seems to be getting funnier each time:

Here’s a skit from “Saturday Night Live” this past week that makes fun of the controversy over what former Disney singing star Miley Cyrus was smoking from a bong, seen in a TMZ-obtained video that recently rocketed around the Internet.

In the words of the often-addled Cyrus, it’s pretty cool:

(Of course, Twitter hasn’t revealed the secret formulas that helped it aggregate, tabulate and rank these topics.)

In the Twitterverse, after the BP oil spill and soccer, the next most popular topic of conversation in 2010 was the movie “Inception,” followed by the Haiti earthquake and the vuvuzela. The iPad, Android, Justin Bieber, Harry Potter and Pulpo Paul round out the top 10. It’s an odd list, indeed.

The person most discussed on Twitter in 2010 was obviously he of the dedicated servers, Mr. Bieber. (It’s somewhat shocking that world events and tech gadgets were able to keep the teen phenom out of the overall top spot.) Beating out her royal highness Lady Gaga, the No. 2 person on Twitter was Brazilian president-elect Dilma Rousseff (pictured).

Here’s the full 2010 list, courtesy of Twitter, followed by 2009′s list for comparison.

2010 Twitter Trends

Overall Top Trends:
1. Gulf Oil Spill
2. FIFA World Cup
3. Inception
4. Haiti Earthquake
5. Vuvuzela
6. Apple iPad
7. Google Android
8. Justin Bieber
9. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows
10. Pulpo Paul

News Events:
1. Gulf Oil Spill
2. Haiti Earthquake
3. Pakistan Floods
4. Koreas Conflict
5. Chilean Miners Rescue

People:
1. Justin Bieber
2. Dilma Rousseff
3. Lady Gaga
4. Julian Assange
5. Mel Gibson

Movies:
1. Inception
2. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows
3. Scott Pilgrim vs. the World
4. Despicable Me
5. Karate Kid

Television:
1. MTV Video Music Awards
2. Pretty Little Liars
3. True Blood
4. Walking Dead
5. Grammy Awards

Technology:
1. Apple iPad
2. Google Android
3. Apple iOS
4. Apple iPhone
5. Call of Duty: Black Ops

World Cup:
1. FIFA World Cup
2. Vuvuzela
3. Pulpo Paul
4. Dunga
5. Diego Maradona

Sports:
1. LeBron James
2. Wimbledon
3. Manchester United
4. Brock Lesnar
5. Celtics

Hash Tags:
1. #rememberwhen
2. #slapyourself
3. #confessiontime (hash tag started by Usher)
4. #thingsimiss
5. #ohjustlikeme

2009 Twitter Trends

News Events:
1. #iranelection
2. Swine Flu
3. Gaza
4. Iran
5. Tehran
6. #swineflu
7. AIG
8. #uksnow
9. Earth Hour
10. #inaug09

People:
1. Michael Jackson
2. Susan Boyle
3. Adam Lambert
4. Kobe (Bryant)
5. Chris Brown
6. Chuck Norris
7. Joe Wilson
8. Tiger Woods
9. Christian Bale
10. A-Rod (Alex Rodriguez)

Movies:
1. Harry Potter
2. New Moon
3. District 9
4. Paranormal Activity
5. Star Trek
6. True Blood
7. Transformers 2
8. Watchmen
9. Slumdog Millionaire
10. G.I. Joe

TV Shows:
1. American Idol
2. Glee
3. Teen Choice Awards
4. SNL (Saturday Night Live)
5. Dollhouse
6. Grey’s Anatomy
7. VMAS (Video Music Awards)
8. #bsg (Battlestar Galatica)
9. BET Awards
10. Lost

Sports (Teams, Events, Leagues):
1. Super Bowl
2. Lakers
3. Wimbledon
4. Cavs (Cleveland Cavaliers)
5. Superbowl
6. Chelsea
7. NFL
8. UFC 100
9. Yankees
10. Liverpool

Technology:
1. Google Wave
2. Snow Leopard
3. Tweetdeck
4. Windows 7
5. CES
6. Palm Pre
7. Google Latitude
8. #E3
9. #amazonfail
10. Macworld

Hash Tags:
1. #musicmonday
2. #iranelection
3. #sxsw
4. #swineflu
5. #nevertrust
6. #mm
7. #rememberwhen
8. #3drunkwords
9. #unacceptable
10. #iwish

Aside: Remember when NBC and “Saturday Night Live” didn’t really want their stuff on the Web? Now they make stuff designed for Internet distribution–note shout-outs here to Amazon, Orbitz, Facebook, FarmVille, Netflix and Angry Birds. And porn!

This is SNL’s second crack at Assange. Last week, it imagined what he’d do if he morphed into Harvey Levin. Also quite good!

You don’t need to watch the whole clip to see it–the joke is over by the 40-second mark. You will have to sit through a pre-roll, though. And, as always, you can’t see it outside the U.S.:

But Hulu Plus can’t show subscribers all of the episodes of all the shows in Hulu’s catalog. Rights issues mean that certain shows will flit on and off the service, and it’s up to subscribers to figure that out for themselves.

Example: “Modern Family,” ABC’s award-winning hit sitcom, disappeared from both Hulu and Hulu Plus this summer after its first season. Now it’s back. But both services are only offering shows from the current season–there’s no way to go back and catch up on last year’s shows, even if you’re paying.

I think, but haven’t been able to confirm, that this has to do with DVD sales for the show, which is produced by News Corp.’s (NWS) 20th Century Fox. I’ve got queries into both Fox and Disney’s (DIS) ABC to try to confirm.

Meantime, here’s what Hulu has to say:

Yes, the first season of Modern Family is no longer on Hulu Plus. We acknowledge this can sometimes be confusing for TV fans, so we do all we can to provide as much advance notice as possible when shows are slated to come down. Below is an example from our Saturday Night Live show page on Hulu Plus. You’ll notice it says “New episodes are posted Sunday afternoons and are available for 17 days.” This is consistent across all our content.

Of course, we keep content on Hulu and Hulu Plus for as long as possible. We can’t offer a specific reasons why a particular video may be taken down, as streaming clearances differ from show to show.

And sure enough, if you head to each show’s Hulu page, you’ll find a different set of availabilities.

Regular Hulu users can only see the last five episodes of “The Family Guy,” for instance, while Hulu Plus subscribers can see all nine seasons. But even if you’re a paying customer, Hulu can only show you five episodes of “The Simpsons,” period.

Meanwhile, the last season of “Lost” fell off both the free and paid services last month, and the other five seasons will go away at the end of the year. Etc.

To be fair to Hulu, it’s certainly not the only service negotiating the frustrating rights/windows patchwork. Everyone who deals with digital media has to navigate this stuff. And none of it makes sense to viewers who just want to watch their shows, when they want to watch them.

But the patchwork is a bigger deal for Hulu, because the service’s primary pitch is that it’s a one-stop shop for all your TV viewing (or at least your broadcast TV viewing). Instead it’s really closer to a half-stocked Super Target: There’s a lot of stuff in there, but you still may not find what you need.

Hulu competitor Netflix (NFLX) offers lots of TV shows via its paid streaming service, too. But it pointedly doesn’t play up the presence of any particular show–Reed Hastings and company simply tell consumers that they’ll find shows they like.

But if you’ve ponied up $10 a month for Hulu Plus and find that you still can’t watch a show that aired a few months ago, you may not be cool with that at all.

Gaps in Hulu’s free service may not be as frustrating for users, because they’re not out any cash. But it is a problem for the joint venture as it ponders a public offering, premised on the notion that its TV partners/owners–ABC, Fox and GE/Comcast’s NBC–are in it for the long haul.

But if Hulu can’t tell users that it has all the rights it needs, how can it convince investors?

Meanwhile, a similarly confusing story:

And here’s another SNL Facebook sketch, which also ran on last night’s show. It’s not as good, but I’m going to share it anyway, which is exactly what NBC (and Hulu) want. Remember the pre-YouTube dark ages, when it wasn’t easy to do this?