For me, Virtual Reality is an opportunity to escape to new worlds. I don’t just mean touring through clusters of supernova nebulae while sprawled on my bed, or wandering about the Medina of 12th Century Rabat during The Bachelor’s commercial break. I mean playing new types of games, previously unimagined.

I’m not much interested in re-visiting the same experiences I can get on a PC, a console or even a handheld device.

Writing in games has a pretty terrible track record. Games are sometimes garlanded with the tortured scribbles of designers who fancy their literary skills. Or marketing folks drape stories over mechanistic constructs, like sopping blankets.

Perhaps the most memorable moment of last week’s 19th Annual DICE Awards was the one not planned.

Two hours or so into the show, Metal Gear Solid 5: The Phantom Pain won the award for best adventure game. But publisher Konami wasn’t around to accept it.

Video games are on the verge of becoming the next movie gold mine after comics, or so director Roy Lee, co-founder of Vertigo Entertainment, believes.

And, he told me during a recent interview at DICE Summit 2016, Hollywood believes so too.

He still has a few months left of his tenure at the University of Texas in Austin but he’s already working part-time on designing the new game. “It’s just me in a room, typing a lot,” he told me today, during an interview at DICE. “This is my second day on the job so it’s a little early to be saying what I’m going to be doing, but I have a concept doc that I wrote up over the last couple of weeks. That’s all that exists right now.”

During our interview he made the point that System Shock 3 is in its most early days of development, but he talked about some of the ways he’ll be bringing the game to life in the next few weeks and months of its development. Here’s what he has planned.

Fallout 4 took home the game of the year award as well as awards for outstanding achievement in game direction and role-playing / massive multiplayer game of the year during tonight’s annual DICE Awards.

Other big winners included Rocket League and Ori and the Blind Forest.

The game industry took time to remember Satoru Iwata tonight, honoring the former Nintendo president with a Lifetime Achievement Award.

At the DICE Awards, organized by The Academy of Interactive Arts & Sciences, Nintendo of America president Reggie Fils-Aimé accepted the award and spoke about his old and friend and colleague, who died last year, age 55.

“Even if you’re not putting story at the heart of your game, players are still looking for stories,” she said. “We are narrative creatures. Stories engage the heart and make players care about your game.”

Pratchett and her writing team recently won the Writer’s Guild Award for Rise of the Tomb Raider, which focuses heavily on the story of Lara Croft as well as smaller stories about non-player characters.

There is much Hideo Kojima can’t say about the past year of his life: how an apparently strong 30-year relationship with Konami crumbled to dust seemingly overnight, why an ambitious reboot of Silent Hill was publicly killed amid overwhelming hype, how things ended on that day in December when he ceased being an employee of Konami.

But it’s clear, in the thoughtful moments as he ponders whether he can address those reasonable questions, that Kojima is both happy and a little sad about where he is now and how he got here.

That said, Howard hinted that the projects likely won’t be revealed publicly any time soon.

“We actually have three longer-term projects that are all — we’ll talk about them at a much future date — they’re different from anything we’ve done before while also being a Bethesda style game: big and crazy,” Howard said, “but in many ways different from what we’ve done before.”

Kerbal Space Program is a simulation that includes engineering, logistics, physics and exploration. It’s a game of discovery in which players piece together all manner of spacecraft and send them out into the universe.

The home planet of Kerbal is loosely based on Earth, as is its surrounding solar system. Players can try different modes which focus on either simple Lego-style construction of spacecraft through to a full simulation of a space program, starting with little more than a shed.

Welcome to the inaugural episode of Newsworthy, an interview show that aims to talk about the intersection of news and games with newsmakers and thought leaders both inside and outside the game industry.

Today we sit down with Gearbox co-founder and sleight of hand aficionado Randy Pitchford.

CastAR is at DICE looking to drum up some development support for the holograph-style system that was first developed at Valve.

Spun off from Valve in 2013 by Jeri Ellsworth and Rick Johnson, the project is now backed by finance group Playground to the tune of $15 million, with further rounds of financing likely. CastAR players don a light pair of glasses that project 3D images onto a table-top board. The player uses a wand-like controller to play games.

The annual DICE Awards show is nearly upon us, bringing with it what the people who make games think are the best creations among their peers.

The 19th DICE Awards will be hosted by comedian Pete Holmes and, as with years past, will kick off with a neat original video homage to gaming created by NoodleHaus.

Hideo Kojima and Guillermo del Toro, who once were signed on to create a new Silent Hill game together at Konami, will be on stage together during the DICE summit later this month to discuss their creative visions, the organizers announced this morning.

The Thursday afternoon session, entitled “A Conversation with Hideo Kojima and Guillermo del Toro”, will be moderated by Geoff Keighley and “revisit some of their fondest memories from their own individual careers as well as some of the pivotal moments from each other’s work that remain a constant source of inspiration.”

Penn Jillette, the talkative, towering half of Penn & Teller, will take the stage with Gearbox’s Randy Pitchford to kickoff next month’s DICE summit with a talk about the art of engagement, organizers announced this morning.

“Engagement is central to both business and art,” said Martin Rae, president, Academy of Interactive Arts & Sciences. “This year a variety of talented people will explore engagement and how it deeply affects what they do — whether it is advancing automobile technology, building boundless entertainment franchises, or creating open worlds based on experience. As always, our audience will be treated to big ideas that will help drive their own creative pursuits forward.”

The 19th Annual DICE Awards will be held in Las Vegas next month, and today the Academy of Interactive Arts and Sciences announced the finalists for this year’s honors.

Along with the various games nominated, two industry veterans will be celebrated at the show, which will be hosted this year by comedian Pete Holmes (best-known for the You Made It Weird podcast). It was previously revealed that ex-Konami staffer Hideo Kojima will enter the Hall of Fame this year, and former Nintendo president Satoru Iwata will be honored, too. He’ll receive a posthumous Lifetime Achievement award during the Feb. 18 event.