More shows need Christmas specials. The UK The Office and more recently, Downton Abbey both had some pretty outstanding specials; surely The Walking Dead could use one?

This video from Jawiin imagines just such a scenario. The jokes are hit or miss, but the impersonations are all pretty great. "I'VE GOT THE HAM."

Are you with me that this most recent half-season of TWD was the strongest the show has been? Or do you think it's been good all along? What other shows deserve weird Christmas specials? I'd watch a Breaking Bad Christmas special.

Chat about that or whatever else, here or over in the Talk Amongst Yourselves forum. See you tomorrow.

Telltale's The Walking Dead game might be getting the lion's share of press lately, but there's actually another very good Walking Dead game out there: The Walking Dead: Assault for iOS. No, really: it's good!

Walking Dead author Robert Kirkman has been having fun promoting the game, and has launched a new Twitter campaign called "Play the Walking Dead" in which he'll regularly issue new challenges for the game via Twitter through December 21 (You know, when the world ends). It's the kind of thing that could be cool, or could be obnoxious, depending—but still, cool to see the author of the series engaging with the game so directly.

Full details from the press release:

Beginning today, Skybound, publisher of The Walking Dead: Assault and Robert Kirkman, creator of The Walking Dead, Invincible, Thief of Thieves and Super Dinosaur, will host "the 10 days of the Apocalypse", a celebration of our forthcoming apocalypse as predicted by the Mayans.

To celebrate this pivotal event in human history, Robert Kirkman is hosting a "10 days of the Apocalypse" event, where every day at 11AM PST on his Twitter feed, @RobertKirkman, he will set a new daily challenge for players of The Walking Dead: Assault.

Winners of each challenge will be awarded prizes that will be kept secret until the challenge is made, however, know that some of these will be very special items you will not be able to find anywhere else.

So, sure, it's really just a stunt to promote The Walking Dead: Assault. But hey, the game is good, and this gives the welcome opportunity to beat the creator of The Walking Dead at his own game.

If the Video Game Awards are actually an awards show, and not just a keynote for promoting upcoming games, then the big news from last night was The Walking Dead: The Game. Eminently quotable analyst Michael Pachter said before the show that if this title, a downloadable self-published game, took home Game of the Year, he'd eat his hat. To his credit, Pachter later tweeted out a request for one, presumably to consume.

But the surprises don't just stop there. The Walking Dead won Game of the Year coming out of the Best Adapted Game category. Except for 2003, the first year of the VGAs, when things were very different from today, only two adapted games have even been nominated for GOTY: Batman: Arkham Asylum and Batman: Arkham City, and neither won. This is a different time in games development, with publishers looking for games whose characters and stories they fully own.

Some might look to a licensed or adapted work and consider that the game derives its significance, or at least the attention given to it, because it draws on some other franchise in popular entertainment. So it's strange that a licensed, adapted work reminds us that story, and characters, and choices, and the memorable experiences they create, matters most.

Here's another surprise nugget: The Walking Dead: The Game earned its makers five Video Game Awards. The next big winner? Journey, with three (including a nomination for Game of the Year.) Borderlands 2 also took home three awards, the best haul for a traditional boxed console game.

So if you're thinking this might have been a different Video Game Awards, in its 10th year, you're probably right. Had the show given more attention to that purpose—only a handful of these awards were actually presented in the broadcast—we might be pondering it as a landmark year. The VGAs are often accused of being an industry popularity contest, but maybe this year they acquired recognizable critical heft. We'll have to see what happens next year, and the year after.

So here are the 25 winners of the 2012 Video Game Awards, plus the Game of the Decade. Two fan-voted awards gave Character of the Year to Claptrap from Borderlands 2, and Most Anticipated Game to Grand Theft Auto V.

Game of the Year

The Walking Dead: The Game

Telltale Games

Also nominated: Assassin's Creed III, Dishonored, Journey, Mass Effect 3

Studio of the Year

Telltale Games

Also nominated: 343 Industries, Arkane Studios, Gearbox Software

Best Xbox 360 Game

Halo 4

Microsoft Studios/343 Industries

Also nominated: Assassin's Creed III, Borderlands 2, Dishonored

Best PS3 Game

Journey

Sony Computer Entertainment/thatgamecompany

Also nominated: Assassin's Creed III, Borderlands 2, Dishonored

Best Wii/Wii U Game

New Super Mario Bros. U

Nintendo

Also nominated: The Last Story, Xenoblade Chronicles, ZombiU

Best PC Game

XCOM: Enemy Unknown

2K Games/Firaxis Games

Also nominated: Diablo III, Guild Wars 2, Torchlight II

Best Shooter

Borderlands 2

2K Games/Gearbox Software

Also nominated: Call of Duty: Black Ops II, Halo 4, Max Payne 3

Best Action-Adventure Game

Dishonored

Bethesda Softworks/Arkane Studios

Also nominated: Assassin's Creed III, Darksiders II, Sleeping Dogs

Best Role-Playing Game

Mass Effect 3

Electronic Arts/BioWare

Also nominated: Diablo III, Torchlight II, Xenoblade Chronicles

Best Multiplayer Game

Borderlands 2

2K Games/Gearbox Software

Also nominated: Call of Duty: Black Ops II, Guild Wars 2, Halo 4

Best Individual Sports Game

SSX

Electronic Arts/EA Canada

Also nominated: Hot Shots Golf World Invitational, Tiger Woods PGA Tour 13, WWE '13

Best Team Sports Game

NBA 2K13

2K Sports/Visual Concepts

Also nominated: FIFA 13, Madden NFL 13, NHL 13

Best Driving Game

Need For Speed: Most Wanted

Electronic Arts/Criterion Games

Also nominated: Dirt: Showdown, F1 2012, Forza Horizon

Best Song in a Game

"Cities" (Beck) for Sound Shapes

Also nominated: "Castle of Glass" (Linkin Park for Medal of Honor: Warfighter); "I Was Born for This" (Austin Wintory for Journey); "Tears" (Health for Max Payne 3)

Best Original Score

Journey

Sony Computer Entertainment/thatgamecompany

Also nominated: Call of Duty: Black Ops II, Halo 4, Max Payne 3.

Best Graphics

Halo 4

Microsoft Studios/343 Industries

Also nominated: Assassin's Creed III, Dishonored, Journey

Best Independent Game

Journey

thatgamecompany

Also nominated: Dust: An Elysian Tail, Fez, Mark of the Ninja

Best Fighting Game

Persona 4 Arena

Atlus/Arc System Works/Atlus

Also nominated: Dead or Alive 5, Street Fighter X Tekken, Tekken Tag Tournament 2

Best Handheld/Mobile Game

Sound Shapes

Sony Computer Entertainment/Queasy Games

Also nominated: Gravity Rush, LittleBigPlanet (PS Vita), New Super Mario Bros 2

Best Performance by a Human Female

Melissa Hutchison for The Walking Dead: The Game

Also nominated: Emma Stone for Sleeping Dogs; Jen Taylor for Halo 4; Jennifer Hale for Mass Effect 3

Best Performance by a Human Male

Dameon Clark for Borderlands 2

Also nominated: Dave Fennoy for The Walking Dead: The Game; James McCaffrey for Max Payne 3; Nolan North for Spec Ops: The Line

Best Adapted Video Game

The Walking Dead: The Game

Telltale Games

Also nominated: Disney Epic Mickey 2: The Power of Two, LEGO Batman 2: DC Super Heroes, Transformers: Fall of Cybertron

Best Downloadable Content

Dawnguard for The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim

Bethesda Softworks/Bethesda Game Studios

Also nominated: Leviathan for Mass Effect 3; Mechromancer Pack for Borderlands 2; Perpetual Testing Initiative for Portal 2

Best Downloadable Game

The Walking Dead: The Game

Telltale Games

Also nominated: Fez, Journey, Sound Shapes

Best Social Game

You Don't Know Jack

Jellyvision Games

Also nominated: Draw Something, Marvel: Avengers Alliance, SimCity Social

Game of the Decade

Half Life 2

Valve Corporation

Also nominated: Batman: Arkham City, BioShock, The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker, Mass Effect 2, Portal, Red Dead Redemption, Shadow of the Colossus, Wii Sports, World of Warcraft

Tonight's host of the Spike Video Game Awards will be appearing in some of the games being honored tonight. First up, The Walking Dead.

We hear all the time that video games are a young medium, that they've still got so much untapped potential to wow us in unique and meaningful ways. And while it may seem like it's been just another 12 months of sequels, remakes and disappointment, there have been signs that video games are maturing. Some of those baby teeth are shaking loose.

Video games probably made more people than ever cry this year, for whatever that's worth. Experiences like Journey made players connect with each other in memorably profound ways. Meanwhile, Thomas Was Alone drew on nostalgia, great platform puzzle mechanics and retro styling to comment on what it means to make something. Thomas wasn't alone in that regard, either. Titles as varied as Dear Esther, Little Inferno and The Unfinished Swan offered their own little windows into human nature.

So, yes, there may still be a few pimples on video games' collective face. But the games and events below are evidence that its voice is changing and getting deeper, too.

Assassin's Creed III's take on history

Ubisoft's threequel wasn't without its flaws. But one of its biggest successes was in its meticulously researched and well-delivered portrayal of Native Americans, arguably amongst the best in any medium. Not only that, ACIII's creators made a game about the American Revolution that didn't make George Washington and his fellow patriots look like saints. The ambiguous treatment given to the politics of the time resisted the easy trap of flag-waving, making Assassin's Creed III feel like a step forward in how games can look at history.

Miiverse's social optimism

A year ago, it would've sounded like the most naïve kind of pipe dream: a virtual gathering place on a game console where people were helpful and, shocker, even polite to each other. But, barely a month into its lifespan, the Wii U's Miiverse has players offering each other tips, sharing fun doodles and, in general, exhibiting behavior in line with the golden rule. Maybe it's because it's a neophyte community of owners who want a new console to succeed. Or maybe it's simply because it's from Nintendo, a company that sees spreading fun as a holy mission. Things may yet change but for now Miiverse seems like an oasis from the slur-happy, cynically dismissive interactions that gamers endure when they come together online.

Papo & Yo's magical memoir realism

Games have drawn from the lives of their creators before, but none as explicitly and poignantly as Minority Media's Papo & Yo. Based on studio head Vander Caballero's life, the PS3 exclusive functioned as a playable diary of what it was like to grow up inside an abusive relationship. Caballero and his team drew on his painful experiences with his alcoholic father and layered them with a thick slather of magical realism and whimsy. The result? A game that shows how joy and crisis can be irrevocably intertwined, while reminding us that we have the strength to embrace or jettison what we need to make it through.

Anna Anthropy's anyone-can-do-it manifesto

This year saw the continued diminishment of major corporations' domination of the creation of popular video games. The tools to make and distribute games are cheaper than ever, which, as Anna Anthropy celebrates in her book, Rise of the Videogame Zinesters, broadens the pool of people making games and thus the themes that games are about. All of this portends a more thematically diverse array of video games in the future.

Spec Ops: the Line's inglorious battlefields

For all the body counts that a player racks up in an average shooter, those games' characters don't show much in the way of psychological repercussions from all that killing. Spec Ops: The Line distinguished itself from 2012's other shooters by exploring the grey areas between duty and survival. At the end of it all, you didn't feel all-powerful or even like you always did the right thing. You just felt wrung out. A lot more like real war—and real life—than other action games.

Journey's quiet co-operation

Take out the screaming, k/d comparisons and dog-eat-dog mindset from an online game. What are you left with? In the case of thatgameompany's Journey, something pretty damn special. Journey players didn't have to help each other reach that mysterious peak in the distance but, when they did, they learned a little bit about the nameless, faceless strangers who traveled with them and a lot about themselves.

Wreck-It Ralph's love letter to video games

Not only did the folks at Disney get the appeal of video games right, they nailed it in two distinct ways. First was the creation of made-up game characters and franchises that felt lived in enough to have possibly existed. And, trickier than that, Wreck-It Ralph integrated actual game icons in ways that made them feel like more than just cheap punchlines. Kids got to bathe in a recreation of the thrill they feel when playing games and grown-up gamers got a well-crafted reminder of why they kept on pressing buttons even when it wasn't cool.

The Walking Dead's harrowing take on survival

The zombie apocalypse presented in Telltale's games wasn't the wacky kind of romp you get in a Dead Rising game. No, in the spin-off of the popular comics series, players were confronted by gut-wrenching choices that made them think long and hard about what to sacrifice. Then you had to live with the consequences of those choices. The Walking Dead was fun only in a self-flagellating way but it did what great artistic creations do: make up a reality that illuminates the ugliness and beauty of how we live in this one.

Australia's R18+ rating

Fallout 3. Left 4 Dead 2. Mortal Kombat. For all too long, the list of titles turned away from gamers Down Under included some of the most anticipated releases of the year. Could Australians still get those games? Sure, they could. But the process was made all the more annoying by the lack of a mature rating for video games in the sprawling country. So, when the R18+ classification became law this year, you could hear the sigh of relief all around the world. Video games haven't been kids' stuff for a long time and the Australian government finally decided to acknowledge that fact.

Have some evidence of your own that video games did some maturing in 2012? Share your images, thoughts and videos in the comments below.

Now that the first season of The Walking Dead is over, it's natural to ask the question: Did my choices even matter? Was this all smoke and mirrors, or did I really have a say over the outcome? It's the same sort of thing raised as any lengthy, branching video game story reaches its conclusion.

Partly due to production constraints and partly due to the writers' desire to tell a coherent story, most games like this don't have dozens of varied endings. We made so many decisions throughout The Walking Dead, but when all was said and done, did they matter? I'd say yes, they did.

Serious business Walking Dead spoilers follow. Beware of biters.

The final episode of The Walking Dead was always going to be where players' choices came together for a final reckoning. And there's no denying that a lot of the bigger decisions wound up not "mattering" that much, in a traditional sense. Characters you saved had already died some other way, and avenues you'd left open had been closed anyway. Whether you spared Ben in episode 4 or let him die (I let him die), he still died at the midpoint of episode 5. Even if Kenny stuck around, he still leapt down to get Clem's radio and met an uncertain fate. (Though remember the rule of death on TV: If there's no body, they're not dead. Going by both the books and the TV show, this even holds true for something as dark as The Walking Dead. So, we'll see about Kenny.)

No matter the decisions you made, you still wound up in the hotel room with Clem in the closet. You still barely managed to get her out of there. Lee had still been bitten, and even if you amputated his arm, he still died (though not before making some awesome/improbable one-armed building-jumps). So did your choices matter, or didn't they?

I think they mattered quite a bit. On a perfunctory level, the inclusion of the crazy stranger in the hotel room was a smart move by Telltale—essentially, it allowed them to sit you down and judge you for every bad decision you'd made in the game. There was no way to make it through The Walking Dead as a saint, so everyone would have to answer for something. I took food from the abandoned car at the end of episode 2. As it turned out, the car belonged to this man, and in the end drove his family mad with hunger and caused him to lose them. It was a smart way to judge players for their actions in a streamlined and doable way, and it was, all things considered, a believable scene.

But on a deeper level, throughout the series, we made decisions about what kind of a man Lee was, and how Clementine would see him. Our choices may not have affected the story outcome or averted his death, but they certainly affected his life—they made him the character we got to know and care about. (Or, depending, dislike but maybe understand.) One could make the same argument about the Mass Effects and Dragon Ages of the world, but given that The Walking Dead was a character study as much as it was an adventure, the fact that our decisions affected Lee's character is more central to the game's meaning as a whole.

Game critic Sparky Clarkson has effectively encapsulated why player choice mattered in a post over at his blog awesomely titled "Your choices don't matter." Rather, the choices do matter, he says, but "they don't matter in the way that they appear to."

Lee's choices don't change the world, or alter the fundamental flow of the story. He can do nothing to keep the drugstore safe, preserve the motel stronghold, or prevent the treacheries in Savannah. If those are the kinds of choices that "matter", then Lee's decisions don't. But decisions that mattered in that way wouldn't really fit the themes of The Walking Dead. It's not a world where a man ultimately has any real power to save anyone.

But the choices in The Walking Dead aren't really about changing the world, they're about changing Lee. The player's choices define who Lee is, whose company he values, what principles he chooses to uphold. The world reacts to those decisions, in subtle ways that either reinforce those decisions (for instance, in the developing friendship with Kenny) or play off them (as in the case of Duck's fate). The player's choices matter because they establish a context for his emotional connection, through Lee, to the game world.

Clarkson calls out the moment that I thought was the cleverest in the entire series: At the very end, when Lee directs Clementine to fight off the trapped walker, get a gun, and handcuff him to the wall before he turns.

All at once, the video game hierarchy moves up a step. Lee becomes the player, and Clementine becomes his avatar. For a few short minutes, it's as though we're controlling Clem instead of Lee. And before we send her on her way, we make one final decision. This game, which has let us make so many choices about how Lee lived, allows us to choose how he'll die.