The DICE conference in Las Vegas is good for a lot of things, but one thing it's great for is bumping into people. People who work in games and have opinions, even. So at this year's event, I posed two questions to many of them: what's the one thing you want to see most in next-gen consoles, and why are game budgets so secretive. (And perhaps notably, many of them said they'd heard the former question a lot in the past few days.)

This story, if you're playing along and read the headline, contains the answers to the first of those two. Head over here for the budget talk, read on to see what people in the industry had to say, and if you feel inspired, offer your own take in the comments below.

Many gamers who take the hobby seriously scoff at each year's Spike TV Video Game Awards. There are numerous reasons for this, the most prominent being that the show is often filled with gags, skits, and seemingly anything that does not consist of awards being handed out and accepted. You need only look at the show this past December where certain awards were given out beforehand and others were announced so rapidly they were gone in the blink of an eye. But about what the awards themselves -- are the selections, too, a joke?

Last night, in the midst of the 2012 DICE Summit in Las Vegas, the 15th Annual Interactive Achievement Awards (the IAAs) took place and were hosted by who else but comedian and BlizzCon frequent Jay Mohr. DICE (which stands for Design, Innovate, Communicate, Entertain) is an event geared towards those within the industry and thus has a much different focus than a trade show like E3. Whereas the nominees and winners of the VGAs are chosen by a select group of those in the videogame press, the IAAs are "decided by a peer-based voting system," as the organizers, the Academy of Interactive Arts & Sciences, put it. One might therefore expect the awards to end up in the hands of different nominees than the VGAs.