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Each year, a group of gaming media outlets (including CVG, GamesRadar, and several others) puts on the Golden Joystick Awards. The nominees are chosen by -- well, we don't know who -- but the winners are selected by popular vote. Yesterday, the short list (or the nominee list, if you prefer) went live, and voting began.

EVE Online, World of Warcraft, Guild Wars, The Lord of the Rings Online, and Age of Conan are all nominated in the "Best Online Game" category. World of Warcraft's Wrath of the Lich King expansion even broke out of the genre by receiving a nomination for the "One to Watch" award. However, the big MMO on the list this year is Age of Conan. It has additionally been nominated for PC Game of the Year and Ultimate Game of the Year.

If you want to be part of the process, go pick your favorite MMO from the list for the Best Online Game award, and if Wrath of the Lich King or Age of Conan strike your individual fancy, vote for them in their other categories as well. Or you could just not vote for any MMOs at all. Your choice.

CCP will begin testing EVE Online's recently announced Emyprean Age expansion on the Singularity test server beginning this Saturday, the 17th of May. To celebrate the event, the dev team is hosting an event at 19:00 GMT. Everyone is invited to test the new features -- particularly Factional Warfare -- with the dev team.

There will be awards for achievements like "most kills" and "most bizarre bug found" once the dust has cleared. If you're an EVE subscriber, read the announcement for more details. If you want to jump right in, don't forget to download the patch and apply it to your client (not the installation with which you play on Tranquility, though!). Once you're all patched up and ready to go, log in on Saturday and join the chat channel "Faction Testing."

How often do you get the chance to blast the entire EVE dev team out of the skies? Sounds like fun.

If you're into the hilarious, fun, and "free-to-play" NCsoft game, Dungeon Runners, then you might have read the forums once or twice. Well, time to jump back in because they want everyone to cast their vote in the 2008 Dungeon Runners Forum Awards.

Categories include:

• Funniest Poster
• Most helpful Poster
• Best forum comment EVER
• Whackiest forum comment
• Favorite Dev person
• Favorite PvPer
• Favorite Fansite Manager
• Favorite Forum Avatar dude
• Favorite Old Schooler
• Favorite Dungeon Runners Bug
• Favorite Dungeon Runners Feature
  

While mainly just for fun, winners will receive a special forum title. But you have to vote before the January 31, 2008, deadline. In this election year now is as good a time as any to get your mad voting skillz up to par. So what are you waiting for? Go rock the vote!

Several video games and their respective creators were honored at the fifty-ninth Annual Technology and Engineering Emmy Awards at CES 2008 in Las Vegas. The awards spotlighted some of the most groundbreaking titles in development of massively multiplayer online graphical role playing games as well as user generated content or game mods.

The winners of the first category for development of MMORPGs were Sony Online Entertainment for Everquest (Laura Naviaux), Blizzard for World of Warcraft (Mike Morhaime) and AOL/Time Warner for Neverwinter Nights (Don Daglow).

And the winners of the second category for user generated content/game modification were EA for Pinball Construction (Bill Budge), Id Software for Quake (John Carmack) and Linden Lab for Second Life (Philip Rosedale).

Pictured from left to right: Daglow, Budge, Carmack, Naviaux, Rosedale, Morhaime

We really only have just one thing to mention. If you're the representative of a multi-billion-dollar international corporation like Activision Blizzard, shouldn't you consider something other than raiding your dad's closet for a 1970's brown polyester suit? Although, only really rich people can afford to look broke, because they buy good stuff and wear it forever. So when Mike got it, it was probably very chic... in the 70's.

If you twist our arm just right, you can get us to toot our own horn. We're humbled and surprised to have been selected by the inimitable Nerfbat as the winner of this year's Gnomey for Best MMO News Source in the 2007 Nerfbat MMO Blog Awards! Though we've only been around for a short time, we plan to continue bringing you hot and fresh (and frequent!) news about all the MMOs already out there, new games on deck, and especially the rumoured titles around the corner. We're going to do our best to live up to our Gnomey! A big thanks goes to all of our readers who contribute great enthusiasm, insightful comments, intelligent feedback and timely tips -- thanks for helping us make this site a fun place to hang!

GameSpy recently released the latest iteration of its annual best-of list. The Lord of the Rings Online: Shadows of Angmar was ranked #6 in the best PC games of 2007 list. World of Warcraft's The Burning Crusade expansion also got some attention. It came in at #5 on the same list -- just an inch ahead of LotRO. However, LotRO also walked away with a bigger prize -- the title of PC MMO Game of the Year.

Both LotRO and TBC failed to beat blockbuster first-person-shooter fare like BioShock and Call of Duty 4 in the overall PC list, but still, this was a pleasant cap to a strong year for both titles, especially LotRO, which saw promising sales figures and a warm critical reception right out of the launch bay door this Spring.

TBC and LotRO are also nominees for various "gamers' choice" awards. The voting for those awards comes to a close today, and the winners will be announced tomorrow.

Sam from Uberguilds sent us word of nominations opening up for GuildCafe's Espresso awards (they're the same company now, remember?). They're looking for your ideas on choosing the best of the year in a number of different categories, including everything from "best gaming blog" to "best user-interface mod" and "best player-written guide."

Unfortunately, there's two problems here-- despite coming from GuildCafe, the awards don't seem to be aimed just at MMOs. They have a "player-created map" category, and unless they're talking about Second Life sims, that's not really MMO-centric. And they have strange qualifications for the fansite and gaming blog categories-- in my mind, getting fairly compensated for writing about games doesn't make your work meaningless. (Disclaimer: everyone who writes for Massively gets paid for their work by Weblogs, Inc, which is a division of AOL.)

But hey, it's their awards, their rules. You readers are smart folks-- go put some good nominations in there and we'll see what GuildCafe comes up with.

The 25th annual Golden Joysticks (not to be confused with Joystiq) awards in London are officially over, and the MMOs were out in force. While Gears of War snagged the "Ultimate Game of the Year 2007" award, The Lord of the Rings Online: Shadows of Angmar took "PC Game of the Year", and World of Warcraft: The Burning Crusade was the victor in the "Gametribe Online Game of the Year" category.

The full results can be viewed on the Golden Joystick website. While the majority of the winners were serious "no duh" picks, it's a little surprising to see LotRO honored as the overall PC game of the year. Not that we don't think it's not a terrific game, mind you, but an MMO (that doesn't have the word Warcraft in the title, anyway) taking the award over the glut of historically more popular shooters and strategy games is a bit shocking, though not unwelcome!