UPDATE: You can watch the Golden Joystick Awards ceremony as it happens, keep up with the live blog and find out who the winners are by heading to this page here.

Today is the day. Crunch time. The nerve shredder. It's the day when over 850,000 votes are finally converted into the tangible hard currency of coveted prizes. Yes, today is the Golden Joystick Awards, when all that hard-earned gamer adoration gets sealed up in a sparkling envelope of dreams, waiting to be released amidst a cacophony of rapturous applause and drunken heckling.

The best thing is, all the winners are only winners because actual real gamers voted for them. This is an award ceremony that actually means something.

Above: Gather the family together and get ready to see if the games you voted for walk away as worthy winners

And you'll be able to watch it all from the comfort of where you're sitting right now. Proceedings will begin to gather some meaningful momentum at 2pm, when the awards ceremony kicks off proper. And you can see it all happening as it actually happens.

We'll have details of where you can watch the glitzerama later today. But that's not all. If moving pictures isn't your scene, a live blogging service will keep you on top of whose winning and whose runner-upping, while accompanying paparazzi snaps will be ready for viewing almost as quickly as the cameraman clicks his little button. So stay close. Besides beaming information direct to your brain, we've pretty much done everything we can to ensure you all get a front row seat.

In the meantime, agitate yourself into a further frenzied state of intense excitement with some more Golden Joystick Awards information.

An absolute menagerie of mid-tier game industry representatives will be gathered at the City of London's luxuriant London Hilton hotel ( located on Park Lane, spitting distance from Buck Palace), and every attendee will be hopeful that they could be walking away with gaming's most prestigious totem of kudos - a Golden Joystick.

Above: On the left is the London Hilton. On the right, is the Frankie Boyle

There are a total of 17 GJs being presented, with awards spanning such categories as Best Multiplayer, Best Handheld Game, Best UK Developer, Best Soundtrack and, of course, The Ultimate Game of the Year.

Oh, and this year incredibly funny funny-man Frankie Boyle has been drafted in as master of the whole crazy ceremony. If you're not familiar with his particular brand of comedic showmanship, go check out his bio and you'll see why he's been carefully hand-plucked to give out the stick-shaped gongs of goldness. He's a funny guy.

It's going to be unmissable. So don't miss it.