Hello to you.

Hope you all had a brilliant holiday, we certainly did. Now however, like most of the UK, GCHQ has been plunged into a shivering, snowy mess. It's STUPID cold here in the office, which is why we've been having many of our recent meetings in places where we can wrap our fingers around vessels full of hot liquid. Mostly, coffee shops.

Rest assured though, we are up and running and full of ideas for the coming year. Being the slaves to self-improvement that we are, 2010 has begun with a series of resolutions. Here's our current draft list...

1. Respond and act on the feedback from GameCity Squared. We had some really helpful input, for which we're very grateful, from users of the show last year. We're already acting on them, and have a number of ideas we'd like to run by you over the coming months. Of which...

2. Communicate better. Now, it's not that we're deliberately closed - more that as the year rolls on one of the things we always mean to do but never really set up the structure for doing so, is communicating well. This tends to get lost in as production really starts to roll and that's something we're going to fix this time. One of the things we talked about at a user-group meeting last year was the idea of creating some clearer, easier means by which people could get involved in anything GameCity. We're thinking we've finally worked out how to do this better.

3. Build playground. For those of you who don't know, one of our biggest projects at the moment is the building of a playground at Woodthorpe Grange Park, designed by Keita Takahashi. Keita was over for a month last year and made a series of brilliant initial designs. There's going to be more about this very soon.

4. Archive Videogames. Yup. The other big sister project of ours is steaming forward very well indeed. This year, we're going to be concentrating and expanding our work on the National Videogame Archive, giving it a closer relationship with the festival and a much more open relationship with you.

We're going to be putting out some recordings in the next few weeks which should help to clarify some of the above, as well as starting to invite you on some nights out. All in all, 2010 is looking like it's going to be a very good year. So long as we don't run out of grit.