Most 17-year-olds spend their days playing video games, but Britain's latest Nobel prize winner spent his teenage years developing them. Sir Demis Hassabis, who was jointly awarded the chemistry prize on Wednesday, got his big break in the tech world as co-designer of 1994's hit game Theme Park, where players create and operate amusement parks. Born in London to a Greek Cypriot father and Singaporean mother, Hassabis went on to gain a double first in computer science at Cambridge University, complete a PhD in cognitive neuroscience and co-found the artificial intelligence startup DeepMind, which Google bought for 400m in 2014. The 48-year-old was knighted for services to AI this year. He is the chief executive of Google's AI unit, Google DeepMind, and its achievements in using AI to predict and design the structure of proteins has spurred the award of the Nobel to Hassabis and his colleague John Jumper, who are sharing half of the award with the other half going to the US academic David Baker.

Whether you're creating a sleek new logo for your company or a magazine cover that's popping with bright colors and interesting shapes, graphic designers need the right kind of laptop to get the job done. The most important thing is powerful hardware. For tasks like 3D modeling, you're going to need a powerful CPU and a good amount of RAM. Depending on the size and complexity of the project, you may need a processor with multiple cores. Another essential piece of hardware is the graphics card.

The last decade has seen an explosion in the popularity of board and card games that aren't just the traditional Christmas assortment. Families seeking interesting, actually fun alternatives to Monopoly and Trivial Pursuits have embraced the German-designed classics Catan and Carcassonne, as well as a growing range of exuberant, highly social card games exemplified by the irrepressible Exploding Kittens and the frighteningly timely Pandemic. And now, with successful, critically acclaimed video games such as Slay the Spire and Wildermyth drawing key design principles from board games, it's the perfect time to tempt the most stubborn console and PC owners away from their screens. Recently I asked video game designers on Twitter for their favourite board and card games to add to my own recommendations. Here then, are 10 examples worth investing in for the festive season, most aimed at teenagers and adults but all fabulously entertaining whether your players are veterans of Cluedo or Call of Duty.

Long disparaged by the Baby Boomer generation as either a childish distraction or a leading cause for the downfall of civilization, video games have weathered that criticism and grown into the dominant storytelling medium of the modern world — not to mention a $136 billion industry. In his latest book, Becoming a Video Game Designer, journalist Daniel Noah Halpern examines the career of gaming titan Tom Cadwell from his roots at MIT, where he became one of the world’s top Starcraft II players, to his meteoric rise as head of design at Riot Games. Through exhaustive interviews with Cadwell and other leading industry figures, Halpern provides a unique and valuable snapshot for aspiring designers into the business of gaming.

Welcome to our series "How I Became a …," where we're digging into the stories of accomplished and influential people and finding out how they got to where they are in their careers. We're finding out what their biggest challenges, their biggest passions and their biggest pieces of wisdom are -- for you. Working in the world of video games is a true dream job, and Bugi Kaigwa, a technical artist at Visual Concepts, is living the dream as a video game designer. Kaigwa, who works on developing the immensely popular NBA 2K basketball games, including this year's NBA 2K17 game, chatted with USA TODAY College about vanilla lattes, hard work and, well, of course video games. Usually, being from Kenya, I am a tea guy -- usually just a ginger tea.

But for a bed, a dresser, a mirror, a desk and a few scattershot piles of junk, the room is empty. Time is perilously short: you have 10 seconds till your abusive partner swaggers in, spoiling for another fight. Can you evade the seemingly inevitable? Now you're a lonely parent, trying everything you can to quell the distraught cries of your terminally ill child. Sales are few and your rent is high.