The judging panel

Judging Flash-based web game competitions ain't like dusting crops, kid. That's why we enlisted the finest minds on the planet to sit on our panel. These guys, revered and feared in equal measure, viewed every single entry to determine our shortlist of ten finalists, so let's meet the poor buggers.

Aleks Krotoski

Aleks Krotoski is an academic and journalist who writes about and studies technology and interactivity. In addition to writing a column for the Guardian's Technology section and presenting the Guardian's weekly technology podcast, she blogs on Guardian Unlimited and is currently working towards a PhD in Social Psychology at the University of Surrey, examining the social networks of cyberspace.

Read Aleks' Guardian blog

Rob Manuel

Rob Manuel co-founded B3ta, made a sick joke book that Waterstones refuses to stock, and is the number one search return for "how to poach an egg". He's made more web games than he'd like to remember and loves nothing better than writing about himself in the third person.

Visit b3ta.com

We also challenged Rob to build a great Flash game in less than six weeks - see how he's getting on.

Alice Taylor

Alice Taylor is the founder of the popular gaming blog Wonderland, and was named one of the game industry's 100 Most Influential Women in 2006. Her first encounter with arcade games was in a pub at the age of six, playing Pac-Man and Space Invaders (2p a game). She was a member of the first ever UK Quake team, and has two level 70s in World of Warcraft. By day she commissions educational projects for Channel 4, which is actually taking the form of games with a factually accurate core. FTW.

Visit the Wonderland blog

Jon Blyth

Jon Blyth started out on the internet with The Law of the Playground, a website that proved popular enough to warrant a book, and two series of a Channel 4 show. Since then, he has moved into games writing - something he refuses to call journalism - and has been nominated for awards that he didn't eventually win. Now, he pens occasional columns for broadsheets and spends most of his days in the offices of PC Zone, which, according to the masthead, is the best PC games magazine in Britain.

Visit disappointment.com

Kieran O'Neill

As the founder of HolyLemon.com, a portal where 100,000 people play games and watch videos each day, Kieran got to be quite the connoisseur of Flash-based web games. After several years' involvement in setting up online games communities and magazines, his latest endeavour is social networking startup Playfire.com, thanks to which he gets to regularly "invest" time "researching" all the latest console titles.

Visit Playfire.com

Jody Smith

Jody luxuriates in the title Editor of E4.com, and has a long career of pretending to work, while secretly playing web games. He has commissioned games for a variety of websites for nearly a decade, some of which have picked up awards along the way. What Jody's picked up along the way we're not saying...

Visit e4.com... oh, you're already here