Tech visionaries recognised in New Year Honours List

Technology visionaries Ian Livingstone and Martha Lane Fox have been recognised in the New Year Honours List.

Livingstone, author of the Fighting Fantasy series of books, and also chairman of video games company Eidos, will be made a CBE. Livingstone was made the government's skills champion for the video games sector in 2010.

Lane Fox, the government's digital champion, will receive the same honour.

Also recognised is Hossein Yassaie, CEO of multimedia and communications firm Imagination Technologies Group, who will receive a knighthood for "services to technology and innovation".

"I'm genuinely humbled to get something," Livingstone said to the BBC. "My life has been all about games, and I think we learn an awful lot through play."

Earlier this year, Livingstone co-wrote the "Next Gen" report for the government, which heavily criticised the way in which ICT was taught in UK schools.

"Against all odds we've managed to bore our children to death, teaching them Word, PowerPoint and Excel, and gave them no insight into how technology is actually created. So we teach them effectively to read, but not to write, we teach them how to use an application but not how to make an application," Livingstone told Computing at the time.

"So our number one recommendation for Next Gen was to have computer science on the schools national curriculum as an essential discipline," he added.

The report influenced Education Secretary Michael Gove as he reformed the national ICT curriculum this year, introducing programming as a key skill.

The full honours list is available here.