According to Nielsen company SuperData's 2020 year in review, 55 percent of people picked up video games during the first phase of lockdowns. The Verge reports: According to SuperData, 66 percent of consumers from 18 to 24 played more console games, while 60 percent played more mobile titles. Unsurprisingly, buyers also tended toward digital purchases. SuperData reports that 27 percent of people -- about 1 in 4 -- played games to stay in touch with each other. [...] As physical spaces disappeared, video games became one of the few places for people to spend time together... SuperData estimates that digital games alone garnered $126.6 billion over the course of the year. The numbers may not spike this year as much as they did in 2020, but SuperData predicts "the long-term habits formed during lockdown are here to stay."

A little over a year after bringing Minecraft Earth in the US, Microsoft announced this week it will shut down the game later this year. Engadget reports: Minecraft Earth players have until June 30th, 2021, to play the augmented reality title before Microsoft shuts down its servers and it's no longer available to download from app marketplaces. Developer Mojang Studios blamed the coronavirus pandemic and all the changes to day-to-day life that have come with it for the shutdown. "Minecraft Earth was designed around free movement and collaborative play -- two things that have become near impossible in the current global situation," the studio said. Like Niantic with Pokemon Go, Mojang had tweaked the game to make it easier to play at home. Those changes clearly weren't enough.

But if there's a silver lining in today's news, it's that Mojang plans to send off Minecraft Earth in style. The studio is rolling out one last update for the game it says contains changes "to make your time in Minecraft Earth as fun as possible." Among other tweaks, the update does away with real-money transactions and drastically reduces the time it will take for players to craft and build things within the game. It also offers players a chance to see all the content that Mojang was working on before today's announcement. "We hope these adjustments will allow you to explore, craft, and build more -- while staying safe indoors," the studio said. Once June 30th comes and goes, Microsoft will delete player data on July 1st. If you spent money in Minecraft Earth at any point during the life of the game, you'll get a token that will allow you to download the Bedrock edition of Minecraft to your mobile device. You can find more details on the shutdown on the Minecraft website.

It might have taken more than 20 years, but a game intended for the original PlayStation has at last made its way into the world. Engadget reports: A group of Japanese developers worked on Magic Castle for eight months in the late '90s. They used Sony's Net Yaroze, a system with which hobbyists could make games for the console. The team sent the RPG to several publishers, but most didn't bite. Sony showed interest, but it wanted the developers to ditch their game and move to a different project. The team rejected the offer and later disbanded. And so the unfinished Magic Castle stayed on the shelf for over 20 years. Until now.

One of the developers, who goes by PIROWO, rediscovered the Magic Castle source code a while back. They decided to finish and release it, four console generations later. Magic Castle has some interesting tricks up its sleeve, as EuroGamer notes. It features dynamic music and you can customize the position of the user interface. There are four character classes to choose from and 20 floors with randomized elements to make your way through. You can download the game from the Internet Archive and play it with an emulator.

Fast Company's technology editor harrymcc writes: After years of growing technical irrelevance and security concerns, the Flash browser plug-in will reach the end of the road on January 12 when Adobe blocks its ability to display content. The web will survive just fine. But there's a huge library of old Flash games — some of them quirky, interesting, and worth preserving. Over at Fast Company, Jared Newman wrote about several grassroots initiatives that will allow us to continue to enjoy these artifacts of the Flash era even after Flash is history.
Some tips from the article:

• If you have a Windows PC, the best way to replay old Flash content is with FlashPoint, a free program with more than 70,000 web games and 8,000 animations, most of which are Flash-based. (Experimental Mac and Linux versions are also available, but are complicated to set up....)

• Conifer lets you run a legacy browser with Flash support on a remote machine, insulating you from any security issues...

• The Internet Archive has made thousands of Flash games and animations playable online in modern web browsers through emulation, so you can play the Helicopter Game or watch Peanut Butter Jelly Time in their original forms.

• Ruffle is the underlying emulation software that The Internet Archive is using. You can also install it as a standalone program or browser extension...

• Newgrounds has released its own Flash Player for Windows that safely loads content from its website, so you still get the full experience of using Newgrounds proper.

But the article opens with a sentence reminding us that "After all the challenges of 2020, there's one thing we can all look forward to in the new year: Adobe Flash Player will finally be dead."

An anonymous reader writes: So on New Year's Eve, the "jam" rock band Phish re-broadcast their legendary 1995 performance on New Year's Eve -- while playing a game of chess against the audience. (Just as they'd done in 1995 -- although during that tour they'd made two just moves during each show.) In a video promoting this year's event, a chess "historian" remembers "No single band in the '90s was playing better chess against their audience" and shares an alleged conspiracy theory that they were being coached by Garry Kasparov. And yet, "Midway through the second of two nights at Madison Square Garden, the audience takes Phish's queen" -- and the band resigned.

This had left their ongoing audience-versus-band match with a score (one game apiece). So 25 years later, for New Year's Eve, Phish finally staged the great re-match.

"However, just as it was time to begin the game (and as the show kicked off with opener "Punch You In The Eye"), Chess.com, the popular chess site hosting the online game, crashed," reports JamBands.com.
Thinking quickly, the band announced on Twitter that "We're making a quick pivot, 2020 style, to live chess mode. We will be using a moderator from Chess.com who will take feedback on the move within the chat and then complete the audience move."

JamBands.com explains how the long-awaited match finally culminated: In between sets, the broadcast cut to a live zoom call between all four band members, during which they discussed their next moves in the game and chatted. At various points, Gordon and Anastasio picked up guitars, and Gordon had a surreal projection of a chess board floating behind him at times. During the first break, McConnell referenced the technical difficulties. "I'm sorry this didn't work out to plan, but nothing this year did," he said with a laugh.

During the break between the second and third sets, the shenanigans increased, with drummer Jon Fishman following through on an off-hand promise to shave his head. (At first, the other three band members didn't even notice.) Ultimately, the band defeated the audience... Down to just their king, queen and a few pawns, the audience resigned as the band was up a pawn and still had a rook and queen on the board...

Phish raised funds for a charity during the broadcast. "For this final webcast of the year, our beneficiary will be none other than The WaterWheel Foundation itself," the band wrote prior to the stream. "Since 1997, the band and their fans have collaborated on a nationwide charitable endeavor by raising funds and donating the proceeds across the country. This year alone, collectively we have raised and donated nearly $750,000 to 27 different nonprofits during the Dinner And A Movie series. Join us in continuing to support those in need...."
You can watch the entire four-and-a-half-hour webcast on YouTube.

The last day of the year was also the last day for FarmVille, one of the original addictive Facebook games. From a report: FarmVille, which allowed players to cultivate colorful cartoonish farms by tending crops and caring for livestock, had 30 million daily players at its peak. But game developer Zynga announced in September it would shut down the game on Dec. 31, a victim of Adobe's decision to stop distributing and updating its Flash Player for web browsers, which in turn led Facebook to announce an end to support for Flash games on its platform.

An anonymous reader shares a report: A ten-year longitudinal study published in the Journal of Cyberpsychology, Behavior, and Social Networking on a group in early adolescence from as young as ten years old, investigated how playing violent video games at an early age would translate into adulthood behavior (23 years of age). Titled "Growing Up with Grand Theft Auto: A 10-Year Study of Longitudinal Growth of Violent Video Game Play in Adolescents" the study found no correlation between growing up playing video games and increased levels of aggression ten years later. This particular study utilized a more contemporary approach for analyzing its data, known as the person-centered approach. Traditional studies use a variable-centered approach whereby researchers treat each variable, or characteristic, as related to another variable. An example would be that exercising is related to a reduced incidence of heart disease. This has been particularly valuable when comparing groups. In a person-centered approach researchers combine various algorithms across variables to determine how these variables compare among individuals. This approach provides a more accurate depiction of how variables relate to the individual.

Phoronix reports: It's been a turbulent year and 2020 is certainly ending interesting in the Linux/open-source space... If it wasn't odd enough seeing Sony providing a new official Linux driver for their PlayStation 5 DualSense controller for ending out the year, there is also a new Linux port to the Nintendo 64 game console... Yes, a brand new port to the game console that launched more than two decades ago.

Open-source developer Lauri Kasanen who has contributed to Mesa and the Linux graphics stack took to developing a new Nintendo 64 port and announced it this Christmas day. This isn't the first time Linux has been ported to the N64 but prior attempts weren't aimed at potentially upstreaming it into the mainline Linux kernel...

This fresh port to the N64 was pursued in part to help port emulators and frame-buffer or console games.
And also, the announcement adds, "Most importantly, because I can."

CD Projekt SA, the Polish video-game publisher of Cyberpunk 2077, was sued by an investor who claims the company misled him about the potential of the error-plagued game whose botched release this month caused shares to dive. From a report: Andrew Trampe sued Thursday in federal court in Los Angeles and seeks to represent other investors who bought the company's securities. CD Projekt failed to disclose that Cyberpunk 2077 was "virtually unplayable on the current-generation Xbox or Playstation systems due to an enormous number of bugs," according to the complaint. As a result, Sony Corp. removed Cyberpunk 2077 from the Playstation store, and Sony, Microsoft and the company were forced to offer full refunds for the game, according to the complaint.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: After over a year of requests from fans and enthusiasts, and months of official teases, Microsoft Flight Simulator has a virtual reality mode. Whether you play the game via Steam or the Windows Store, you can now take advantage of "OpenXR" calls to seemingly any PC-VR system on the market, aided by an "enable/disable VR" keyboard shortcut at any time. This summer, ahead of the game's final-stretch beta test, the developers at Asobo Studio used a screen-share feature in a video call to tease the VR mode to us at Ars Technica. This is never an ideal way to show off VR, in part because the platform requires high refresh rates for comfortable play, which can't be smoothly sent in a pandemic-era video call. But even for a video call, it looked choppy. Asobo's team assured us that the incomplete VR mode was running well -- but of course, we're all on edge about game-preview assurances as of late. Now that users have been formally invited to slap Microsoft Flight Simulator onto their faces, I must strongly urge users not to do so -- or at least heavily temper their expectations. Honestly, Asobo Studio should've issued these warnings, not me, because this mode is nowhere near retail-ready.

Ultimately, trying to use the 2020 version of MSFS within its VR mode's "potato" settings is a stupid idea until some kinks get worked out. It's bad enough how many visual toggles must be dropped to PS2 levels to reach a comfortable 90 fps refresh; what's worse is that even in this low-fidelity baseline, you'll still face serious stomach-turning anguish in the form of constant frametime spikes. Turn the details up to a "medium" level in order to savor the incredible graphics engine Asobo built, of course, and you're closer to 45 fps. I didn't even bother finding an average performance for the settings at maximum. That test made me sick enough to delay this article by a few hours. [...] The thing is, my VR stomach can always survive the first few minutes of a bumpy refresh before I have to rip my headset off in anguish -- and this was long enough to see the absolute potential of MSFS as a must-play VR library addition. I don't have an ultrawide monitor, so testing MSFS has always been an exercise in wishing for a better field of view -- to replicate the glance-all-over behavior of actual flight. Getting a taste of that in my headset -- with accurate cockpit lighting, impressive volumetric clouds, and 3D modeling of my plane's various sounds -- made me want to sit for hours in this mode and get lost in compelling, realistic flight. But even the most iron stomachs can only take so much screen flicker within VR before churning, and that makes MSFS's demanding 3D engine a terrible fit for the dream of hours-long VR flight... at least, for the time being.

Sony has published a new "hid-playstation" Linux kernel driver for bringing up the PlayStation 5 DualSense controller and will also be used for supporting other PlayStation hardware on Linux. Phoronix reports: This new Linux kernel driver supports the PlayStation 5 "DualSense" game controller both in USB and Bluetooth modes. All key functionality along with LEDs, motion sensors, touchpad, battery, lightbar, and rumble are all supported by this official Sony Linux driver. The Linux kernel already has the existing "hid-sony" driver while this PlayStation 5 game controller comes with the hid-playstation driver. In announcing the new driver, they are planning to move some of the Sony Interactive Entertainment hardware support from the existing hid-sony to hid-playstation drivers. The hid-sony driver will continue to be maintained and used by broader Sony devices. This new driver follows the move from about a year ago of Sony "officially" maintaining the hid-sony Linux input driver.

This new driver comes in at just over 1,400 lines of code in its initial form catering to the PS5 controller. When transitioning support for older hardware to this new driver there is also a promise of unit test coverage and more. The new HID-PlayStation driver is currently under review and isn't yet queued up for mainlining but those wanting to try it out can find the 13 patches up for testing.

Leaked Nintendo documents have revealed a frightening surveillance operation carried out against a hacker who was researching exploits for the 3DS handheld. TorrentFreak reports: During the past 24 hours, various Twitter accounts (1,2) have been posting snippets from documents that were recently leaked from Nintendo. While there are numerous items of interest, the most shocking revelations involve Neimod, a hacker who several years ago developed exploits for the 3DS handheld console. [T]he scale of the operation, which is revealed in detail in the leaked documents, shows just how far the gaming giant was prepared to go to stop his work. For example, the leak reveals personal profiling that dug deeply into Neimod's education status, listed details of his working life, while offering evidence of physical snooping on his daily lifestyle. What time he could be found at home, who came to see him there, and even when he visited places like banks and restaurants are all included. While this kind of surveillance is creepy in its own right, additional documents reveal a detailed plan to use the gathered intelligence to physically confront Neimod in order to pressurize him into complying with the company's demands.

According to Nintendo's planning, the operation would begin around April 15, 2013, with its team meeting at a local hotel to discuss and finalize their plans. Following a review of Neimod's movements of the previous week, the team would then decide where and when contact would be made -- after work or at home, for example. With an undercover investigator monitoring Neimod to discover what time he left work, Neimod was to be approached by a 'contact team,' who were instructed to approach their target "in a friendly, non-threatening, professional, and courteous manner." "Provide a business card," the instructions read. After Neimod had been engaged in conversation, the team was instructed to flatter the hacker by "acknowledging his engineering/programming aptitude." They were also told to reference his stated aim of not "facilitating piracy" with his hacks but point out Nintendo's concerns that a release of his hack could do just that.

Whether Neimod complied or resisted, Nintendo prepared for both eventualities. The following slide, posted to Twitter by Eclipse-TT, shows a flow chart that begins with instructions for the "Knock and Talk Team," details a staging area, rules of engagement, and plans for what should happen when things go to plan -- or otherwise. The Nintendo "Final Enforcement Proposal" document describes a "carrot and stick" approach, with the stick being a laundry list of potential offenses committed by Neimod under Belgian law and the carrot representing a number of sweeteners that might be of interest to the hacker. If cooperation was achieved, Nintendo suggested it could refrain from filing a criminal complaint. It may also enter into a "bounty" contract with Neimod with payments made for finding and documenting exploits. Within certain parameters, his discoveries could still be announced to the public, allowing him to retain "bragging rights." This could help Nintendo's image, the company wrote.

Roughly half a billion people played Among Us in November, becoming "by far the most popular game ever in terms of monthly players," according to Nielsen's SuperData. The Verge reports: The success is even more remarkable because InnerSloth -- the company that makes Among Us -- only has four employees. That's roughly 125 million players per person who works on the game. It's proven to be so popular that the studio decided to cancel a sequel that was in the works and just put all its effort into improving the original. It even caught the attention of sitting congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who livestreamed herself playing it to try to encourage people to vote, with an audience on Twitch that peaked at over 400 thousand viewers.

In an email to The Verge, Carter Rogers, Principal Analyst at SuperData, said that the next-most popular game in terms of monthly active users only clocked in at 300 million. Rogers notes that Nielsen arrives at its figures through a mix of "point-of-sale and event data from publishers, developers and payment service providers." Among Us' release on the Nintendo Switch was recent enough that it didn't have an appreciable impact on the game's total numbers in Nielsen's analysis.

An internal Nintendo leak has revealed measures the company took when approaching a 3DS homebrew hacker. The measures are rather extreme and apparently include surveillance of the individual in question, as well as internal presentations and instructions on how to approach him. From a report: This comes courtesy of prominent Twitter Nintendo leaker Eclipse. According to documents unearthed by Eclipse -- which also include a Switch software development kit and console security documents, among other things -- the company conducted surveillance on Neimod, a hacker who cracked the 3DS, in 2013. Online Nintendo historian Forest of Illusion corroborates this with an internal document showing findings about Neimod's personal life including where he lived and his average work week. In addition to the surveillance, Nintendo also created detailed plans on how to approach Neimod in order to get him to back down from hacking the 3DS. In the documents, IRC chats involving Neimod are included, showing Nintendo covertly extracting information from Neimod and altering its response to the issue based on what he says. The details of Nintendo's plan to approach Neimod are remarkably detailed, with multiple stages and potential outcomes mapped out in a flowchart.

The military news site Task and Purpose reports: The U.S. military's youngest branch, the Space Force, just trounced its sibling services, as well the United Kingdom's military, in the second annual Call of Duty Endowment Bowl.

The transatlantic Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War tournament pit eight teams from the U.S. Army, Navy, Air Force, Space Force, and Marine Corps, along with the British Army, Royal Navy, and Royal Air Force, against each other. Each team was captained by a civilian gamer and popular streamer who offered guidance and tips to players in real-time as they vied for the top spot...

The tournament was put on by the Call of Duty Endowment, which has placed more than 77,000 veterans into full-time jobs since its inception in 2009. This year alone, the endowment placed 11,000 veterans in jobs amidst the novel coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic.

"Space Force isn't even a year old so this may have been their very first win in anything competitive against any of the other services," Dan Goldenberg, the endowment's executive director said during the event, according to Business Insider. "So it's a heck of a great way to start off their history."

Aleksander Kubica is a postdoctoral fellow at Canada's Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics and Institute for Quantum Computing. And he's also the winner of the world's first quantum chess tournament. (It's now available for streaming on Twitch, and begins with a clip of the late Stephen Hawking playing a 2016 game against Ant-Man star Paul Rudd.)

"It's a complicated version of regular chess that incorporates the quantum concepts of superposition, entanglement, and interference," explains Ars Technica (in an article shared by John Trumpian): In quantum chess, there are multiple boards on which the pieces exist, and their number is not fixed. Players can perform "quantum moves" as well as regular chess moves; players just need to indicate which type of move they're performing. Any quantum move will create a superposition of boards (doubling the number of possible boards in the superposition with each quantum move), although the player will see a single board representing all boards at the same time. And any individual move acts on all boards at the same time.

Pawns move the same as in regular chess, but other pieces can make either standard moves or quantum moves, such that they can occupy more than one square simultaneously. In a 2016 blog post, Chris Cantwell of Quantum Realm Games offered the example of a white queen performing a quantum move from D1 to D3. "We get two possible boards. On one board the queen did not move at all. On the other, the queen did move. Each board has a 50 percent chance of 'existence'..."
In 2016 Stephen Hawking had played a game of quantum chess against Paul Rudd in a video which also featured both Keanu Reeves and Alex Winter, stars of the "Bill and Ted" movies.

Software developer/sys-admin Hawke Robinson is the CEO of RPG Research, a 501(c)3 non-profit, volunteer-run, charitable organization founded in 1977.

He's also long-time Slashdot reader kmleon, and shares this story from the gaming-news site The Gamer: RPG Research recently sent out an urgent call requesting more volunteers, more warehouse space, and more donations to help meet the overwhelming demand it is currently facing. In a truly good news/bad news situation, the organization has seen donations increase by 600% from previous years, while 2020 has increased demand for the organization's programs by more than 1,000%.

The increased demand is simply more than RPG Research is currently staffed and equipped to handle, resulting in the call for aid. Along with the need for more volunteers, RPGR is also seeking a sizeable warehouse to house office space, events, the RPG Museum, as well as to hold the RPG bus and trailers. The ideal warehouse being sought is "a 2,000 (minimum) to 4,000+ square foot warehouse" somewhere "in the greater Spokane Washington or Post Falls Idaho region...."

The international (six continents) organization began studying roleplaying games and their effects in 1983, and since then have presented their findings through various programs in educational settings, prison systems, and therapeutic medical settings.

"On Friday, Nintendo and Universal Studios Japan took the veil off a years-in-the-making project: the very first Nintendo-themed theme park," reports Ars Technica (in an article shared by long-time Slashdot reader mprindle): And who better to introduce the world to this life-sized walk through of all things Mario than the character's creator himself, longtime Nintendo developer and designer Shigeru Miyamoto...

Many of the park's decorations and objects can be interacted with by park visitors who wear a special wristband, dubbed the Power-Up Band, which includes an Amiibo-like NFC chip. Press its sensor near park objects like a Super Mario coin block, and a new virtual item will appear in a synced Super Nintendo World app on your smartphone. Exactly how these virtual items will affect your visit to Super Nintendo World remains unclear, but Miyamoto-san hinted to surprising attractions and hidden interactable panels for park visitors to discover in person. (Additionally, those Power-Up Bands will double as Amiibo for compatible hardware, like Nintendo Switch.)

Only one "ride" received a showcase in the video, albeit a brief one: a Mario Kart race against Bowser. It's hosted inside a replica of Bowser's castle, and visitors will sit in one of a series of Mario-styled go-karts that appear to be linked on a rollercoaster-like track, as opposed to freely controllable. Exactly what visitors will see on that ride remains unclear, but previous news about the ride's augmented reality (AR) elements was reinforced with the first official look at the park's AR glasses, which come attached to a Super Mario hat.
The park opens in Japan on February 4, 2021, according to Ars, followed by later launches at Universal Studios in in Singapore, and at its U.S. locations in Orlando, Florida and Los Angeles.

Microsoft is following Sony's move and offering Cyberpunk 2077 refunds to anyone who has purchased the game digitally. It is not however pulling the game from the Microsoft Store. The Verge reports: "We know the developers at CD Projekt Red have worked hard to ship Cyberpunk in extremely challenging circumstances," explains a Microsoft spokesperson in a statement to The Verge. "However, we also realize that some players have been unhappy with the current experience on older consoles. To date, we have granted refunds to the vast majority of customers who have requested one. To ensure that every player is able to get the experience they expect on Xbox, we will be expanding our existing refund policy to offer full refunds to anyone who purchased Cyberpunk 2077 digitally from the Microsoft Store, until further notice."

If you're interested in a Microsoft Store refund, you can follow the steps on Microsoft's support page.

An award-winning Taiwanese horror game was removed from storefronts by the beleaguered developer CD Projekt Red amid a backlash from Chinese gamers, hours after it was put on sale. From a report: Devotion, a PC game that chronicles the life of a Taiwanese family in a religious cult in the 1980s, was released to critical acclaim in February 2019. But shortly after release, Chinese players found a poster hanging in the apartment that serves as the games' setting that said "Xi Jinping Winnie-the-Pooh moron." Almost 10,000 negative reviews soon flooded the game's review page. The developer, Red Candle Games, posted an apology saying it was "purely an accident" that the poster was left in the game.

Within a week, however, the game was pulled from sale on the digital storefront Steam. It has not been available in English since, despite winning multiple game of the year awards at the end of 2019, and an ongoing campaign for it to return to sale. On Wednesday, Red Candle Games announced that was changing. The game would be published on Friday by GOG, the digital storefront run by the Cyberpunk 2077 developer CD Projekt Red, it said in a tweet at 10am. A fresh wave of opprobrium from Chinese internet users followed the announcement and less than six hours later, CDPR reversed its decision. "Earlier today, it was announced that the game Devotion is coming to GOG," the company tweeted. "After receiving many messages from gamers, we have decided not to list the game in our store." It gave no further explanation and did not respond to a request for comment. Like many PC gaming firms, GOG operates in a grey area in China.