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Businesses

Major Union Launches Campaign To Organize Video Game, Tech Workers (latimes.com) 106

A new campaign launched Tuesday by one of the nation's largest labor unions -- and spearheaded by one of the leading video game industry activists in Southern California -- aims to organize video game studios and tech offices to form or join a union. The Los Angeles Times reports: The Campaign to Organize Digital Employees (CODE for short) is a new project of the Communications Workers of America aimed specifically at unionizing video game and tech companies. It grew out of conversations between the CWA and Game Workers Unite, a grass-roots organization that sprang up in 2018 to push for wall-to-wall unionization of the $43-billion video game industry, alongside conversations with organizers across the larger tech industry.

The union declined to specify how much money it was putting behind the new effort, but has put two organizers on payroll to lead the push with support from dozens of CWA staff members across the country. One of the new staffers, Wes McEnany, comes from a more traditional labor organizing career with Boston-area unions and the labor-backed campaign for a $15 minimum wage. CWA also hired Emma Kinema, who co-founded Game Workers Unite and organized the Los Angeles and Orange County chapters of the group. The dedicated staff and national ambition set the CODE project apart from other efforts to organize tech workers, such as the United Steelworkers-backed Pittsburgh Assn. of Tech Professionals, which successfully unionized Google subcontractors in September. The organizers behind the new effort see the push for better working conditions and corporate ethics as one and the same.
"The new project charts a path away from organizing video game workers along the Hollywood craft union model," the report adds. "SAG-AFTRA has represented video game voice actors for years, and called a strike in 2017 over pay and royalty structures. But CWA largely follows the industrial union model, which organizes entire companies at once rather than splitting workers who perform different jobs into specialized unions."

Slashdot reader sziring, who first brought the story to our attention, has raised the following questions/concerns: "If unions win out, will open source suffer? If a newly minted tech union worker wants to contribute time towards an open-source project will they be able to? Isn't rule one typically avoiding free work at all costs? I'm not debating if they should unionize but trying to understand the possible rippler effects if more coders fall under a union umbrella."
Microsoft

The Original Xbox Was Announced 19 Years Ago Today (gamerevolution.com) 51

On January 6, 2001, Bill Gates and The Rock debuted the original Xbox, calling it "the most electrifying" games console on the market. GameRevolution reports: The surreal image of The Rock standing alongside Gates, telling the billionaire "it doesn't matter what you think, Bill," was certainly a unique way to debut the console. We're glad Microsoft opted for this unusual route, though, because if it hadn't we wouldn't have video footage of The Rock discussing symmetric multiprocessing.

The original Xbox released on November 15, 2001. [It debuted with a 32-bit 733 MHz, custom Intel Pentium III Coppermine-based processor, 133 MHz 64-bit GTL+ front-side bus (FSB) with a 1.06 GB/s bandwidth, and 64 MB unified DDR SDRAM, with a 6.4 GB/s bandwidth, of which 1.06 GB/s is used by the CPU and 5.34 GB/s is shared by the rest of the system, according to Wikipedia.] Its high manufacturing cost would wind up costing Microsoft a lot of money, with the company losing $4 billion on the console. It would also fall short of its predicted 50 million sales, with Microsoft only shifting 24 million units by the end of its life cycle.
For comparison, the Xbox One X, which debuted on November 7, 2017, featured a SoC which incorporates a 2.3 GHz octa-core CPU, and Radeon GPU with 40 Compute Units clocked at 1172 MHz, generating 6 teraflops of graphical computing performance. It also includes 12GB of GDDR5 RAM with 9 GB allocated to games. Microsoft's next-generation Series X console is expected to deliver "four times the processing power of Xbox One X," although technical specs have yet to be announced.
AI

Video Leaks From Samsung's 'Artificial Human' Avatar Project Neon (theverge.com) 39

The Verge has been investigating Samsung's "artificial human" project Neon, which seems to be about creating realistic human avatars: A tweet from the project's lead and some leaked videos pretty much confirm this -- although they don't give us nearly enough information to judge how impressive Neon is. The lead of Neon, computer-human interaction researcher Paranav Mistry, tweeted this image, apparently showing one of the project's avatars. Mistry says the company's "Core R3" technology can now "autonomously create new expressions, new movements, new dialog (even in Hindi), completely different from the original captured data...."

In a recent interview, Mistry made clear he thinks "digital humans" will be a major technology in the 2020s... "While films may disrupt our sense of reality, 'virtual humans' or 'digital humans' will be reality. A digital human could extend its role to become a part of our everyday lives: a virtual news anchor, virtual receptionist, or even an AI-generated film star."

Reddit users also found the URLs for videos in the source code on Neon's home page -- and though the videos have since been removed, some of the footage has been archived and analyzed on YouTube.
Software

EA Appears To Be Permanently Banning Linux Players On Battlefield V 130

Many users have taken to the Lutris Forums to report that EA is permanently banning Linux players on Battlefield V. "Good friends, finally after some time without being able to play Battlefield V for Linux, this week I was using lutris-4.21, I was having fun when my anti-cheat, FairFight, blew me out of the game, so I was banned," writes one user. "As I was not using any cheating, I think the anti-cheat considered dxvk or the table layer that used at the time as cheating..." Another user said the "same problem" happened to them, and they "got banned on tuesday for cheating."

While some users await a response from EA, others have received an email confirming the action that was taken on their account. "... After thoroughly investigating your account and concern, we found that your account was actioned correctly and will not remove this sanction from your account," the email states.

We've seen this happen on multiple occasions with Blizzard, but they eventually fixed the problem the first time. In a comment on Hacker News, user jchw writes: "Anti-cheat software is an absolute shit show of cat-and-mouse tactics. It's often difficult to distinguish anti-cheat software from rootkits or spyware. They're invasive and user hostile, and they frequently cause collateral damage that is swept under the rug and that support tacitly refuses to acknowledge..."
Games

Ubisoft Uses AI To Teach a Car To Drive Itself in a Racing Game (venturebeat.com) 14

An anonymous reader shares a report: Reinforcement learning, an AI training technique that employs rewards to drive software policies toward goals, has been applied successfully to domains from industrial robotics to drug discovery. But while firms including OpenAI and Alphabet's DeepMind have investigated its efficacy in video games like Dota 2, Quake III Arena, and StarCraft 2, few to date have studied its use under constraints like those encountered in the game industry. That's presumably why Ubisoft La Forge, game developer Ubisoft's eponymous prototyping space, proposed in a recent paper an algorithm that's able to handle discrete, continuous video game actions in a "principled" and predictable way. They set it loose on a "commercial game" (likely The Crew or The Crew 2, though neither is explicitly mentioned) and report that it's competitive with state-of-the-art benchmark tasks.

"Reinforcement Learning applications in video games have recently seen massive advances coming from the research community, with agents trained to play Atari games from pixels or to be competitive with the best players in the world in complicated imperfect information games," wrote the coauthors of a paper describing the work. "These systems have comparatively seen little use within the video game industry, and we believe lack of accessibility to be a major reason behind this. Indeed, really impressive results ... are produced by large research groups with computational resources well beyond what is typically available within video game studios." The Ubisoft team, then, sought to devise a reinforcement learning approach that'd address common challenges in video game development. They note that data sample collection tends to be a lot slower generally, and that there exist time budget constraints over the runtime performance of agents.

Classic Games (Games)

Meet The Programmer Behind Atari's Legendarily Bad Videogame 'E.T.' (thehustle.co) 57

An anonymous reader quotes The Hustle: Once the most highly coveted game developer -- a hit-maker with the Midas touch -- he had been immortalized as the man who created E.T., the "worst" video game in history. But Howard Scott Warshaw's story, like that of Atari, is a parable about corporate greed and the dangers of prioritizing quantity over quality... His first game, Yars' Revenge -- a story about mutated houseflies under siege -- took him 7 months to develop, and went through another 5 months of rigorous play-testing. When it hit the shelves in May of 1982, it became Atari's biggest 2600 game of all time, selling more than 1m copies.

The success of this game netted Warshaw a high-profile follow-up assignment: the video game adaptation of the Steven Speilberg film, Raiders of the Lost Ark. Released in November of 1982 after 10 months of development, this, too, was a 1m-copy seller. Warshaw soon became known as the game designer with the golden touch -- and his success earned him rockstar status. According to press reports, he purportedly pulled in $1m a year and was "hounded for autographs by a devoted cult following of teenagers."

But in mid-1982, Atari had also begun to shift its business strategy in the games department. In its earlier days, Atari gave programmers ample time (5-10 months) to create and develop innovative games. But that window closed when the company realized that the real road to riches was in licensing the rights to films.... The typical game took 1k hours' worth of work over 6 months. Warshaw had less than 36 hours to come up with a concept [for his E.T. game] to present to Hollywood's hottest director. Worse yet, he had just 5 weeks to finish the game... Warshaw's only option was to create a small, simple, replayable game -- something with few moving parts that he could implement quickly. Less than 2 days later, he was standing in a conference room in Burbank, pitching his design to Spielberg: The player would guide E.T. through a landscape filled with pits, and collect pieces of a phone while evading FBI agents.

"He just looked at me and said, 'Can't you just do something like Pac-Man?'" recalls Warshaw. "But eventually, he approved it."

Warshaw then put in 500 hours over the next 5 weeks, "doing everything he could to make something halfway decent in the time he was given," the site reports.

"Unfortunately for Warshaw, the flop of E.T. coincided with a much graver event: The video game crash of 1983. A flood of low-quality, hastily created games, coupled with the rise of the personal computer, led to a moment of reckoning: In the 2 years following the release of E.T., the video game industry saw its revenue fall from $3.2B to just $100m -- a 97% decline..."

Warshaw gave up programming and became a real estate broker, and then a psychotherapist, the article concludes. "But true insiders knew that E.T. was merely a symptom -- not the cause -- of the crash."
Christmas Cheer

In 1994 A 12-Year-Old Programmed a Videogame. It Turned Up on Twitch Monday (kotaku.com) 41

Prorammer Rick Brewster has worked at both Microsoft and Facebook. But this Christmas on Twitter he shared the story of his long-lost videogame creation "that somehow -- like some kind of lost, drunken cat -- finally found its way home on Christmas Eve."

An anonymous reader quotes Kotaku: Rick Brewster is a programmer and the author of Paint.NET, a free replacement for Microsoft Paint that's expanded to have features similar to image creation programs like Photoshop and GIMP. In 1994, at the age of 12, Brewster made The Golden Flute IV: The Flute of Immortality, a DOS-based roleplaying game inspired by a text adventure from a 1984 instructional book on how to write adventure games. He wrote The Golden Flute IV on a Tandy 1000 TL/2, an IBM clone computer...

"I made ONE installable copy onto 3.5" 720K disks that I packaged up and mailed to my cousin on the east coast, and that's it," Brewster explained in a Twitter thread. That copy was seemingly lost, with no playable copy surviving.

Apparently, that's not what happened. Somehow, a version of that game found its way into the hands of a streamer name Macaw, who specializes in old and obscure games. He played The Golden Flute IV on December 23rd, exploring it for a short time before moving on to other games.

"Apparently breaking & entering is a 'serious felony' and punishable by execution without a trial in this universe," Brewster remembered on Twitter on Christmas Day.

He believes that back in 1994 his cousin must've uploaded the videogame to a BBS, since it's now ended up in the old game collection "Frostbyte" at the Internet Archive. Which means that you, too, can now play 12-year-old Rick Brewster's long-lost amateur videogame using Archive.org's online DOSbox emulator.
AI

Researchers Want To Use Mega Man 2 To Evaluate AI (venturebeat.com) 11

Games have long served as a training ground for AI algorithms, and not without good reason. From a report: Games -- particularly video games -- provide challenging environments against which to benchmark autonomous systems. In 2013, a team of researchers introduced the Arcade Learning Environment, a collection of over 55 Atari 2600 games designed to test a broad range of AI techniques. More recently, San Francisco research firm OpenAI detailed Procgen Benchmark, a set of 16 virtual worlds that measure how quickly models learn generalizable skills. The next frontier might be Mega Man, if an international team of researchers have their way. In a newly published paper [PDF] on the preprint server Arxiv.org, they propose EvoMan, a game-playing competition based on the eight boss fights in Capcom's cult classic Mega Man 2. As they describe it, competitors' goal is to train an AI agent to defeat every enemy and evaluate their performances by common metrics.

Why Mega Man 2? The paper's coauthors assert that few other environments test an AI's ability to win against a single enemy, or how well an AI generalizes to win matches against waves of enemies or coevolves to create increasingly difficult enemies. To this end, in EvoMan, an AI-controlled Mega Man -- a robot equipped with a powerful arm cannon -- must beat eight so-called Robot Masters equipped with different weapons. Every time a Robot Master is defeated, the agent acquires its weapon, making it easier to defeat the bosses who remain. As proposed, EvoMan challenge entrants would train their agents on any four enemies and measure how well their learned strategy scales up to a whole set of enemies. The agents would be expected to learn how to identify and react to general patterns like avoiding being shot or shooting at the direction of the enemy, and to deplete an enemy's health from 100 energy points to 0 by the end of each match.

First Person Shooters (Games)

The Man Who Made Wolfenstein (polygon.com) 19

theodp writes: Over at Polygon, games journalist Colin Campbell remembers the late Silas Warner in The Man Who Made Wolfenstein. Before Doom, there was Warner's Castle Wolfenstein (1981) and Beyond Castle Wolfenstein (1984), which counted id Software's legendary John Carmack and John Romero as fans. After completing his degree in Physics at Indiana University, Warner found work at IU installing a new system called PLATO, which he used to fork John Daleske's Empire (1973), which is sometimes credited as being the first multiplayer shooting game. Ultima creator Richard Garriott called Warner's Escape (1978) a major inspiration that "changed my life." Warner's Robotwar (manual, pdf) also did double-duty as a stealth learn-to-program tutorial. Sadly, Warner was plagued with bad health and passed away at age 54 without receiving the proper credit or rewards he was due.
First Person Shooters (Games)

How Do Bullets Work in Video Games? (gamasutra.com) 92

FPS (first-person shooter) games have been a staple in the video game industry ever since the explosion of Wolfenstein 3D back in 1992. Since then, the genre has been evolving with graphical upgrades, huge budgets, and an eSports ecosystem. But what about its core, the shooting mechanics? How have we progressed on that front? Why do some guns feel like it's the real thing, while others feel like toys?
Technology

Board Games Are Getting Really, Really Popular (wired.com) 43

An anonymous reader shares a report: Jonathan Kay, co-author of the new book Your Move: What Board Games Teach Us About Life, has largely given up on movies and TV, and has instead made tabletop gaming his primary mode of recreation. "It has a social function in my life, and an intellectual function," Kay says in Episode 392 of the Geek's Guide to the Galaxy podcast. "I've now written a book about it, so I guess it has a professional, editorial function. It's a huge part of my life." Kay wrote the book together with Joan Moriarty, who works full-time at the Snakes & Lattes board game cafe in Toronto. The concept of a board game cafe may be unfamiliar to many, but Kay believes that Snakes & Lattes is an important institution.

"I'm not sure if it's still the biggest board game cafe in North America, but I think it might be the oldest single-purpose urban board game cafe," he says. "And the Snakes & Lattes business model became a model for people creating board game cafes in other cities." The rise of such cafes is a testament to the growing popularity of board games. Sales quadrupled between 2013 and 2016, and the annual Gen Con convention now attracts over 70,000 attendees, Kay among them. He enjoys the laid back atmosphere among the mostly quiet, bookish gamers. "Introverts are actually usually very careful about their social interactions, because they know that if there's conflict that emerges, they won't know how to manage it," he says. "So as a result there's a heightened sense of politeness and consideration at these places."

Games

Video Games Are Dividing South Korea (technologyreview.com) 48

When StarCraft first came on the scene in 1998, the real-time science fiction strategy game wasn't just a hit -- it was an awakening. Out of 11 million copies sold worldwide, 4.5 million were in South Korea, despite it not being localized into Korean. "PC bangs," pay-as-you-go gaming cafes stocked with food and drinks, grew from just 100 to 23,000 in three years. But as the mania took the country by storm, hospital check-ins involving computer games also dramatically rose. Young people were playing until their bodily functions began breaking down, occasionally even to the point of death.

In May of this year, after years of advocacy from medical experts and lawmakers, members of the 72nd assembly of the World Health Organization unanimously voted to recognize video game addiction as a disorder. The categorization, however, remains controversial. Despite years of concern and study about the effects of video games, conclusive evidence that they cause addiction or violence has been hard to come by. And in the numerous parliamentary forums, televised debates, and academic symposia convened, the same question looms large: Has a culture of intensive gaming really brought about a public health crisis, or is excessive gaming just a symptom of other problems?
Games

Vim Releases 'Killersheep' Game To Demo Two New Features In Vim 8.2 (vim.org) 24

The creators of Vim have released a game called "Killersheep" to show off two new features in Vim 8.2.

"Before I did the keynote at VimConf 2018 I asked plugin developers what they wanted from Vim," reads the announcement at Vim.org. "The result was a very long list of requested features. The top two items were clear: Popup windows and text properties." After more than a year of development the new features are now ready for the Vim crowds.

Popup windows make it possible to show messages, function prototypes, code snippets and anything else on top of the text being edited. They open and close quickly and can be highlighted in many ways... This was no small effort. Although the existing window support could be used, popup windows are different enough to require a lot of extra logic. Especially to update the screen efficiently. Also to make it easy for plugin writers to use them; you don't need to tell Vim exactly where to show one, just give a reference point and the text to display, Vim will figure out the size and where the popup fits best.

Text properties can be used for something as simple as highlighting a text snippet or something as complicated as using an external parser to locate syntax items and highlight them asynchronously. This can be used instead of the pattern based syntax highlighting. A text property sticks with the text, also when inserting a word before it. And this is done efficiently by storing the properties with the text.

Star Wars Prequels

Exclusive Clip From 'Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker' Debuts In Fortnite (theverge.com) 24

In 30 minutes an exclusive clip from the yet-to-be-released Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker will premier in the videogame Fortnite.

An anonymous reader quotes the Verge: We've known about the clip premiere since last week, but Epic disclosed some more concrete details Thursday night at the Game Awards. The studio says it'll open the gates of its virtual world starting at 1:30 p.m. EST. The clip will start airing at the Risky Reels drive-in movie theater at 2 p.m. EST. Speaking with Game Awards host Geoff Keighley yesterday, Epic's worldwide creative director Donald Mustard hinted that there would be some sort of involvement from director J.J. Abrams. We don't know if that means a live pre-show, or perhaps the director himself will intro the clip before it airs.
UPDATE: CNN has a report on the event, while also noting that its start was delayed 15 minutes "because of issues with logging in and making purchases.

"Even after 2:15 pm, players still took to social media to complain the game was crashing or they couldn't even open it."

Fortnite is also offering skins of Star Wars characters Rey and Finn, according to the article, with Mustard envisioning Fortnite as a world where all intellectual property "can live together." The Verge also predicts that the clip will eventually be available elsewhere online, while Business Insider believes "countless" Fortnite players will stream the event live on YouTube and Twitch.

Meanwhile, J. J. Abrams has also asked Lucasfilm to release the original Star Wars trilogy in its original pre-Special Edition format, according to Nerdist.com, but "I've been told that, for reasons that I quite don't understand, that that's not necessarily possible."
Microsoft

Xbox Series X To Allow 'Suspend and Resume' For Multiple Games At Once (wccftech.com) 53

In an exclusive interview with Gamespot, Partner Director of Program Management for Team Xbox Jason Ronald revealed a new feature of the Xbox Series X: the ability to suspend and resume multiple games at once. Wccftech highlights what Ronald said: [From Gamespot]: "Today, we have the capability of instantly resuming the last game that you were playing. Why can't you do that for multiple games? Many players choose to play multiple games at the same time, being able to instantly jump right back where I was, those are things that we can do with the platform level to make the gaming experience better. It's really about ensuring there's less waiting and more time playing because that's ultimately what we all want to do with the consoles and with the services that we have."

For his part, Phil Spencer (Head of Gaming at Microsoft) wanted to highlight the goal to enhance the player's immersive factor thanks to the high refresh rate (the Xbox Series X supports up to 120 frames per second) and reduced input latency: "So when we talk about things like refresh rate and we talk about input latency, this is all about the most immersive experience game designers can create, where the visuals are stunning, my ability to get into the experience [is] very timely, it's as great as it's ever been with the I/O speeds and the load times we're going to see, and the input and the ability for just my control and activation of my character or of the game itself becomes a subconscious thing and not something that I think about."

XBox (Games)

Microsoft's Next Xbox Is Xbox Series X, Coming Holiday 2020 (theverge.com) 78

At the 2019 Game Awards today, Microsoft revealed the name and console design of its next-generation gaming console: Xbox Series X. The Verge reports: The console itself looks far more like a PC than we've seen from previous Xbox consoles, and Microsoft's trailer provides a brief glimpse at the new design. The console itself is designed to be used in both vertical and horizontal orientations, and Microsoft's Xbox chief, Phil Spencer, promises that it will "deliver four times the processing power of Xbox One X in the most quiet and efficient way."

The Xbox Series X will include a custom-designed CPU based on AMD's Zen 2 and Radeon RDNA architecture. Microsoft is also using an SSD on Xbox Series X, which promises to boost load times. Xbox Series X will also support 8K gaming, frame rates of up to 120 fps in games, ray tracing, and variable refresh rate support. Microsoft also revealed a new Xbox Wireless Controller today. "Its size and shape have been refined to accommodate an even wider range of people, and it also features a new Share button to make capturing screenshots and game clips simple," explains Spencer. This updated controller will work with existing Xbox One consoles and Windows 10 PCs, and will ship with every Xbox Series X.

PlayStation (Games)

Sony Announces Plan To Publish PlayStation Games On Non-PS Consoles (arstechnica.com) 24

Sony has announced plans to launch PlayStation games on "additional console platforms beyond PlayStation platforms as early as 2021." The first announced series for the change is Sony's long-running baseball sim series MLB The Show. Ars Technica reports: The gazillion-dollar question, of course, is which other console platforms we might expect the series to launch on. Neither Sony nor MLB had any answers to that question as of press time. Sony also didn't hint to doing the same thing for any other current PlayStation-exclusive series. Since the series began life in 1998 on PlayStation 1, simply titled MLB '98, Sony's baseball games have launched exclusively on PlayStation platforms -- and, in fact, they've launched on every PlayStation-branded device. While other multi-platform baseball sim series have fallen by the wayside in the years since, most recently 2K Sports' MLB 2K13, Sony's PlayStation-exclusive take on the American pastime has persisted as an annual release.

"Sony" at large has published games on non-PlayStation consoles in recent years, mostly in the form of Sony Music Entertainment's UNTIES entertainment publishing group. But those games are rarely marked with "Sony" or "PlayStation" branding, let alone temporary exclusivity on PlayStation platforms. Today's news marks the first time a series from Sony Interactive Entertainment with loud ties to the PlayStation brand has been announced for other competing consoles.
There are still way more questions than answers: "Might Sony go so far as to launch MLB The Show on Xbox, thus creating a tangled love triangle of who publishes on whose consoles? Or will this become a bizarre move on Sony's part to support Google Stadia, even though Sony has its own complicated sometimes-streaming subscription service? And either way, how far might Sony and the MLB milk this cloud of mystery, assuming that 'as early as 2021' could mean one, two, or even 4,000 years later?"
Games

Architects Are Playing With the Future of Design in Video Games (medium.com) 36

Game worlds can be blueprints for the real world, liberating spaces where rules can be reinvented and the invisible made visible. From a report: For architects, the sheer scope of this artificiality means video games can be both playgrounds and testing grounds. "In games, there is the idea that an object has a visual solidity and a material solidity, and it doesn't have to have both," says Luke Pearson, a lecturer at the Bartlett School of Architecture in London. "It takes you right back to the start of having to construct a space. You have to invent your own rules and logic for how things work." Pearson and his colleague Sandra Youkhana run the Videogame Urbanism studio at Bartlett. They investigate the future of cities through video games, teaching students how to use virtual worlds to interrogate the ways they think about materials.

"We want to push beyond the idea that the future of game technology in architecture is only in making photorealistic, VR representations for developers to look at penthouses," Pearson says. At a time when it's perfectly normal to segue from navigating the real-world walls of a city into the fantastical vistas of a game, the realms of architecture and games are arguably closer than ever. There is growing interest in pulling one into the other. Architect and film director Liam Young recently called on young architects to apply their skills to designing digital environments "that a billion people play in every day" instead of cutting their teeth designing "rich houses for rich people."

China

Chinese Newspaper Touts Videogame Where Players 'Hunt Down Traitors' in Hong Kong (globaltimes.cn) 96

The Global Times is a daily tabloid newspaper published "under the auspices" of the Chinese Communist Party's People's Daily, according to Wikipedia.

And this week Slashdot reader Tulsa_Time noticed that this official state-run newspaper "promoted a video game where users are tasked with hunting down the 'traitors' leading Hong Kong's ongoing pro-democracy demonstrations."

Here's an excerpt from the article by China's state-run newspaper: An online game calling on players to hunt down traitors who seek to separate Hong Kong from China and fuel street violence has reportedly begun to attract players across Chinese mainland social media platforms. The game, "fight the traitors together," is set against the backdrop of the social unrest that has persisted in Hong Kong. The script asks the player to find eight secessionists hidden in the crowd participating in Hong Kong protests.

Players can knock them down with slaps or rotten eggs until they are captured. Online gamers claim the game allows them to vent their anger at the separatist behavior of secessionists during the recent Hong Kong riots. The eight traitors in the game, caricatured based on real people, include Jimmy Lai Chee-ying, Martin Lee Chu-ming and Joshua Wong Chi-fung, prominent opposition figures who have played a major role in inciting unrest in Hong Kong. There are also traitor figures in ancient China...

In the game, amid a crowd of black-clad rioters wearing yellow hats and face masks, Anson Chan Fang On-sang, another leading opposition figure, carries a bag with a U.S. flag, clutches a stack of U.S. dollars and holds a loudspeaker to incite violence in the streets.

Graphics

Qualcomm To Offer GPU Driver Updates On Google Play Store For Some Snapdragon Chips (hothardware.com) 8

MojoKid writes: At its Snapdragon Summit in Maui, Hawaii this week, Qualcomm unveiled the new Snapdragon 865 Mobile Platform, which enable next year's flagship 5G Android phones with more performance, a stronger Tensor-based AI processor and a very interesting new forthcoming feature not yet offered for any smartphone platform to date. The company announced that it will eventually start delivering driver updates for its Adreno GPU engines on board the Snapdragon 865 as downloadable packages via the Google Play Store. This is big news for smartphones, as GPU drivers are rarely updated out of band, if ever, and typically have to wait for the next major Android release. And even then, many OEMs don't bother putting in the effort to ensure that mobile GPUs are running the most current graphics drivers from Qualcomm. The process, which would have to be pre-qualified by major OEMs as well, will be akin to what the PC GPU 3D graphics driver ecosystem has been benefiting from for a long time, for maximum performance and compatibility. Unfortunately, at least currently, GPU driver update support is limited to only the Adreno 650 core on board the new Snapdragon 865, which currently supports updating drivers in this fashion. Here's hoping this program is met with success and Qualcomm will begin to enable the feature for legacy and new midrange Snapdragon platforms as well.

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