New anti-addiction guidelines for minors that set out limits for time and money spent on mobile games have been introduced by China's state censor, following previous calls to curb excessive gaming. PolygamousRanchKid writes: State media published the new rules on Tuesday, which introduced a stricter real-name registration system and, for the first time, an age rating system. The State Administration of Press and Publications (SAPP) guidelines also include limiting gaming to between 8am and 10pm, with no more than 1.5 hours each day -- or three hours on holidays -- and no more than 400 yuan (US$57) to be spent each month on in-game purchases. Gaming analyst Daniel Ahmad said the new rules were in line with expectations as many of the limits already existed in computer games and were being extended to mobile titles. He expected the real-name registration and rating system to have the greatest impact on underage players. "The introduction of a stricter real-name registration and age rating system is certainly new and will have a larger impact given that these systems will be harder for minors to hack or cheat," said Ahmad, who works for gaming consultancy Niko Partners.

A family physician warned about a new problem this week in the New York Times: As a family doctor, I often hear from parents about how their kids push back at any attempt to limit how much time they spend playing video games. The parents will say, it's after midnight, maybe it's time to turn off the video game and get some sleep. But the kid -- usually a teenage boy -- responds that he wants to be a professional gamer. "This is my job," the boy might say... Millions of young Americans are paying real money to watch other young people play video games. Tyler Blevins, known as "Ninja," earns $500,000 a month playing Fortnite -- and that was before he dumped his previous host, Twitch, where he had over 14 million followers, to join Microsoft's streaming platform, Mixer.

Does it make sense to support a teenager's dreams of being the next Tyler Blevins? Plenty of parents do everything they can to support their children's athletic dreams. They invest in soccer camp for the next Mia Hamm, do endless tennis drills with the next Serena Williams or wake up before sunrise to drive the next Michael Phelps to swim practice. Is it any different if your child is staying up all night playing video games? The University of California, Irvine, offers scholarships to play e-sports in games such as Overwatch and League of Legends, just as many colleges have long offered scholarships to play traditional sports such as soccer and football...

The key to emotional well-being is balance. Children, especially teens, can easily careen off balance. As parents, we have to teach our kids the skills they need to keep from crashing through the guardrails. That is not to say you should be dismissive of your child's passion. If your child is dreaming of being a professional gamer, I advise parents to answer just as they would a teenager who wants to be a professional athlete. Play your game. Improve your skills. But homework and other responsibilities come first. And don't sacrifice sleep. .. Parents can support their kids' interests while also providing a reality check... You say: I commend you for your dream. I applaud your dream. I support you in your pursuit of your dream. But dreams don't always come true. And even if yours does, it may not last. Nobody plays professional soccer or professional football forever, and the same is true for e-sports, which take a greater physical and mental toll than many would imagine -- with long bouts of live streaming in particular being tied to real risks.

haaz (Slashdot reader #3,346) tells us that history has just been made as part of the Children's Miracle Network Hospitals annual online game-playing fundraiser, Extra Life:
A man from Milwaukee, Wisconsin is trying to play pinball long enough to break the standing Guinness World Record for Longest Marathon Pinball Play of 30 hours 10 minutes.

He's using Extra Life's gaming/DIY fundraising site to webcast his attempt and raise money for Children's Hospital of Wisconsin. He gets a five minute break every hour, and yes, he's wearing an adult diaper.
Just minutes ago on Twitter, the Children's Hospital of Wisconsin announced he'd beaten the record. And lots of other fundraising game-playing marathons are happening around the world today, including one in Canada -- and many of them are being streamed online.

The event began in 2008, and over the last four years has raised close to $10 million each year. As one gaming site put it, "Let's help the future programmers of our cyborg overlords fulfill their mission by streaming some video games for the kids this weekend!"

Blizzard Entertainment kicked off its annual BlizzCon fan expo today with a direct apology from president J. Allen Brack regarding the explosive Hong Kong controversy that's engulfed the company for the past month. From a report: "Blizzard had the opportunity to bring the world together in a tough Hearthstone e-sports moment about a month ago. We did not. We moved too quickly in our decision-making and then to make matters worse, we were too slow to talk to all of you," Brack said onstage during the beginning of the BlizzCon opening ceremony. "When I think about how most unhappy I am, I think about two things. We didn't live up to the higher standards we set for ourselves. Second, we failed in our purpose. For that, I am sorry, and I accept accountability."

New submitter jklappenbach writes: Further cementing Kyle Hill's nerd creds, he's just released a YouTube video [via Because Science] where he demonstrates how Magic: The Gathering can be used to construct a Turing Machine, using both a specifically-constructed deck and the current rules of the game (except the ability to pull cards from all of history). Kyle posted the full setup of the deck in a comment below the video, with a link to the paper that can be found via arXiv.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: DeepMind today announced a new milestone for its artificial intelligence agents trained to play the Blizzard Entertainment game StarCraft II. The Google-owned AI lab's more sophisticated software, still called AlphaStar, is now grandmaster level in the real-time strategy game, capable of besting 99.8 percent of all human players in competition. The findings are to be published in a research paper in the scientific journal Nature. Not only that, but DeepMind says it also evened the playing field when testing the new and improved AlphaStar against human opponents who opted into online competitions this past summer. For one, it trained AlphaStar to use all three of the game's playable races, adding to the complexity of the game at the upper echelons of pro play. It also limited AlphaStar to only viewing the portion of the map a human would see and restricted the number of mouse clicks it could register to 22 non-duplicated actions every five seconds of play, to align it with standard human movement.

Still, the AI was capable of achieving grandmaster level, the highest possible online competitive ranking, and marks the first ever system to do so in StarCraft II. DeepMind sees the advancement as more proof that general-purpose reinforcement learning, which is the machine learning technique underpinning the training of AlphaStar, may one day be used to train self-learning robots, self-driving cars, and create more advanced image and object recognition systems. "The history of progress in artificial intelligence has been marked by milestone achievements in games. Ever since computers cracked Go, chess and poker, StarCraft has emerged by consensus as the next grand challenge," said David Silver, a DeepMind principle research scientist on the AlphaStar team, in a statement. "The game's complexity is much greater than chess, because players control hundreds of units; more complex than Go, because there are 10^26 possible choices for every move; and players have less information about their opponents than in poker."

After gaming giant Activision Blizzard banned a pro gamer who expressed support for Hong Kong protesters, the company has taken heat on all sides. Players boycotted Blizzard games. Employees walked out of work. Lawmakers lambasted the company for caving to pressure from China. And Blizzard faced another problem it didn't reveal at the time: a sponsor pulled out of its pro gaming league amid the controversy. From a report: Two days after the company announced that it would ban Hong Kong-based professional Hearthstone player Chung Ng Wai, Mitsubishi Motors Taiwan ended its sponsorship of Blizzard's esports events, according to Erica Rasch, a spokesperson for Mitsubishi.

DarkRookie2 shares a report from Ars Technica: For the first time since 2012, Electronic Arts is once again publishing new games on Valve's Steam platform, the publisher announced today. [You still need an Origin account.] A preorder page for next month's Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order is already up on the Steam store, and EA promises that "other major titles," like The Sims 4 and Unraveled Two, will be available on Steam in "the coming months." Multiplayer titles like Apex Legends, FIFA 20, and Battlefield V, meanwhile, will be available on Steam "next year," with cross-play between the Steam versions and those on EA's existing Origin service.

Counter-Strike: Global Offensive players will no longer be able to trade container keys between accounts because the trade was part of a massive worldwide fraud network. From a report: Players earned cases in Counter-Strike containing weapons and cosmetic upgrades, but had to purchase the keys to open the boxes. Developer Valve runs an internal marketplace on Steam where it allowed players to trade the boxes and the keys. Valve patched the game on October 28 and explained the problem in its patch notes. "In the past, most key trades we observed were between legitimate customers," the statement said. "However, worldwide fraud networks have recently shifted to using CS:GO keys to liquidate their gains. At this point, nearly all key purchases that end up being traded or sold on the marketplace are believed to be fraud-sourced."

Microsoft is bringing back its Xbox All Access plan, the monthly subscription that includes membership to Xbox Live Gold and Xbox Game Pass, as well as Xbox One hardware, all for a discounted monthly fee. From a report: This time, however, Microsoft is giving subscribers the option to prep for a next-generation console upgrade when the next Xbox, named Project Scarlett, launches in holiday 2020. Xbox All Access originally launched in summer 2018. As part of that subscription, for $21.99 per month for 24 months, subscribers got an Xbox One S, Xbox Live Gold, and Game Pass; and for $34.99 per month, subscribers got an Xbox One X, in addition to Xbox Live Gold and Game Pass. There was no upfront cost, and at the end of the 24-month subscription period, subscribers keep the Xbox One hardware they paid for.

The latest Call Of Duty (CoD) game has been released, amid calls to boycott its publisher's products. From a report: Call Of Duty: Modern Warfare is the sixteenth major title in the series, which is one of the best-selling games franchises of all time. Activision Blizzard has faced criticism for punishing an e-sports competitor who voiced support for the Hong Kong protests at another game's event. Some fans said they had cancelled their pre-orders of CoD as a consequence. But industry watchers still expect the title to be one of the year's biggest earners. "Call of Duty remains Activision's biggest AAA [large budget] game franchise and is key to the company's annual performance and overall commercial targets," said Piers Harding-Rolls, an analyst at the IHS Markit consultancy.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: When Google launches its Stadia streaming service on November 19 (for some pre-orderers, at least), it will only include titles that are also available on standard PCs and consoles. Going forward, though, the company says it's going to focus on first-party exclusives "that wouldn't be possible on any other platform." That's how Google head of Stadia Games and Entertainment Jade Raymond (well-known as one of the creators of Assassin's Creed) summarized the company's plans in a recent interview with GamesIndustry.biz. Google announced today that its first first-party game development studio would be located in Montreal, and Raymond told GI that studio will be focused on trying things that other dedicated game platforms can't do.

Part of that promise, Raymond says, is the ability to use Google's distributed data center hardware to perform real-time calculations that can't be done on even the most powerful home hardware. "A fully physics-simulated game is one of the Holy Grails of game creation since Trespasser was being imagined 20-something years ago, and now we finally have a platform where we'll be able to deliver some of those experiences," Raymond said, making reference to the overly ambitious failure of 1998's Jurassic Park: Trespasser. That distributed server technology could also aid in the performance and scale of MMOs, Raymond said, because "everyone [on Stadia] is essentially playing in one big LAN party as far as the tech is concerned. There is no difference or constraints from an architecture perspective of how far the users are, or worrying about replication and all the other things that typically limit the number of people you can have in a game." Raymond went on to say that she foresees story-based Stadia games with characters that have "believable human interactions" rather than canned lines of repeated language. "She also talked up the potential to watch a YouTube documentary that includes footage of a classic game, then jump into a Stadia-powered gameplay session with that game directly," reports Ars Technica.

The Fortnite Chapter 2 update that rolled out to gamers worldwide last week has shattered traffic records at Akamai, one of the multiple content delivery networks (CDNs) Epic Games was using to get the game update to its players. From a report: Traffic numbers during the update's rollout peaked at 106 Tbps on Akamai's network, surpassing the 100 Tbps threshold for the first time in the company's history. While exact numbers were not released, the Fortnite update is believed to have accounted for more than half of the peak traffic. Adam Karon, Executive Vice President and GM, Media and Carrier, at Akamai, said the company is regularly reaching peaks of 50 Tbps every day, usually compromised of live streaming video (including live sports), music, e-commerce transactions, financial services, banking, software patches, healthcare information, automobile software updates, and others. "It was just 2008 when we marveled that peak traffic on Akamai crossed the 1 Tbps mark. Now, hardly a decade later, we're talking about a peak two orders of magnitude greater," Karon said.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Since the World Health Organization proposed new diagnoses for "hazardous gaming" and "gaming disorder" last year, there's been an ongoing scientific debate about which way the causation for these issues really goes. Does an excessive or addictive relationship with gaming actually cause psychological problems, or are people with existing psychological problems simply more likely to have an unhealthy relationship with gaming? A recent study by Oxford's Internet Institute, published in the open access journal Clinical Psychological Science, lends some support to the latter explanation. But it also highlights just how many of the game industry's most devoted players may also be driven by some unmet psychological needs.

To study how so-called "dysfunctional gaming" relates to psychological needs and behaviors, the Oxford researchers surveyed a nationally representative sample of 1,004 UK adolescents and their caregivers. They asked the caregivers to evaluate their adolescents' levels of "psychosocial functioning:" how well the adolescents are able to internalize or externalize problems in their lives as evidenced by their behavior. [...] Of the 1,004 adolescents surveyed, 525 said they played online games daily for an average of about three hours per day. Among that group, over 55% showed at least one of the nine indicators for Internet Gaming Disorder, and even 23% showed at least three indicators. Those reported "dysregulated gaming" effects showed a significant positive correlation with the amount of time spent playing, as well as a significant negative correlation with the reported psychosocial evaluations from caregivers. In other words, those with "dysregulated" gaming habits were more likely to spend more time playing each day and less likely to be able to handle problems in their lives in a healthy way. Crucially, though, the measured effect of the dysregulated gaming variable in the study "accounted for a practically insignificant share of variability in key outcomes... as compared with the role played by basic psychological needs," as the study authors write. "This evidence suggests that having information about the extent to which an adolescent's video-game play is dysregulated provides no practically useful incremental information when viewed in light caregivers' assessments of emotional, behavioral, peer, or conduct difficulties."

"So while so-called adolescent 'problem gamers' are more likely to show behavioral problems, that fact in and of itself is much less important in predicting those problems than other measures of whether those adolescents' psychological needs are being met," reports Ars Technica. "That suggests that both dysregulated gaming and psychosocial behavior problems are both potential signs of more fundamental underlying psychological frustrations rather than excessive gaming causing problems in and of itself."

An anonymous reader quotes the Verge: Blizzard has suspended three college Hearthstone players for six months after they held up a sign that read "Free Hong Kong, Boycott Blizz" while participating in an official competition stream. The ban, which was first reported by VICE Games, comes just over a week after Blizzard suspended a professional Hearthstone player, Ng "Blitzchung" Wai Chung for six months...

Similar to Blitzchung's ban, the three college players didn't receive word about their ban until a couple of days after they held up the sign... Team player Casey Chambers tweeted out an email from a member of the Hearthstone team at Blizzard, which stated that the entire team received the ban for violating the company's official rules.
eSports consultant Rod Breslau posted on Twitter that now Blizzard is also not allowing post-game interviews for Collegiate Hearthstone teams. He adds, "I'm impressed with just how many bad decisions Blizzard has made through all of this..."

Activision and Infinity Ward are doubling down on their commitment to not have loot boxes in the upcoming Call of Duty: Modern Warfare with the announcement that it will instead feature a battle pass. The new system is almost identical to other battle pass systems found in games like Fortnite. IGN reports: In a newly published blog post, Activision announced that is "introducing a new Battle Pass system, not a loot box system," to Call of Duty: Modern Warfare. The news comes after Infinity Ward announced the studio is not developing a loot box system for Modern Warfare despite rumors and leaks suggesting otherwise. A battle pass is a system where players can earn rewards by playing the game and completing in-game objectives. The more objectives players complete, the further they progress through the Battle Pass and the more rewards they unlock.

Unlike a loot box, a battle pass usually shows what rewards players are on track to unlock, and this will be the case for Modern Warfare's battle pass as well. "The new Battle Pass system will allow players to see the content that they are earning or buying," Activision writes. "Battle Passes will launch timed to new, post-launch live seasons, so you can unlock cool new Modern Warfare-themed content that matches each season." Activision also says that "functional content" that impact gameplay and game balance, like base weapons and attachments, will be unlocked simply by progressing through the game and not a battle pass. "There will be both a Free Stream and a Premium Stream of content in the Battle Pass System in Modern Warfare," says Activision. "New base weapons will be earned through gameplay, simply by playing Modern Warfare. Functional attachments for base weapons can be unlocked through gameplay as well just like in the game's Beta." Instead, the battle pass and in-game store will feature cosmetics that "does not impact game balance."

The battle pass is expected to arrive later this year.

Cecilia D'Anastasio and Dhruv Mehrotra report via Kotaku: Today, when you use Wizards Unite or Pokemon Go or any of Niantic's other apps, your every move is getting documented and stored -- up to 13 times a minute, according to the results of a Kotaku investigation. Even players who know that the apps record their location data are usually astonished once they look at just how much they've told Niantic about their lives through their footsteps. For years, users of these technologists' products -- from Google Street View to Pokemon Go -- have been questioning how far they're going with users' information and whether those users are adequately educated on what they're giving up and with whom it's shared. In the process, those technologists have made mistakes, both major and minor, with regards to user privacy. As Niantic summits the world of augmented reality, it's engineering that future of that big-money field, too. Should what Niantic does with its treasure trove of valuable data remain shrouded in the darkness particular to up-and-coming Silicon Valley darlings, that opacity might become so normalized that users lose any expectation of knowing how they're being profited from.

Analogue is set to announce a new Game Boy clone. From a report: Analogue, known for their FPGA (Field Programmable Gate Array)-based hardware clones of the NES, SNES, and Sega Genesis/Megadrive, will be launching a handheld addition to their lineup called the "Analogue Pocket." The unit will be compatible with the entire library of Game Boy and Game Boy Color games, as well as Sega's Game Gear, SNK's Neo Geo Pocket Colour, and Atari's Lynx -- essentially bringing every 90's handheld under one hardware roof, without software emulation. The unit will also feature a 3.5" LTPS LCD at 1600 x 1440 resolution (615ppi), and USB-C charging port. Further reading: Game Boy has turned Game Man, just in time for the original device's 30th birthday.

Activision Blizzard, reeling from harsh reactions after it punished a tournament player for backing Hong Kong's anti-Beijing protesters, canceled a New York launch event for an edition of its Overwatch game. From a report: The event, scheduled for Wednesday at Nintendo's store in Rockefeller Center, was planned to support the release of Overwatch: Legendary Edition for the Nintendo Switch portable game machine. Nintendo tweeted Tuesday that Blizzard had canceled the promotion. Blizzard, which didn't immediately respond to a request for comment, has been struggling to contain a backlash after it punished the gamer Chung Ng Wai, known as Blitzchung. The player wore a gas mask and chanted a pro-Hong Kong slogan in a post-tournament interview, leading Blizzard to ban him from events for a year and strip him of $10,000 in prize money.

Google's Stadia game streaming service will launch on November 19th, the company's Rick Osterloh announced today at the company's fall hardware event. From a report: In a separate blog post published during the keynote, Google added that servers will open to the public at 12PM EST/9AM PST. Besides the US, Stadia will launch in Canada, UK, Ireland, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Netherlands, Belgium, Denmark, Sweden, Norway and Finland. At launch, you'll be able to purchase Stadia's Founder's Edition for $129.99. The pack, which has been able to pre-order since June, includes a Chromecast Ultra, limited-edition Night Blue controller and two three-month Stadia Pro subscriptions. The Founder's Edition grants you access to Stadia's library of games at up to 4K resolution, 60 frames per second and with both HDR and 5.1 surround sound. Next year, Google plans to offer a Stadia Base subscription that allows you to buy games individually and play them at 1080p and 60 frames per second.