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.

The latest update from Internet Archive brings thousands of MS-DOS games from the '90s like 3D Bomber, Zool and Alien Rampage. CNET reports: On Sunday, Internet Archive released 2,500 MS-DOS games that includes action, strategy and adventure titles. Some of the games are Vor Terra, Spooky Kooky Monster Maker, Princess Maker 2 and I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream. "This will be our biggest update yet, ranging from tiny recent independent productions to long-forgotten big-name releases from decades ago," Internet Archive software curator Jason Scott wrote on the site's blog.

One game that might trigger a few memories is the 1992 action-adventure horror game Alone in the Dark, published by Infogrames. In the game, you can play private investigator Edward Carnby or family member Emily Hartwood, who's investigating the suspicious death of Jeremy Hartwood in his Louisiana mansion called Derceto, which is now supposedly haunted. Fighting against rats, zombies and giant worms, you have to solve a number of puzzles to escape. Another retro game included by Internet Archive is a 1994 title played on PCs and Amiga computers called Mr. Blobby (a remake of the SNES game Super Troll Islands). Players can choose from three different characters -- Mr. Blobby, Mrs. Blobby and Baby Blobby. The goal of the game is to color in the computer screen by walking over it. Levels include climbing ladders, avoiding spikes and bouncing on springs.

Microsoft has started the public preview for the Project xCloud game streaming service that it first announced in late 2018. Thurrott reports: "The Project xCloud Preview is now officially live in the US, UK and Korea," a Microsoft representative told me today. "This preview serves as our opportunity to test, improve and garner feedback. It's critical we bring gamers with us on this journey so we can learn more from them and their experiences in a wide variety of real-world environments and use-case scenarios. That way we can deliver a product that fits the needs of all types of gamers." The initial public preview is only on Android, but it's expected to come to iOS, Windows, and elsewhere in the coming months as well. I'm on the preview, so I'll report back on the experience as soon as I can.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Today, Microsoft announced that it's rolling out filters that will let Xbox Live players automatically limit the text-based messages they receive to four maturity tiers: "Friendly, Medium, Mature, and Unfiltered." That's a long-overdue feature for a major communication platform that's well over a decade old now, but not really anything new in terms of online content moderation writ large.

What's more interesting is a "looking ahead" promise Microsoft made at the end of the announcement (emphasis added): "Ultimately our vision is to supplement our existing efforts and leverage our company efforts in AI and machine learning technology to provide filtration across all types of content on Xbox Live, delivering control to each and every individual player. Your feedback is more important than ever as we continue to evolve this experience and make Xbox a safe, welcome and inclusive place to game." Microsoft told The Verge that the ultimate goal is a system "similar to what you'd expect on broadcast TV where people are having a conversation, and in real-time, we're able to detect a bad phrase and beep it out for users who don't want to see that." However, instead of live engineers that are doing the censoring, Microsoft is employing machine learning.

An anonymous reader quotes the I-Programmer site: Humans! Rest easy, we still beat the evil AI at the all-important Angry Birds game. Recent research by Ekaterina Nikonova and Jakub Gemrot of Charles University (Czech Republic) indicates why this is so....

"Firstly, this game has a large number of possibilities of actions and nearly infinite amount of possible levels, which makes it difficult to use simple state space search algorithms for this task. Secondly, the game requires a planning of sequences of actions, which are related to each other... For example, a poorly chosen first action can make a level unsolvable by blocking a pig with a pile of objects. Therefore, to successfully solve the task, a game agent should be able to predict or simulate the outcome of it is own actions a few steps ahead."
The researchers also report that the game requires AI to distinguish "between multiple birds, their abilities and optimum tapping times..."

"Despite the fact we have come close to a human-level performance on selected 21 levels, we still lost to 3 out of 4 humans in obtaining a maximum possible total score."

An anonymous reader quotes Forbes: Nvidia has a lot riding on the success of its GeForce RTX cards. The Santa Clara, California company is beating the real-time ray tracing drum loudly, adamant on being known as a champion of the technology before AMD steals some of its thunder next year with the PlayStation 5 and its own inevitable release of ray-tracing enabled PC graphics cards.

Nvidia has shown that, with ray tracing, it can breathe new life into a decades-old PC shooter like id Software's Quake 2, so why not dedicate an entire game studio to remastering timeless PC classics? A new job listing spotted by DSOGaming confirms that's exactly what Nvidia is cooking up.
The ad says NVIDIA's new game remastering program is "cherry-picking some of the greatest titles from the past decades and bringing them into the ray tracing age, giving them state-of-the-art visuals while keeping the gameplay that made them great." (And it adds that the initiative is "starting with a title that you know and love but we can't talk about here!")

Meanwhile, a China-based industry watcher on Medium reports that "six RISC-V positions have been advertised by NVIDIA, based in Shanghai and pertaining to architecture, design, and verification."

"Fortnite just blew up its entire map and all that's left is a black hole," reports TechCrunch. Some are speculating that this is simply a teaser for a new Fortnite map, but it's unclear when that new map will arrive... Fortnite's website is currently just a Twitch stream featuring a black hole.
The Washington Post reports: Anyone looking for clues on Fortnite's multiple social media accounts were left staring at the same image. The same black hole greets all visitors to Fortnite's Instagram. And intrepid players discovered that inputting the infamous "Konami code" launches a Galaga-style shooting game starring the mascot of Greasy Grove restaurant Durrr Burger.... As the event happened, many Twitch users reported having trouble using the popular streaming service, with more than 4 million people watching the event. Millions more tuned in on YouTube and Twitter, as well.... Rumors have swirled that the famous Fortnite map was going to be completely replaced, and given that everything's now gone, it sounds plausible...

Fortnite's Season 10 has been expected to end soon, and since last year, spectacular one-time live events within the game have been used to build hype, signal changes to the one map the game has used for two years, and usher in a new season and battle pass. This time, players who logged in at 2 p.m. Eastern time witnessed a rocket launch from the Dusty Divot area of the island, which turned into multiple rockets, all zipping around in a manner similar to the rocket that players saw in the first season-ending live event in Season 4. The rockets then converged onto an area where a meteor was landing, and the collision caused players to fly up into the air to witness a black hole suck the entirety of the game inside.

And since then, players have been left with nothing but the black hole.

An anonymous reader quotes Fortune: The battle against gaming addiction entered a new era this week when the U.K. public health system, the National Health Service (NHS), announced the opening of its first center specializing in 'Internet and Gaming Disorders....' Starting in November, the London-based center's psychiatrists and clinical psychologists will work with patients between ages 13 and 25 whose lives have been affected by "severe or complex behavioral issues associated with gaming, gambling and social media," the NHS said in a release... [T]he U.K. center is meant to fill a gap in mental health treatment that was previously occupied by private programs and more generalized NHS mental health services. "We are inundated. We have got sixty referrals already," says Dr. Henrietta Bowden-Jones of the addictions faculty at the Royal College of Psychiatrists, who serves as director of the National Centre for Internet and Gaming Addictions where the new clinic will be located....

Other European clinics have seen similarly desperate growth. The Yes We Can clinic on the outskirts of Eindhoven, Netherlands, for instance, treated 250 children for gaming addiction in 2018 and has so far treated 450 in 2019 -- including 50 from the U.K... Dr. Bowden-Jones says that she expects that a relatively small percentage of gamers will suffer the medically recognized disorder -- no more than 2% -- but that the issue is important to address because about 75% of young people in the U.K. engage in gaming.

"Activision Blizzard Inc., facing the threat of a boycott, reduced the punishment it meted out to a tournament player who voiced support for Hong Kong's pro-democracy demonstrators," reports Bloomberg: The company's Blizzard Entertainment division originally barred the player from events for a year and stripped him of some $10,000 in prize money. But it said at the end of the week that it would cut the ban to six months and pay his winnings.

The reversal followed an uproar from customers and even U.S. lawmakers, who felt Blizzard was kowtowing to China by punishing the player. Some analysts worried the boycott might take a toll on a company that has already suffered recent upheaval... [C]ustomers and some Blizzard workers felt the reaction was too extreme. In the furor that ensued, several employees staged a protest at its offices in Irvine. They covered up a plaque that read "Every Voice Matters" and held up umbrellas -- a symbol of the Hong Kong protesters.

"In hindsight, our process wasn't adequate, and we reacted too quickly," J. Allen Brack, president of Blizzard Entertainment, said in the statement. Still, he added that "if this had been the opposing viewpoint delivered in the same divisive and deliberate way, we would have felt and acted the same."
Long-time Slashdot reader AmiMoJo shares another update from Ars Technica: Additionally, the two Chinese broadcasters who interviewed (and possibly egged on) blitzchung during his shout of "Liberate Hong Kong, revolution of our age!" had been fired; they too have had their punishment changed to a six-month suspension from their jobs as official Hearthstone esports "casters."

Following Blizzard's decision to suspend a Hearthstone player for expressing support of protests in Hong Kong during an official tournament broadcast, some gamers are working to turn Overwatch hero Mei into a symbol of the Hong Kong resistance. Polygon reports: A post yesterday on the r/HongKong subreddit suggested people turn Mei, a Chinese Overwatch hero, into a "pro-democracy symbol" to get "Blizzard's games banned in China." (China already censors Winnie the Pooh after the internet began associating the character with president Xi Jinping.) The post has been upvoted more than 12,000 times, and has more than 300 comments, plenty of which are images of Mei supporting Hong Kong. The movement has spread outward into Twitter and elsewhere. Players have also continued to post screenshots of themselves uninstalling Blizzard games and closing their accounts. The #BoycottBlizzard hashtag remains active, with new tweets generated nearly every second.

jimminy_cricket writes: Due to the ban placed on a Hearthstone player for supporting Hong Kong protestors, Blizzard is now receiving criticism from U.S. senators. "Blizzard shows it is willing to humiliate itself to please the Chinese Communist Party," Sen. Ron Wyden said, according to The Verge. "No American company should censor calls for freedom to make a quick buck." "Recognize what's happening here. People who don't live in China must either self censor or face dismissal & suspensions," Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) said in a tweet on Tuesday. "China using access to market as leverage to crush free speech globally. Implications of this will be felt long after everyone in U.S. politics today is gone."

Fortnite developer Epic Games said in a statement that it will not ban players or content creators for political speech. From a report: The message comes after Blizzard caught fire this week for banning a professional Hearthstone player for shouting a statement associated with Hong Kong protesters. "Epic supports everyone's right to express their views on politics and human rights. We wouldn't ban or punish a Fortnite player or content creator for speaking on these topics," an Epic Games spokesperson told The Verge. Over the weekend, Blizzard banned Hearthstone player Ng "Blitzchung" Wai Chung from participating in tournaments after he voiced support for the protesters in Hong Kong. In a post-game interview on Sunday, Blitzchung said, "Liberate Hong Kong. Revolution of our age!" Now, he cannot participate in any tournaments for an entire year (effective October 5th), and Blizzard is withholding any prize money he would have received in the Grandmasters tournament over the weekend. Those forfeited winnings have been reported to total around $10,000. Tim Sweeney, founder and CEO of Epic Games, added, "Epic is a US company and I'm the controlling shareholder. Tencent is an approximately 40% shareholder, and there are many other shareholders including employees and investors. [Bowing to China] will never happen on my watch as the founder, CEO, and controlling shareholder."

The mobile version of video game franchise "Call of Duty" racked up 100 million downloads in its first week, industry site Sensor Tower said on Tuesday, dwarfing the debuts of previous smashes including "Fortnite" and "PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds" (PUBG). From a report: PUBG, Fortnite and Electronic Arts' "Apex Legends" scored 26.3 million, 22.5 million and 25 million respectively in their first week of release. "This is by far the largest mobile game launch in history in terms of the player base that's been built in the first week," said Randy Nelson, head of mobile insights at Sensor Tower. "Call of Duty: Mobile" was launched by its publisher Activision Blizzard Inc on Oct. 1 and Sensor Tower said the numbers reflected worldwide unique downloads across Apple's App Store and Google Play in the period since.

Sony has confirmed that its next-generation console will be called the PlayStation 5, and it'll be out next year, launching in time for "Holiday 2020." From a report: The company also announced several changes that it'll be making to the controller on the PS5. Chief among them is replacing the current rumble technology that Sony has been using since the original PlayStation for new haptic feedback technology that it promises will offer a "broader range of feedback." The other big change that Sony is talking about today is a technology it's calling "adaptive triggers," which will go in the primary R2/L2 triggers on the PS5's controller. According to Sony, developers will be able to "program the resistance of the triggers," giving the example that you'll be able to "feel" the increased tension as you draw back a bow or force you to push down with extra pressure if you're driving through rough terrain. It sounds pretty similar to a Microsoft patent from earlier this year, which detailed a similar trigger system for a future Xbox controller.

An anonymous reader writes: Billy Mitchell is the intense videogamer made famous in the 2007 documentary The King of Kong. Last month he threatened to sue both the Guinness Book of World Records and the videogame record-keepers at Twin Galaxies for defamation after they revoked an entire lifetime's worth of videogame high scores. An online discussion had argued that videotapes of three of Mitchell's performances suggested they'd been achieved using a MAME emulator -- but the organization revoked all of Mitchell's high scores (including his uncontested perfect game of Pac-Man in 1999).

Last week Twin Galaxies finally posted their response to Mitchell's lawsuit. "It is not necessary to hire lawyers and threaten Twin Galaxies out of the blue to get it to review and consider relevant new evidence -- all anyone has to do is simply reach out and directly request an opportunity to present the information...

"There will be no retraction or reinstatement. It should be noted that Twin Galaxies is under no obligation to maintain Mr. Mitchell's scores in its database. He has no divine right to be part of the Twin Galaxies community either. Twin Galaxies has unlimited authority to maintain the integrity of its score database." They also write that any lawsuit will be considered a strategic lawsuit against public participation and countered accordingly, followed by a second suit over malicious prosecution. "Please advise Mr. Mitchell to tread lightly, and choose wisely."

Last week a massive new 16,000-word profile of Mitchell pointed out that after his records were revoked, Mitchell had actually webcast himself playing Donkey Kong on Twitch, "obtaining scores equal to those that had been disputed, broadcast live from public venues.... Mitchell had proven he could earn those scores now. But he hadn't outlined a clear defense to prove he'd achieved them at the time of the original submissions."

CNBC reports that a popular Twitch poker star has been accused of cheating: Stones Gambling Hall in Sacramento, California says it will not livestream poker games pending an investigation into cheating allegations made against one of the game's players, Mike Postle... The original accusations were made by Veronica Brill, another poker player who has played with Postle on "Stones Live." Since then, others have come forward with similar complaints. Brill has no specific accusation of what Postle is doing and even admits that she can't be sure he is cheating. So why does she think he is cheating? His results are too good, according to Brill. She said (and several professional pokers players who talked to CNBC, agreed) no one could do as well as he has, for as long as he has, on these livestreamed games...

It's not just that Postle is winning, it's how he's winning, that is drawing suspicion. Poker commentator Joey Ingram, poker pro Matt Berkey, and others have spent hours reviewing hands Postle played and found several times where Postle made a fold or a call that wouldn't seem "right" but happened to work out in his favor. Berkey said Postle made plays no pro would ever make, and he did them often, and they worked. Poker is a game of incomplete information. Berkey said Postle played "as if he had perfect information."

Stones Gambling Hall said it has hired an independent investigator to look into the accusations. In a statement Stones Gambling Hall said: "We temporarily halted all broadcasts from Stones. We have also, as a result, halted the use of RFID playing cards." The RFID cards contain chips, that combined with readers in the poker table, transmit information about each player's hole cards, so that viewers can see the cards on the broadcast (which is on a 30-minute delay to protect game integrity). At this point, there is no specific allegation, no "smoking gun" as Berkey said. But many pros are pointing to those RFID cards and the hole card information, saying it's just not possible for Postle to play the way he does and win the way he does.

Dave Knott writes: A Montreal legal firm has requested authorization to launch a class-action lawsuit against Epic Games, makers of the widely-popular video game Fortnite. The legal notice, filed on behalf of two minors, likens the effect of the game to cocaine, saying it releases the chemical dopamine to the brain of vulnerable young people who can become dependent on playing. Much of the suit is based on a 2015 Quebec Superior Court ruling that determined tobacco companies didn't warn their customers about the dangers of smoking. Jean-Philippe Caron, a lawyer at Calex, said the firm was contacted by several parents whose kids had become addicted to the game.

Last year, the World Health Organization classified addiction to video games as a disease. It defined the disorder as "a pattern of gaming behavior characterized by impaired control over gaming, increased priority given to gaming over other activities to the extent that gaming takes precedence over other interests and daily activities, and continuation or escalation of gaming despite the occurrence of negative consequences." According to Caron, Fortnite was designed by psychologists to make it more addictive. "They knew that their game was very attractive, yet they did not divulge the risks to the population. It's a little like tobacco."

In anticipation for Google's upcoming Stadia cloud gaming service and Microsoft's Project xCloud, which enters open beta this month, Sony is lowering the price of PlayStation Now for PS4 and PC. "Monthly subscriptions are now available for $10, which is a considerable reduction from the previous $20 price point," reports GameSpot. "Quarterly subscriptions, meanwhile, will now cost $25, having previously been $45 in the U.S. and unavailable elsewhere. Finally, a year's PS Now membership is now $60, down from $100." From the report: The new price points are active right now; existing customers will see the new cost reflected in their upcoming bill. The price cut applies worldwide on the platform's catch-all subscription -- not on individual game rentals. Sony also revealed a number of new titles being added to the PS Now library. God of War (2018), Infamous: Second Son, Grand Theft Auto V, and Uncharted 4: A Thief's End are all now available as part of the service's subscription offering--but they will be removed on January 2, 2020, Sony said.

dryriver shares a report from the BBC: Facebook is creating an immersive environment called Horizon to tempt people into spending more time in virtual reality. The VR app will be a mix of social places where users can mingle and chat, and other areas where they can play games against each other. People will inhabit and explore the virtual spaces via a cartoon avatar. The app will be made available and tested in early 2020, by a small group of Facebook users. Details about Horizon and early footage of the virtual space were shown off at Facebook's Oculus Connect 6 developer conference this week. Facebook said anyone using Horizon would be able to call on human "guides" to help them navigate and become more familiar with the virtual environment. The guides will not be "moderators" who will police behavior, said Facebook. It added that it would include tools that let people manage how they interact with other users. It will also have options that let people shape and build their own part of the environment. They will also be able to design their own avatars. The entire space has been given a cartoon-like feel as it is intended to be used on Facebook's Oculus Quest headset, which does not have the high resolution graphics of PC-linked headsets.

Sam Machkovech, a reporter for Ars Technica, who has tried Horizon, said Facebook had put "a ton of work" into the version he saw, to make it as welcoming as possible. But he noted that Horizon was "yet another" combination of apps, chat and avatars which Facebook had produced in just a few years. He suggested that it was still searching for a good combination that proved properly tempting to users. "We're still waiting for Facebook to inspire confidence that it will launch a social-VR app and stick with it for more than two years," he wrote. Anyone interested in joining Horizon can sign up to be an early tester. You can watch the strange YouTube pre-rendered CGI ad for Facebook Horizon here.

Microsoft is enabling Google's Assistant to work with its Xbox One console. From a report: Much like the existing Alexa integration, Microsoft is allowing Google Assistant to launch games and apps, turn the console on and off, pause videos, and much more. You'll need to use the Google Assistant app for iOS or Android or a device like Google's Home with Assistant on it to control an Xbox One. Google Assistant won't run on the Xbox One itself; instead, it will receive commands from other devices running Assistant.

Microsoft's Xbox One game streaming service, Project xCloud, will get a public preview test in October, letting select testers play games like Gears 5 and Halo 5: Guardians on phones and tablets. From a report: The public preview of Project xCloud will initially be limited to players in the United States, United Kingdom, and Korea. Halo 5: Guardians, Gears 5, Killer Instinct, and Sea of Thieves will be playable as part of the preview, and Microsoft says it will add more titles over time. Testers won't need to own the Xbox One games available during the Project xCloud preview in order to play them. Players interested in taking part in the Project xCloud public preview can register for the closed beta based on their country. Microsoft says it will roll out invitations in a phased approach, starting with a "small number of participants," and opening it up to more players over time. Project xCloud's public preview test will initially be limited to Android devices running Android 6.0 or higher with Bluetooth 4.0. Participants will also need a Microsoft account and a Bluetooth-enabled Xbox One wireless controller. Project xCloud will be compatible with WiFi and cellular networks, and Microsoft says it's working with a number of cellular providers worldwide: SK Telecom in Korea, T-Mobile in the U.S., and Vodafone in the U.K.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Wall Street Journal: Many parents of both boys and girls have witnessed striking differences in the way their kids use technology, with their sons generally gravitating to video games and their daughters often spending more of their screen time scrolling through social media. Emerging research indicates that brain differences between males and females help account for the split. According to a 2017 survey conducted by Pew Research Center, 41% of teenage boys said they spend too much time playing video games while only 11% of girls said they do. Marc Potenza, a psychiatry professor at Yale University, teamed up with researchers at universities in China to find out why. Using functional MRIs, which measure brain activity by detecting changes in blood flow, the team studied neural responses in young male and female gamers, particularly in the parts of the brain associated with reward processing and craving -- a motivating factor in addiction. When the men and women were shown photos of people playing video games, those parts of the men's brains showed higher levels of activation than those parts of the women's brains. Brain regions that have been implicated in drug-addiction studies also were shown to be more highly activated in the men after gaming. The researchers said the results suggest men could be more biologically prone than women to developing internet gaming disorder.

But girls and women aren't free from problems when it comes to digital media. Data from Pew shows that, in general, women use social platforms such as Facebook, Instagram and Pinterest far more than men. Many girls and women are drawn to those photo-sharing sites because they like to form bonds and find similarities, says Rosanna Guadagno, a social psychologist at Stanford University. Even if women only use those sites more than men because that is where their friends are, many experts and parents say they have found that girls appear to have a greater fear of missing out, which compels them to keep up with what their friends are posting. Some recent studies show that girls feel the ill effects of too much social media use, such as depression and anxiety, more than boys do.

wired_parrot shares a report from the BBC: Released in 1982, Entombed was far from a best-seller and today it's largely forgotten. But recently, a computer scientist and a digital archaeologist decided to pull apart the game's source code to investigate how it was made. An early maze-navigating game, Entombed intrigued the researchers for how early programmers solved the problem of drawing a solvable maze that is drawn procedurally. But they got more than they bargained for: they found a mystery bit of code they couldn't explain (Link to full paper). The fundamental logic that determines how the maze is drawn is locked in a table of possible values written in the games code. However, it seems the logic behind the table has been lost forever.

Both Sony and Microsoft on Monday committed to making their future video game consoles better for the planet. The two console makers laid out their plans alongside the UN Climate Summit as part of the Playing for the Planet Alliance. From a report: Microsoft will start a pilot program to create 825,000 carbon neutral Xbox consoles, the company said in a press release Sunday. It said these will be the first video game consoles to achieve that goal. Sony will focus on the upcoming PlayStation 5's energy consumption. The Japanese company will improve the next console's low-power suspend mode to make it more efficient than the PlayStation 4. Sony said if 1 million users make use of the PS5's energy-saving feature, it'll save the equivalent of the average electricity use of 1,000 US homes. Sony will also reassess its carbon footprint in its gaming service and data centers. The Playing for the Planet Alliance is a joint effort among the console manufacturers, publishers, developers and Twitch through various eco-friendly initiatives, spreading awareness, and reducing carbon emissions and power consumption.

An anonymous reader writes: Ubisoft plans to send cease & desist legal letters to operators of DDoS-for-hire services, also known as DDoS booters or DDoS stressors. The company said it plans on making this step as part of a global action plan to curb DDoS attacks aimed at Rainbox Six Siege multiplayer servers.

The French video game company has been under a wave of DDoS attacks ever since last week when it launched the Operation Ember Rise update for the Rainbow Six Siege game. Along with the update, Ubisoft also performed a reset of multiplayer rankings. Following the reset, multiple players are suspected to have started launching DDoS attacks at the company's servers.

The cheating players have been using the DDoS attacks to trigger server lag and slow down matches. The goal was to annoy opponents, who in many cases would end up disconnecting and receiving a penalty for leaving the match, allowing the player who launched the DDoS attack to gain rank points undeserved. The DDoS attacks have been widespread as several players got wind of the trick and started renting DDoS firepower from online DDoS for-hire sites.

MojoKid writes: Lakka with RetroArch is one of the most comprehensive open-source retro-gaming console front ends available, with support for a wide array of single-board computers and multiple operating systems. Although the more powerful Raspberry Pi 4 was released months ago, the developers of Lakka had a number of bugs to contend with that prevented an official stable release, until yesterday. Lakka 2.3 (with RetroArch 1.7.8) is available now though, and it appears to leverage the additional horsepower of the Pi 4 quite well. It's even able to play some of the more demanding Sega Dreamcast and Saturn games -- among many other retro-consoles, like the Atari 2600, SuperNES, and many others. In addition to the Pi 4, this latest Lakka release also adds support for the ROCKPro64 and incorporates a wide range of bug fixes and feature enhancements.

A French high court this week delivered a blow to Valve, ruling that European consumers are legally free to resell digital games bought on Steam, just as they're able to resell packaged, physical games. From a report: The ruling was delivered by the High Court of Paris (Tribunal de grande instance de Paris) two days ago, according to a report on French games site Numerama. In a statement released today, Valve pledged to appeal the decision. The court's ruling is a victory for French consumer group UFC-Que Choisir, which filed a suit against Steam four years ago, alleging anti-consumer rights activities. The court rejected Valve's defense that argued Steam is a subscription service. According to Numerama, the court found that Steam sells games in perpetuity, and not as part of a subscription package. The ban on reselling games is therefore counter to European Union laws on digital goods that are designed to block prohibitions on "the free movement of goods within the Union." According to EU law, all goods, including software, can be sold used without the permission of the maker or the original seller.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Sega and Sports Interactive have announced that Football Manager 2020 will be sold in new eco-friendly package that uses much less plastic, and they're pushing for the rest of the entertainment industry to follow suit. The new packaging replaces the now-standard plastic DVD case used for most game discs with a folded, reinforced cardboard sleeve made of 100% recycled fiber. The shrinkwrap surrounding that package has also been replaced with a low-density LDPE polyethylene that's highly recyclable. Even the ink on the cardboard has been changed out for a vegetable-and-water-based version (so it's technically vegan if you're desperate for a snack).

The new packaging does cost a bit more to produce -- about 20 (British) cents per unit (or 30 percent), according to an open letter from Sports Interactive Studio Director Miles Jacobson. But those costs are somewhat offset by reduced shipping and destruction costs for excess units, he added. And as Spanish footballer Hector Bellerin says in a video accompanying the letter, "if there's no Earth, there's no money to spend." All told, Jacobson says the new packaging will save 55 grams of plastic per unit, or 20 tonnes across a print run of over 350,000. That's an extremely tiny dent in the estimated 335 million tons of plastic that is produced annually worldwide. But Jacobson hopes it could add up to a sizable dent if the entire industry follows suit for the tens of millions of discs it produces each year. "We're not the biggest game in the world," Jacobson said. "Imagine what happens if every other game, every film company, every music company switches to this packaging... So I'm throwing down the gauntlet here to ALL entertainment companies who use plastic for their Blu Ray, DVD and CD packaging."

"Billy Mitchell, the former Donkey Kong and Pac-Man high-score champion made famous in the 2007 film The King of Kong, has threatened legal action against the sanctioning bodies who threw out all of Mitchell's high scores in April 2018 after finding that two were illegitimate," reports Polygon. This week, lawyers for Mitchell sent a letter to Twin Galaxies and Guinness World Records demanding that both "retract their claims against Billy Mitchell" and restore the scores to their world record leaderboards, where Mitchell had been a fixture since the early 1980s... The letter to Twin Galaxies alleges that it defamed Mitchell, both in its findings and in later posts to their website.

In banning Mitchell, Twin Galaxies also vacated records that were not in question, and banned Mitchell from further participation in their leaderboards. One of Mitchell's records thrown out was a "perfect score" in Pac-Man (reaching the maximum number of points available in its 255 levels). Mitchell's attorneys say Twin Galaxies implied that score was tainted by cheating, too.

Guinness, say the lawyers, cited that disqualification in its 2019 Gamers Edition compilation of records in saying that Mitchell's "submitted scores were obtained while using [the emulator] MAME," which the attorneys take to mean as applying to all of Mitchell's scores, from 1982 to present day. They say that is factually incorrect and also impossible, as MAME was created in 1997...

The letter also alleges that Twin Galaxies "did not provide Billy Mitchell fair opportunity to provide evidence to prove his innocence," and that "specific evidence was accepted, while evidence of equal stature was rejected."
A 156-page package summarizing Mitchell's defense has been posted in Reddit's videogame speedrunning forum. It argues that the documentary's makers actually have filmed footage in which a videotaped high-score attempt at Funspot Arcade is clearly announced to be "not a score submission. This is for entertainment purposes only." And while the film-makers show that score being submitted, "this was only acting done for the movie...the scoreboard shown by the movie was forged.... Actually, in the King of Kong movie, the tape I hand Doris Self is a WWE Wrestling tape, not my 1,047,200 performance... The movie's portrayal that I submitted this performance is fictitious."

Mitchell's documents say that that score was submitted later -- without his permission -- by a referee for Twin Galaxies, arguing that the footage suffers from a compromised chain of custody. The documents even include emails written by the owner of the web site fuckbillymitchell.com "saying he has a 'master plan' to take Billy Mitchell down," along with statements from two separate witnesses who say that man had even at one point asked for help in how to fake footage of a videogame.

"I find the current accusation of Mitchell too close to exactly what Richard planned in 2009 to be overlooked."

The University of Alabama is taking an extraordinary, Orwellian step to reward students who attend games -- and stay until the fourth quarter -- by using location-tracking technology from students' phones to see who skips out and who stays. If students stay until the fourth quarter, they will be rewarded with improved access to tickets to the SEC championship game and to the College Football Playoff semifinals and championship game, which Alabama is trying to reach for the fifth consecutive season. The New York Times reports: Greg Byrne, Alabama's athletic director, said privacy concerns rarely came up when the program was being discussed with other departments and student groups. Students who download the Tide Loyalty Points app will be tracked only inside the stadium, he said, and they can close the app -- or delete it -- once they leave the stadium. "If anybody has a phone, unless you're in airplane mode or have it off, the cellular companies know where you are," he said.

The creator of the app, FanMaker, runs apps for 40 colleges, including Clemson, Louisiana State and Southern California, which typically reward fans with gifts like T-shirts. The app it created for Alabama is the only one that tracks the locations of its students. That Alabama would want it is an example of how even a powerhouse program like the Crimson Tide is not sheltered from college football's decline in attendance, which sank to a 22-year low last season. The Tide Loyalty Points program works like this: Students, who typically pay about $10 for home tickets, download the app and earn 100 points for attending a home game and an additional 250 for staying until the fourth quarter. Those points augment ones they garner mostly from progress they have made toward their degrees -- 100 points per credit hour. (A regular load would be 15 credits per semester, or 1,500 points.) Adam Schwartz, a lawyer for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a privacy watchdog, said it was "very alarming" that a public university -- an arm of the government -- was tracking its students' whereabouts.

"Why should packing the stadium in the fourth quarter be the last time the government wants to know where students are?" Schwartz said, adding that it was "inappropriate" to offer an incentive for students to give up their privacy. "A public university is a teacher, telling students what is proper in a democratic society."

Almost a year ago, Discord launched its own games store and overhauled the Nitro subscription service to offer access to a library of games in addition to other chat and server related perks. From a report: The app's store has gone through several changes over the year, with games ultimately being sold directly through developers' Discord servers instead of the original dedicated portal. However, the library of games Nitro subscribers get access to is getting axed, and its because almost nobody actually played them, per Discord. "We learned a lot from all of you over the last year. Through your valuable feedback, it became clear that while we and some of you love these games, the truth is the vast majority of Nitro subscribers didn't play them," said the company in a blog post today.

"So, after careful consideration, we won't be hitting Continue when these contracts come up for renewal. The removal affects users who are registered for the $9.99 per month (or the $99.99 annual) Nitro subscription, who will no longer be able to play the almost 100-strong catalog of games -- seen on the left image -- from October 15, 2019. To those who may have been caught off guard by the announcement and want to cancel Nitro, Discord is also offering refunds on the subscription.