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Today — 18 May 2024Main stream

Procedural Artificial Narrative using Gen AI for Turn-Based Video Games

18 May 2024 at 08:32
"This research introduces Procedural Artificial Narrative using Generative AI (PANGeA), a structured approach for leveraging large language models (LLMs), guided by a game designer's high-level criteria, to generate narrative content for turn-based role-playing video games (RPGs)."

Full abstract: "This research introduces Procedural Artificial Narrative using Generative AI (PANGeA), a structured approach for leveraging large language models (LLMs), guided by a game designer's high-level criteria, to generate narrative content for turn-based role-playing video games (RPGs). Distinct from prior applications of LLMs used for video game design, PANGeA innovates by not only generating game level data (which includes, but is not limited to, setting, key items, and non-playable characters (NPCs)), but by also fostering dynamic, free-form interactions between the player and the environment that align with the procedural game narrative. The NPCs generated by PANGeA are personality-biased and express traits from the Big 5 Personality Model in their generated responses. PANGeA addresses challenges behind ingesting free-form text input, which can prompt LLM responses beyond the scope of the game narrative. A novel validation system that uses the LLM's intelligence evaluates text input and aligns generated responses with the unfolding narrative. Making these interactions possible, PANGeA is supported by a server that hosts a custom memory system that supplies context for augmenting generated responses thus aligning them with the procedural narrative. For its broad application, the server has a REST interface enabling any game engine to integrate directly with PANGeA, as well as an LLM interface adaptable with local or private LLMs. PANGeA's ability to foster dynamic narrative generation by aligning responses with the procedural narrative is demonstrated through an empirical study and ablation test of two versions of a demo game. These are, a custom, browser-based GPT and a Unity demo. As the results show, PANGeA holds potential to assist game designers in using LLMs to generate narrative-consistent content even when provided varied and unpredictable, free-form text input." Buongiorno, S., Klinkert, L. J., Chawla, T., Zhuang, Z., & Clark, C. (2024). PANGeA: Procedural Artificial Narrative using Generative AI for Turn-Based Video Games. arXiv preprint arXiv:2404.19721.

Caitlin Moran described which PM as a ‘C-3PO made of ham’? The Saturday quiz

18 May 2024 at 02:00

From a burrowing clam to toilet cleaner, test your knowledge with the Saturday quiz

1 The OED’s first citation for “video game” mentions which Atari product?
2 Which river has Damietta and Rosetta branches?
3 Who were bribed in the 1950s payola scandal?
4 Which poet was nicknamed the White Myth of Amherst?
5 What athletics world record has stood at 7291 since 1988?
6 Which PM was described by Caitlin Moran as a “C-3PO made of ham”?
7 Which philosopher had a brother who was a celebrated one-handed pianist?
8 What brand name was used by M&S from 1928 until 2000?
What links:
9
Bummalo; out first ball; Pacific burrowing clam; toilet cleaner?
10 John Deydras; Lambert Simnel; Perkin Warbeck; Mary Baynton?
11 Calderdale, West Yorkshire and Nova Scotia, Canada?
12 The Night Manager; Conversations with Friends; Notes on a Conditional Form?
13 Leda; Nut; Rebecca; Rhea Silvia?
14 Beaded; flush; keyed; recessed; tuck; V-grooved; weathered?
15 Relating to a city (8); devout (12); not guilty (13); merciful (14)?

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© Photograph: Enric Fontcuberta/EPA

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© Photograph: Enric Fontcuberta/EPA

Yesterday — 17 May 2024Main stream

From If to Billie Eilish: a complete guide to this week’s entertainment

17 May 2024 at 19:00

John Krasinski and Ryan Reynolds go family-friendly in their new imaginary-friends comedy, while the singer swaps introspection for lust on her long-awaited new album

If
Out now
In what has to be one of the more enviable showbiz lives, John Krasinski has played Jim in The Office, married Emily Blunt, and written and directed acclaimed horror franchise A Quiet Place. Now he turns his hand to family entertainment, writing and directing this part-animated fantasy about imaginary friends made visible with a little help from Ryan Reynolds and Steve Carell.

Continue reading...

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© Photograph: Photo Credit: Jonny Cournoyer/Jonny Cournoyer

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© Photograph: Photo Credit: Jonny Cournoyer/Jonny Cournoyer

Before yesterdayMain stream

Virtual Boy: the bizarre rise and quick fall of Nintendo’s enigmatic red console

16 May 2024 at 18:56

Nearly 30 years after the launch of the Virtual Boy, not much is publicly known about how, exactly, Nintendo came to be interested in developing what would ultimately become its ill-fated console. Was Nintendo committed to VR as a future for video games and looking for technological solutions that made business sense? Or was the Virtual Boy primarily the result of Nintendo going “off script” and seizing a unique, and possibly risky, opportunity that presented itself? The answer is probably a little bit of both.

As it turns out, the Virtual Boy was not an anomaly in Nintendo’s history with video game platforms. Rather, it was the result of a deliberate strategy that was consistent with Nintendo’s way of doing things and informed by its lead creator Gunpei Yokoi’s design philosophy.

↫ Benj Edwards and Jose Zagal at Ars Technica

I’ve never used a Virtual Boy, and in fact, I’ve never even seen one in real life. It was mythical object when I was not even a teenager yet, something we read about in gaming magazines in The Netherlands. We didn’t really know what it was or how it worked, and it wasn’t until much later, in the early YouTube age, that I got to see what using one was actually like in the countless YouTube videos made about the device.

It seems it caused quite a few headaches, was cumbersome to use, had very few games, and those that were sold ended up collecting dust pretty quickly. In that sense, it seems not a lot has changed over the past thirty years.

GTA 6 Release Date Narrowed To Fall 2025 Amid Questions about Delays

By: msmash
16 May 2024 at 18:41
Take-Two Interactive is doubling down Grand Theft Auto VI's release date, saying the long-awaited sequel will be out fall 2025 despite rumors of a possible delay into 2026. From a report: Take-Two announced GTA 6's updated release window in its latest earnings report, saying that its current outlook is based on the new date. "We do feel highly confident that we'll deliver [Grand Theft Auto VI] in fall of 2025," Take-Two CEO Strauss Zelnick told IGN in an interview when asked if he was concerned that GTA 6 may get delayed.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

1 In 4 US Teens Say They Play Games On a VR Headset

By: BeauHD
14 May 2024 at 20:10
An anonymous reader quotes a report from UploadVR: 1 in 4 U.S. teens told Pew Research Center they play games on a VR headset. The survey was conducted on 1453 U.S. teens aged 13 to 17. Pew claims the participants were "recruited primarily through national, random sampling of residential addresses" and "weighted to be representative of U.S. teens ages 13 to 17 who live with their parents by age, gender, race and ethnicity, household income, and other categories." Broken out by gender, 32% of boys and 15% of girls said they play games on a VR headset. The survey doesn't ask whether they actually own the headset, so this will include those who play on a sibling or parent's headset.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The weird and wonderful world of the PC-98

By: Rhaomi
14 May 2024 at 14:10
Pastel cities trapped in a timeless future-past. Empty apartments drenched in nostalgia. Classic convertibles speeding into a low-res sunset. Femme fatales and mutated monsters doing battle. Deep, dark dungeons and glittering star ships floating in space. All captured in a eerie palette of 4096 colours and somehow, you're sure, from some alternate 1980s world you can't quite remember... Drawn painstakingly one pixel at a time, with a palette of 4096 possible colours, pushing the limits of these 80's era machines memory, these early graphic artists and hackers alike have left an indelible mark on the world of digital art and internet culture, only to be forgotten in the passing of time. But what made this boring business computer from Japan so special?
The strange world of Japan's PC-98 computer [contains some NSFW pixel art] / More striking imagery: Incredible pictures from an era of games we never got to experience [CW: flashing lights] - Tumblr: High quality [SFW] pixel art from PC-98 games - Pixelation.org: The Art of PC98 - Amino: The world of PC-98 Pixel Art - Galleries from @noirlac, @item, and @densetsu.ch

A downloadable pack of over 7,000 PC-98 images and GIFs [check the current page for v4, coming soon-ish] Video: PC-98: Japan's Own Era of Early PC Gaming [CW: flashing lights] Video: Over 50 NEC PC-98 Games In Under 30 Minutes TVTropes has an extensive primer on the platform followed by a long list of game articles Music: A selection of unique PC-98 tracks by composer Takeaki Watanabe Hardware: Restoring & Learning All About The NEC PC-9821 [transcript included!] DIY: PC-98 Emulation For Beginners A collection of PC-98 image files for use with an emulator

Game Dev Says Contract Barring 'Subjective Negative Reviews' Was a Mistake

By: msmash
14 May 2024 at 11:22
The developers of team-based shooter Marvel Rivals have apologized for a contract clause that made creators promise not to provide "subjective negative reviews of the game" in exchange for early access to a closed alpha test. From a report: The controversial early access contract gained widespread attention over the weekend when streamer Brandon Larned shared a portion on social media. In the "non-disparagement" clause shared by Larned, creators who are provided with an early download code are asked not to "make any public statements or engage in discussions that are detrimental to the reputation of the game." In addition to the "subjective negative review" example above, the clause also specifically prohibits "making disparaging or satirical comments about any game-related material" and "engaging in malicious comparisons with competitors or belittling the gameplay or differences of Marvel Rivals."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Five DIY Outdoor Entertaining Projects That Cost Less Than $100

14 May 2024 at 08:00

If the weather is warming up where you are, you're probably itching to spend more time outdoors. And if you're the kind of outdoors lover who prefers entertaining to quiet reading sessions in the hammock, you're going to want some some games or other entertainment for you backyard. Fortunately, you don't have to spend a ton to make your outdoor space a destination for your friends and family.

Install a bocce court

In order to add a bocce court, you’ll need a level spot that’s at least 13 feet wide. The length of your court can vary, with regulation courts measuring 91 feet and standard recreational courts measuring 60 feet. Once you’ve selected your bocce court area, you’ll need to tamp down the ground to level the surface exactly and then cover the flattened area with pea gravel ($5.88/5 cubic feet). To frame your bocce court, you can use concrete ($5.71/80 pound bag) and a curb shaper ($18.49) or a mold ($43.90). Finally, you’ll need a set of bocce balls ($16.99) to get the game going.

Add a tree swing

If you have a big enough tree and enough space for swinging, a tree swing is a must. You can make a simple tree swing with some good quality rope ($22.99/50 feet) and a board ($24.28/ 2 inch by 1 foot by 8 foot board) that’s thick and wide enough for someone to sit on. Just drill through each end of your board and thread the rope through each hole. Then, use a knot below the hole to attach the board to the rope on each side.

Tree swing figure eight knot
Thread through and knot Credit: Becca Lewis

Hang your swing from a branch to finish your swing. You can also use burlap ($14.99) between the rope and the branch to protect the tree bark from getting scraped by the rope. Make sure that you’re choosing a sturdy branch that can stand up to the weight of your swingers to avoid damaging your tree (or your swinger!). The diameter of the branch should be at least three or four inches, but that is also not more than half the diameter of the main trunk and you should choose a branch with no obvious signs of decay like missing bark or insect infestation. Hang your swing no more than halfway to the end of the branch from the trunk of the tree to give yourself a steady spot.

Make a beanbag toss

A beanbag toss is a simple DIY project you can make from one sheet of plywood ($27.38/4 foot by 8 foot sheet) and some beanbags ($16.99). You’ll need to cut four triangles, two tops, and two backs to make a bottomless wedge. You'll then cut three holes in the top of each wedge about three inches in diameter.

Beanbag toss parts layout
Beanbag toss parts Credit: Becca Lewis

Put a bead of wood glue on the top edge of each of the side pieces and the top edge of the back piece. Then, position the parts with the top piece in place and attach it by nailing or screwing the top piece into the side and back pieces. Finally, nail or screw the back piece into each side.

Beanbag toss exploded parts
Beanbag toss exploded parts Credit: Becca Lewis

Then, sand your parts to eliminate splinters and paint your wedges to your own taste. This can be an excellent opportunity to use up some leftover paint from another project, or you can use a quart-sized exterior paint ($14.98/quart).

Set up a horseshoe court

A horseshoe game is one of the simplest outdoor games to set up. You just need a flat area that’s about 40 feet long by about eight feet wide and a horseshoe set ($34.85). Just hammer your stakes in at either end of a 40-foot span and your court is ready to go. Remember that tossing horseshoes can require some room to swing, and not every horseshoe player will be accurate on every toss, so give yourself a 10-foot distance from buildings and areas where people congregate.

Make a scoreboard for your games

To make a scoreboard, first start with a board made from plywood or similar wood. Your scoreboard can be any size you want, but should be a rectangle that fits in your recreation area or can be mounted to a post for access and visibility. Depending on the game, you’ll need to keep track of different numbers; howeve, you can make almost any scoreboard using a numbered board with holes and dowels. First, make a grid on your board with the number of players across the top and the number of points along the side. Then, drill a hole in the center of each square in your grind the same size as your dowel. For a half-inch dowel ($2.07/ four foot dowel), you'll drill a half-inch hole. Paint or draw your numbers onto the board for each corresponding dowel position, and then you can track points by moving the dowel up the board as points are scored. This is a great way to use up scraps of material or leftover paint from other projects.

EA is prototyping in-game ads even as we speak

14 May 2024 at 06:16

Electronic Arts has a long, storied history of trying to wring more money out of gamers after they’ve purchased a game — now, it appears, the company’s hard at work on its next generation of in-game ads.

EA CEO Andrew Wilson admitted as much on the company’s Q4 earnings call: when an analyst asked about “the market opportunity for more dynamic ad insertion across more traditional AAA games,” he said the company’s already working on it.

“We have teams internally in the company right now looking at how do we do very thoughtful implementations inside of our game experiences,” said Wilson.

↫ Sean Hollister at The Verge

Ads in games are definitely not new – we’ve seen countless games built entirely around brands, like Tapper for Budweiser, Pepsiman, or Cool Spot for 7-Up – and banner ads and product placement in various games has been a thing for decades, too. It seems like EA wants to take this several steps further and use things like dynamic ad insertion in games, so that when you’re playing some racing game, you’ll get an ad for your local Hyundai dealer, or an ad for a gun store when you’re playing GTA in the US.

Either way, it’s going to make games worse, which is perfectly in line with EA’s mission.

Warner Bros. gives Adult Swim games back to their creators rather than kill them

13 May 2024 at 13:48
A Victorian-esque portrait of a couple, with a mother holding a baby, a man holding a pickaxe, and the words

Enlarge / Timely art from the game Traverser, soon to be published by developer Gatling Goat Studios. (credit: Gatling Goat Studios/Adult Swim Games)

Warner Bros. Discovery has spent at least two months threatening more than a dozen indie games developers with the "retirement" of their games, with little to no response as to why they couldn't do something simple and much better for the games' players and creators.

Late last week, one of the Adult Swim Games creators impacted by Warner Bros. Discovery's (WBD) seeming shutdown posted on X (formerly Twitter) that he received an email from Warner Bros. indicating that his Duck Game was "safe." "[T]he game is being returned to corptron along with [its] store pages on all platforms," Landon wrote. The same went for Owen Deery, whose notice from WBD about his game Small Radios Big Televisions brought attention to the media conglomerate's actions and who posted that his game, too, will have its ownership and store listings returned to him.

As noted by PC Gamer, the 60-day timeline originally provided to developers for their games to be delisted has passed, and yet most of the Adult Swim Games titles are still up.

Read 4 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Cryptmaster is a dark, ridiculous RPG test of your typing and guessing skills

11 May 2024 at 07:00
Cryptmaster screenshot showing the player typing out

Enlarge / Sometimes you gotta get your nose in there to remember the distinct aroma of 1980s RPG classics. (credit: Akupara Games)

There are people who relish the feeling of finally nailing down a cryptic clue in a crossword. There are also people unduly aggravated by a puzzlemaster's puns and clever deceptions. I'm more the latter kind. I don't even play the crossword—or Wordle or Connections or Strands—but my wife does, and she'll feed me clues. Without fail, they leave me in some strange state of being relieved to finally get it, yet also keyed up and irritated.

Cryptmaster, out now on Steam, GOG, and Itch.io for Windows, seems like the worst possible game for people like me, and yet I dig it. It is many things at once: a word-guessing game, a battle typing (or shouting) challenge, a party-of-four first-person grid-based dungeon crawler, and a text-prompt adventure, complete with an extremely goofy sense of humor. It's also in stark black and white. You cannot fault this game for a lack of originality, even while it evokes Wizardry, Ultima Underground, and lots of other arrow-key-moving classics, albeit with an active tongue-in-cheek filter.

Cryptmaster announcement trailer.

The Cryptmaster in question has woken up four role-playing figures—fighter, rogue, bard, and wizard—to help him escape from his underground lair to the surface, for reasons that must be really keen and good. As corpses, you don't remember any of your old skills, but you can guess them. What's a four-letter action that a fighter might perform, or a three-letter wizard move? Every time you find a box or treasure, the Cryptmaster opens it, gives you a letter count, then lets you ask for clues. "SMELL," you type, and he says it has that wonderful old-paper smell. "LOOK," and he notes that there are writings and drawings on one side. Guess "SCROLL," and he adds those letters to your characters' next ability clues. Guess wrong, well, better luck next time.

Read 5 remaining paragraphs | Comments

EA Weighs Putting In-game Ads in AAA Games

By: msmash
10 May 2024 at 13:20
Electronic Arts CEO Andrew Wilson confirmed the company is considering putting ads in traditional AAA games, which players purchase for around $70 apiece. During EA's latest earnings call, Wilson said, "Advertising has an opportunity to be a meaningful driver of growth for us," and that teams are looking at how to thoughtfully implement ads within game experiences. In-game advertising is not new, with the first recorded instance dating back to 1978. As the gaming industry is expected to grow to $583 billion by 2030, in-game ads are seen as a natural progression. However, player reception depends on the placement and unobtrusiveness of the ads. EA has faced backlash in the past for poorly placed ads, such as full-screen promotions for a TV show in UFC 4, which disrupted gameplay. The company has been experimenting with dynamic ads since 2006, with titles like Need for Speed Carbon and Battlefield 2142 among the first to feature them.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

40 years later, Kontrabant 2 for ZX Spectrum is rebroadcast on FM in Slovenia

8 May 2024 at 16:13
Kontrabant 2 title image on ZX Spectrum

Enlarge / In 1984, the year 2000 was so promising, students made entire games promising to take you there. (credit: Radio Student)

Software is almost impossibly easy to download, distribute, and access compared to 40 years ago. Everything is bigger, faster, and more flexible, but there's a certain charm to the ways of diskettes and cassettes that is hard to recapture. That doesn't mean we can't try.

By the time you read this, it's likely that Kontrabant 2 will have already hit the airwaves on Radio Študent in Slovenia. At 9:30 pm Slovenia time (UTC+2 in Daylight Savings Time), if you are tuned to 89.3 FM, hitting record on a cassette tape will capture a buzzing sound that will run until just over 50KB have been transmitted. If all went well, you can load the tape into your working ZX Spectrum or bring it to the Computer History Museum in Slovenia and use theirs to try it out.

Read 4 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Tom Driveimpossiblyquicklyer

By: cortex
6 May 2024 at 12:37
Tom Walker tries desperately, with halting success, to complete some very basic missions in Grand Theft Auto 4 while all the cars on the map lose their fucking minds. Part 1, Part 2, Part 3. Come for the comedy car deaths, stay for the slow evolution of a "this is a horror stealth game" playstyle that makes it at all possible to make progress.

"Oh yes, it has the juice."

By: chavenet
4 May 2024 at 15:29
In this video ad, the Hero Wars mascot Galahad finds himself in dire straits as but a human plough-horse upon the field. His captor, half-cow, half-human woman, brands him on the buttock with what looks like our old friend the purple devil emoji—rather a "naugty" [sic] act. Suddenly set upon by wolves, the cow lady is compromised—and Galahad steps up to become white knight, fending the beasts off with his axe. The cow lady and her new hero Galahad elope to her encampment, where she carries him around like a baby, and spots him for sit-ups. Needless to say, the episode of the bovine damsel does not occur in-game. from The Weird World of Hero Wars Ads: Sex Sells [Splice Today]

For examples see: Hero Wars Ads As Art

Google tells court it shouldn’t have to distribute third-party app stores

3 May 2024 at 14:26
The Google Play store application logo displayed on a smartphone screen.

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images | Kirill Kudryavtsev)

Google urged a federal court to reject Epic Games' request for an injunction that would reduce Google's control of the Android app distribution and in-app payment markets.

"Rather than a judicial injunction against alleged violations of law, Epic asks this Court to create a new global regulatory regime that would set prices, impose ongoing duties to deal, and require the Court to micromanage on an ongoing basis a highly complex and dynamic ecosystem that is used by billions of consumers and millions of app developers and that supports the business of hundreds of OEMs and carriers around the world," stated Google's objections filed yesterday in US District Court for the Northern District of California.

In December 2023, the maker of Fortnite won a jury ruling that found Google engaged in anticompetitive conduct in order to maintain monopolies in the Android app distribution market and the Android market for in-app billing. The jury sided with Epic on every question it was presented.

Read 14 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Mini Settlers is a city builder that you can both enjoy and actually put down

3 May 2024 at 07:37
Mini Settlers screen showing rocks, fields, and lots of water pumps and farms.

Enlarge / Are you enticed by this kind of orderly madness with a clean graphical layout? Then I suggest you… settle in. (credit: Goblinz Studio)

You can't buy Mini Settlers right now, but I think you should play the free "Prologue" demo and wishlist the full game if you dig it. It's not quite like any other city builder I've played.

Mini Settlers is "mini" like minimalism. It is in the same genre, but quite far from, games like Cities: Skylines 2 (a choice with some proven merit). Your buildings are not 3D-rendered with real-time lighting. Your buildings are colored squares, sometimes with a few disc tokens stacked on them, tabletop-style. Your roads don't have traffic, but they have drivers (tiny squares) that take resources between nodes. When things go wrong, you don't get depressing news about pollution and riots; some people just leave their homes, but they'll come back if you fix what's wrong.

Mini Settlers announcement video.

Mini Settlers is not the game to play to satisfy your long-running suspicion that urban planning was your missed calling. In the (non-progress-saving) Prologue-free demo out this week, the mines and quarries have infinite resources. There is no "money" to speak of, so far as I can tell. Apple farms must be placed near apple orchards and water pumps by water, and the rest is up to you. The interface looks like a thought experiment in how far you can get from traditional city sim HUDs, but then someone implemented it.

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Chinese Tencent-owned Riot Games installs rootkit on every League of Legends players’ computer

1 May 2024 at 09:05

With 14.9, Vanguard, Riot’s proprietary Anti-Cheat system will be deployed and active in League of Legends. This means that active enforcement of Vanguard will be in effect and working hard to make sure your queues are free from scripters, botters, and cheaters! We recently released a blog detailing the “why” behind bringing Vanguard to League that you can check out here. It’s a bit of a long read, but it does have some pictures.

↫ Lilu Cabreros in the League of Legends patch notes

The basic gist is that Vanguard is a closed-source, kernel-level rootkit for Windows that runs at all times, with the supposed goal of detecting and banning cheaters from playing League of Legends. This being a rootkit designed specifically to inject itself into the Windows kernel, it won’t work on Linux, and as such, the entire League on Linux community, which has been playing League for years now and even at times communicated with Riot employees to keep the game running, is now gone.

Interestingly enough, Riot is not implementing Vanguard on macOS, which League of Legends also supports – because Apple simply doesn’t allow it.

This is probably the most invasive, disturbing form of anticheat we’ve seen so far, especially since it involves such a hugely popular game. It’s doubly spicy because Riot Games is owned by Tencent, a Chinese company, which means a company owned and controlled by the Chinese government now has rootkits installed on the roughly 150 million players’ computers all over the world. While we’re all (rightly, in my opinion) worried about TikTok, China just slipped 150 million rootkits onto computers all over the world.

One really has to wonder where these increasingly invasive, anti-privacy and anti-user anticheat measures are going from here. Now that this rootkit can keep tabs on literally every single thing you do on your Windows computer, what’s going to be the next step? Anticheat might have to move towards using webcams to watch you play to prevent you from cheating, because guess what? The next level of cheating is already here, and it doesn’t even involve your computer.

Earlier this year, hardware maker MSI showed off a gaming monitor that uses “AI” to see what’s going on on your monitor, and then injects overlays onto your monitor to help you cheat. MSI showed off how the monitor will use the League of Legends minimap to follow enemy champions and other relevant content, and then show warnings on your screen when enemies approach from off-screen. All of this happens entirely on the monitor’s hardware, and never sends any data whatsoever to the computer it’s attached to. It’s cheating that literally cannot be detected by anything running on your computer, rootkit or not.

So, the only logical next step as such forms of cheating become more advanced and widespread is to force users to turn on their webcams, and point them at their displays.

I fired up League of Legends today on my gaming computer – which runs Linux, of course – and after the League client “installed” the rootkit, it just got stuck in an endless loop of asking me to restart the client. I’ve been playing League of Legends for close to 14 years, and while I know the game – and especially its community – has a deservedly so bad reputation, I’ve always enjoyed the game with friends, and especially with my wife, who’s been playing for years and years as well.

Speaking of my wife – even though she runs Windows and could easily install the rootkit if she wanted to, she has some serious doubts about this. When I explained what the Vanguard rootkit can do, her mouse pointer slowly moved away from the “Update” button, saying, “I’m not so sure about this…”

The first video game, Spacewar!, on the DEC PDP-1 in your browser

29 April 2024 at 03:53

This is a virtual DEC PDP-1 (emulated in HTML5/JavaScript) running the original code of “Spacewar!”, the earliest known digital video game. If available, use gamepads or joysticks for authentic gameplay — the game was originally played using custom “control boxes”.

Spacewar! was conceived in 1961 by Martin Graetz, Stephen Russell, and Wayne Wiitanen. It was first realized on the PDP-1 in 1962 by Stephen Russell, Peter Samson, Dan Edwards, and Martin Graetz, together with Alan Kotok, Steve Piner, and Robert A Saunders.

↫ Norbert Landsteiner

It’s wild to me that even for the very first video game, they already made what are effectively controllers anyone today could pick up and use. Note that this emulator can run more than just Spacewar!.

Inside the Super Nintendo cartridges

22 April 2024 at 07:20

One of the remarkable characteristics of the Super Nintendo was the ability for game cartridges (cart) to pack more than instructions and assets into ROM chips. If we open and look at the PCBs, we can find inside things like the CIC copy protection chip, SRAM, and even “enhancement processors”.

↫ Fabien Sanglard

When I was a child and teenager in the ’90s, the capabilities of the SNES cartridge were a bit of a legend. We’d talk about what certain games would use which additional processors and chips in the cartridge, right or wrong, often boasting about the games we owned, and talking down the games we didn’t. Much of it was probably nonsense, but there’s some good memories there.

We’re decades deep into the internet age now, and all the mysteries of the SNES cartridge can just be looked up on Wikipedia and endless numbers of other websites. The mystery’s all gone, but at least now we can accurately marvel at just how versatile the SNES really was.

Porting 8-bit Sonic 2 to the TI-84+ CE

19 April 2024 at 16:23

It all started in fall of 2022, when I was watching This Does Not Compute’s video on the history of graphing calculator gaming. Around the 5 minute mark, he offhandedly mentions the kind of processors TI’s graphing calculator line uses. Most of them use the Z80, the 89 and 92 use the M68K, and the Nspire line uses an ARM-based processor.

That really piqued my interest, since I already knew the processors that Sega’s retro game consoles used: The Z80 for the Master System, and the M68K for the Genesis. The calcs have a grayscale screen, but I wanted to know if anyone ever tried porting a Sonic game from the consoles to one of the calcs.

↫ grubbycoder

Right off the bat, after settling on the most appropriate graphing calculator to try and port Sonic 2 to, namely the TI-84+ CE with a 48Mhz eZ80 processor (“basically a 24-bit Z80”), 256 KB of RAM and a 320×240 display, the porting process runs into some serious roadblocks before any code’s even been written. Unlike the Sega hardware Sonic 2 runs on, the TI-84+ CE has no graphics hardware, the clock speed is effectively crippled at 12-20Mhz, a file format with a size limit of 64KB per file.

The rest of the story details the many difficulties that needed to be overcome, but in the end, the port is completed – and yes, you can now play Sonic 2 from the Master System on a TI graphing calculator.

Discord is nuking Nintendo Switch emulator devs and their entire servers

12 April 2024 at 06:29

Discord has shut down the Discord servers for the Nintendo Switch emulators Suyu and Sudachi and has completely disabled their lead developers’ accounts — and the company isn’t answering our questions about why it went that far. Both Suyu and Sudachi began as forks of Yuzu, the emulator that Nintendo sued out of existence on March 4th.

↫ Sean Hollister at The Verge

This is exactly what people were worried about when Nintendo and Yuzu settled for millions of dollars. Even though it’s a settlement and not a court ruling, and even tough the code to Yuzu is entirely unaffected by the settlement and freely shareable and usable by anyone, and even though emulators are legal – the chilling effect this settlement is having is absolutely undeniable. Here we have Discord going far beyond its own official policy, without even giving the affected parties any recourse. It’s absolutely wild, and highlights just how dangerous it is to rely on Discord for, well, anything.

I wish that for once, we’d actually see a case related to console emulation go to court in either the EU or the US, to make it even clearer that yes, unless you distribute copyrighted code like game ROMs or console firmware, emulators are entirely legal and without any risk. You know, a recent court ruling we could point to to dissuade bullies like Nintendo from threatening innocent developers and ruining their lives because of entirely legal activities.

And let me reiterate: don’t use Discord as for anything other than basic chat. This platform ain’t got your back.

Discord turns to ads

2 April 2024 at 18:03

Quests are a way for players to discover games and earn rewards for playing them on Discord. We started experimenting with them over the last year, and millions of you opted in and completed them. We’ve heard great feedback from developers who partnered with us to create them and from many of you who completed one. If you didn’t see firsthand, the “May the 4th” Fortnite Quest is a great example. Now, we’re opening up sponsored Quests to more game developers.

↫ Peter Sellis

That’s a lot of fancy, hip words to say Discord is going to show you ads. I have an odd relationship with Discord – it holds a special place in my heart because through Discord is how I met my now-wife and mother of our children, so understandably, the chat platform has a special meaning for us. At the same time, though, Discord has been getting steadily worse and less usable over the years, and while my wife isn’t too bothered by that, I certainly am – and so we moved our instant messaging over to Signal instead. My wife still uses Discord with her friends.

Seeing a platform that used to be quite usable, and easily the best way to manage a group of geographically spread-out friends, fall prey to the same kind of bullshit so many other platforms have succumbed to. Discord today is almost unrecognisable to what it was like 6-7 years ago, and now there’s even going to be ads – the final nail in the coffin for the possibility of me ever going back to using it.

The hearts of the Super Nintendo

1 April 2024 at 10:04

Every computer has at least one heart which beats the cadence to all the other chips. The CloCK output pin is connected to a copper line which spreads to most components, into their CLK input pin.

If you are mostly a software person like me, you may have never noticed it but all kinds of processors have a CLK input pin. From CPUs (Motorola 68000, Intel Pentium, MOS 6502), to custom graphic chips (Midway’s DMA2, Capcom CPS-A/CPS-B, Sega’s Genesis VDP) to audio chips (Yamaha 2151, OKI msm6295), they all have one.

↫ Fabien Sanglard

I’ve watched enough Adrian Black that I already knew all of this, and I’m assuming so did many of you. But hey, I’ll never pass up the opportunity to link to the insides of the Super Nintendo.

EFF to Ninth Circuit: There’s No Software Exception to Traditional Copyright Limits

11 March 2024 at 18:31

Copyright’s reach is already far too broad, and courts have no business expanding it any further, particularly where that reframing will undermine adversarial interoperability. Unfortunately, a federal district court did just that in the latest iteration of Oracle v. Rimini, concluding that software Rimini developed was a “derivative work” because it was intended to interoperate with Oracle's software, even though the update didn’t use any of Oracle’s copyrightable code.

That’s a dangerous precedent. If a work is derivative, it may infringe the copyright in the preexisting work from which it, well, derives. For decades, software developers have relied, correctly, on the settled view that a work is not derivative under copyright law unless it is “substantially similar” to a preexisting work in both ideas and expression. Thanks to that rule, software developers can build innovative new tools that interact with preexisting works, including tools that improve privacy and security, without fear that the companies that hold rights in those preexisting works would have an automatic copyright claim to those innovations.

That’s why EFF, along with a diverse group of stakeholders representing consumers, small businesses, software developers, security researchers, and the independent repair community, filed an amicus brief in the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals explaining that the district court ruling is not just bad policy, it’s also bad law.  Court after court has confronted the challenging problem of applying copyright to functional software, and until now none have found that the copyright monopoly extends to interoperable software absent substantial similarity. In other words, there is no “software exception” to the definition of derivative works, and the Ninth Circuit should reject any effort to create one.

The district court’s holding relied heavily on an erroneous interpretation of a 1998 case, Micro Star v. FormGen. In that case, the plaintiff, FormGen, published a video game following the adventures of action hero Duke Nukem. The game included a software tool that allowed players themselves to build new levels to the game and share them with others. Micro Star downloaded hundreds of those user-created files and sold them as a collection. When FormGen sued for copyright infringement, Micro Star argued that because the user files didn’t contain art or code from the FormGen game, they were not derivative works.

The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled against Micro Star, explaining that:

[t]he work that Micro Star infringes is the [Duke Nukem] story itself—a beefy commando type named Duke who wanders around post-Apocalypse Los Angeles, shooting Pig Cops with a gun, lobbing hand grenades, searching for medkits and steroids, using a jetpack to leap over obstacles, blowing up gas tanks, avoiding radioactive slime. A copyright owner holds the right to create sequels and the stories told in the [user files] are surely sequels, telling new (though somewhat repetitive) tales of Duke’s fabulous adventures.

Thus, the user files were “substantially similar” because they functioned as sequels to the video game itself—specifically the story and principal character of the game. If the user files had told a different story, with different characters, they would not be derivative works. For example, a company offering a Lord of the Rings game might include tools allowing a user to create their own character from scratch. If the user used the tool to create a hobbit, that character might be considered a derivative work. A unique character that was simply a 21st century human in jeans and a t-shirt, not so much.

Still, even confined to its facts, Micro Star stretched the definition of derivative work. By misapplying Micro Star to purely functional works that do not incorporate any protectable expression, however, the district court rewrote the definition altogether. If the court’s analysis were correct, rightsholders would suddenly have a new default veto right in all kinds of works that are intended to “interact and be useable with” their software. Unfortunately, they are all too likely to use that right to threaten add-on innovation, security, and repair.

Defenders of the district court’s approach might argue that interoperable software will often be protected by fair use. As copyrightable software is found in everything from phones to refrigerators, fair use is an essential safeguard for the development of interoperable tools, where those tools might indeed qualify as derivative works. But many developers cannot afford to litigate the question, and they should not have to just because one federal court misread a decades-old case.

Fragging: The Subscription Model Comes for Gamers

By: Rory Mir
23 January 2024 at 19:24

We're taking part in Copyright Week, a series of actions and discussions supporting key principles that should guide copyright policy. Every day this week, various groups are taking on different elements of copyright law and policy, addressing what's at stake and what we need to do to make sure that copyright promotes creativity and innovation.

The video game industry is undergoing the same concerning changes we’ve seen before with film and TV, and it underscores the need for meaningful digital ownership.

Twenty years ago you owned DVDs. Ten years ago you probably had a Netflix subscription with a seemingly endless library. Now, you probably have two to three subscription services, and regularly hear about shows and movies you can no longer access, either because they’ve moved to yet another subscription service, or because platforms are delisting them all together.

The video game industry is getting the same treatment. While it is still common for people to purchase physical or digital copies of games, albeit often from within walled gardens like Steam or Epic Games, game subscriptions are becoming more and more common. Like the early days of movie streaming, services like Microsoft Game Pass or PlayStation Plus seem to offer a good deal. For a flat monthly fee, you have access to seemingly unlimited game choices. That is, for now.

In a recent announcement from game developer Ubisoft, their director of subscriptions said plainly that a goal of their subscription service’s rebranding is to get players “comfortable” with not owning their games. Notably, this is from a company which had developed five non-mobile games last year, hoping users will access them and older games through a $17.99 per month subscription; that is, $215.88 per year. And after a year, how many games does the end user actually own? None. 

This fragmentation of the video game subscription market isn’t just driven by greed, but answering a real frustration from users the industry itself has created. Gamers at one point could easily buy and return games, they could rent games they were only curious about, and even recoup costs by reselling their game. With the proliferation of DRM and walled-garden game vendors, ownership rights have been eroded. Reselling or giving away a copy of your game, or leaving it for your next of kin, is no longer permitted. The closest thing to a rental now available is a game demo (if it exists) or playing a game within the time frame necessary to get a refund (if a storefront offers one). These purchases are also put at risk as games are sometimes released incomplete beyond this time limit. Developers such as Ubisoft will also shut down online services which severely impact the features of these games, or even make them unplayable.

DRM and tightly controlled gaming platforms also make it harder to mod or tweak games in ways the platform doesn’t choose to support. Mods are a thriving medium for extending the functionalities, messages, and experiences facilitated by a base game, one where passion has driven contributors to design amazing things with a low barrier to entry. Mods depend on users who have the necessary access to a work to understand how to mod it and to deploy mods when running the program. A model wherein the player can only access these aspects of the game in the ways the manufacturer supports undermines the creative rights of owners as well.

This shift should raise alarms for both users and creators alike. With publishers serving as intermediaries, game developers are left either struggling to reach their audience, or settling for a fraction of the revenue they could receive from traditional sales. 

We need to preserve digital ownership before we see video games fall into the same cycles as film and TV, with users stuck paying more and receiving not robust ownership, but fragile access on the platform’s terms.

Kids Online Safety Shouldn’t Require Massive Online Censorship and Surveillance: 2023 Year in Review

28 December 2023 at 11:25

There’s been plenty of bad news regarding federal legislation in 2023. For starters, Congress has failed to pass meaningful comprehensive data privacy reforms. Instead, legislators have spent an enormous amount of energy pushing dangerous legislation that’s intended to limit young people’s use of some of the most popular sites and apps, all under the guise of protecting kids. Unfortunately, many of these bills would run roughshod over the rights of young people and adults in the process. We spent much of the year fighting these dangerous “child safety” bills, while also pointing out to legislators that comprehensive data privacy legislation would be more likely to pass constitutional muster and address many of the issues that these child safety bills focus on. 

But there’s also good news: so far, none of these dangerous bills have been passed at the federal level, or signed into law. That's thanks to a large coalition of digital rights groups and other organizations pushing back, as well as tens of thousands of individuals demanding protections for online rights in the many bills put forward.

Kids Online Safety Act Returns

The biggest danger has come from the Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA). Originally introduced in 2022, it was reintroduced this year and amended several times, and as of today, has 46 co-sponsors in the Senate. As soon as it was reintroduced, we fought back, because KOSA is fundamentally a censorship bill. The heart of the bill is a “Duty of Care” that the government will force on a huge number of websites, apps, social networks, messaging forums, and online video games. KOSA will compel even the smallest online forums to take action against content that politicians believe will cause minors “anxiety,” “depression,” or encourage substance abuse, among other behaviors. Of course, almost any content could easily fit into these categories—in particular, truthful news about what’s going on in the world, including wars, gun violence, and climate change. Kids don’t need to fall into a  wormhole of internet content to get anxious; they could see a newspaper on the breakfast table. 

Fortunately, so many people oppose KOSA that it never made it to the Senate floor for a full vote.

KOSA will empower every state’s attorney general as well as the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) to file lawsuits against websites or apps that the government believes are failing to “prevent or mitigate” the list of bad things that could influence kids online. Platforms affected by KOSA would likely find it impossible to filter out this type of “harmful” content, though they would likely try. Online services that want to host serious discussions about mental health issues, sexuality, gender identity, substance abuse, or a host of other issues, will all have to beg minors to leave, and institute age verification tools to ensure that it happens. Age verification systems are surveillance systems that threaten everyone’s privacy. Mandatory age verification, and with it, mandatory identity verification, is the wrong approach to protecting young people online.

The Senate passed amendments to KOSA later in the year, but these do not resolve its issues. As an example, liability under the law was shifted to be triggered only for content that online services recommend to users under 18, rather than content that minors specifically search for. In practice, that means platforms could not proactively show content to young users that could be “harmful,” but could present that content to them. How this would play out in practice is unclear; search results are recommendations, and future recommendations are impacted by previous searches. But however it’s interpreted, it’s still censorship—and it fundamentally misunderstands how search works online. Ultimately, no amendment will change the basic fact that KOSA’s duty of care turns what is meant to be a bill about child safety into a censorship bill that will harm the rights of both adult and minor users. 

Fortunately, so many people oppose KOSA that it never made it to the Senate floor for a full vote. In fact, even many of the young people it is intended to help are vehemently against it. We will continue to oppose it in the new year, and urge you to contact your congressperson about it today

Most KOSA Alternatives Aren’t Much Better

KOSA wasn’t the only child safety bill Congress put forward this year. The Protecting Kids on Social Media Act would combine some of the worst elements of other social media bills aimed at “protecting the children” into a single law. It includes elements of KOSA as well as several ideas pulled from state bills that have passed this year, such as Utah’s surveillance-heavy Social Media Regulations law

When originally introduced, the Protecting Kids on Social Media Act had five major components: 

  • A mandate that social media companies verify the ages of all account holders, including adults 
  • A ban on children under age 13 using social media at all
  • A mandate that social media companies obtain parent or guardian consent before minors over 12 years old and under 18 years old may use social media
  • A ban on the data of minors (anyone over 12 years old and under 18 years old) being used to inform a social media platform’s content recommendation algorithm
  • The creation of a digital ID pilot program, instituted by the Department of Commerce, for citizens and legal residents, to verify ages and parent/guardian-minor relationships

EFF is opposed to all of these components, and has written extensively about why age verification mandates and parental consent requirements are generally dangerous and likely unconstitutional. 

In response to criticisms, senators updated the bill to remove some of the most flagrantly unconstitutional provisions: it no longer expressly mandates that social media companies verify the ages of all account holders, including adults. Nor does it mandate that social media companies obtain parent or guardian consent before teens may use social media.  

One silver lining to this fight is that it has activated young people. 

Still, it remains an unconstitutional bill that replaces parents’ choices about what their children can do online with a government-mandated prohibition. It would still prohibit children under 13 from using any ad-based social media, despite the vast majority of content on social media being lawful speech fully protected by the First Amendment. If enacted, the bill would suffer a similar fate to a California law struck down in 2011 for violating the First Amendment, which was aimed at restricting minors’ access to violent video games. 

What’s Next

One silver lining to this fight is that it has activated young people. The threat of KOSA, as well as several similar state-level bills that did pass, has made it clear that young people may be the biggest target for online censorship and surveillance, but they are also a strong weapon against them

The authors of these bills have good, laudable intentions. But laws that would force platforms to determine the age of their users are privacy-invasive, and laws that restrict speech—even if only for those who can’t prove they are above a certain age—are censorship laws. We expect that KOSA, at least, will return in one form or another. We will be ready when it does.

This blog is part of our Year in Review series. Read other articles about the fight for digital rights in 2023.

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