Computer Games

In an early development video, Marshall even recommends setting match duration to short times because, he reminds us, football is'just kicking and goals'. So for a game jam-type thing, I thought I'd make a silly football game. After 15 months, Behold the Kickmen turned from a joke, into a commercially released game for PC and Mac. It's not interesting if a football game designer is making a football game.

Internet users outside China watched a computer defeat its national go champion, but few Chinese web surfers could see it. Censors blocked access to Tuesday's online broadcast by Google, which organized the game in a town west of Shanghai during a forum on artificial intelligence. The event got little coverage from Chinese newspapers and broadcasters, suggesting they might have received orders to avoid mentioning Google, which closed its China-based search engine in 2010 in a dispute over censorship and computer hacking. The official response to the game, a major event for go and artificial intelligence, reflects the conflict between the ruling Communist Party's technology ambitions and its insistence on controlling what its public can see, hear and read.

Working in the world of video games is a true dream job, and Bugi Kaigwa, a technical artist at Visual Concepts, is living the dream as a video game designer. Kaigwa, who works on developing the immensely popular NBA 2K basketball games, including this year's NBA 2K17 game, chatted with USA TODAY College about vanilla lattes, hard work and, well, of course video games. My dad is an amazing, amazing artist and I look up to him. My heart, though, was in the animation; I love video games, and I came to California and enrolled in Cogswell.

Doug Polk, one of the world's best poker players, shoveled egg whites into his mouth with a plastic fork and slurped unsweetened oatmeal from a paper cup, 13 days into the oddest tournament he has ever entered. His opponent, Claudico, did not struggle with fatigue, mental breakdown or hunger, despite... Doug Polk, one of the world's best poker players, shoveled egg whites into his mouth with a plastic fork and slurped unsweetened oatmeal from a paper cup, 13 days into the oddest tournament he has ever entered. The European Space Agency's Rosetta orbiter will commit operational suicide early Friday morning, but first it has just a little bit more science to do. The European Space Agency's Rosetta orbiter will commit operational suicide early Friday morning, but first it has just a little bit more science to do.

The immediate reaction to Apple's long-overdue MacBook Pro overhaul seems mixed, to say the least. For every excited reaction to the laptop's adaptive Touch Bar keys, we see people lamenting the lack of ports that professional users actually need, the lack of a 32GB memory option, the lack of an SD card slot, and the lack of, well, pretty much any "pro" features in the entry-level MacBook Pro model (which still costs $1,500 and up). Fear not: If "Pro" is more than a mere buzzword to you, there's a veritable cornucopia of attractive, yet powerful PC laptops just waiting to scratch your itch. For even more options, be sure to check out PCWorld's list of the best PC laptops around.

Tata Communications is hoping that a Formula 1 racing fan and Singapore-based game designer will pave the way for an immersive augmented reality experience that could be deployed in the future. The effort is designed to attract developers to potentially enhance the Formula 1 racing experience. The innovation challenge highlights how companies are increasingly holding contests to garner ideas and potentially future talent. YogaBrata's idea was to use a 360-degree trackside experience that is enabled by a group of commentators who roam wearing wearable cameras.

We have survived the advent of the new Millennium, and we have found once again that, after the divine afflatus, human intellect reigns supreme in the cosmos. Yet even with the burgeoning networks and the increasingly powerful integration of humanity and its machines, the surprises offered by the observations of the young and young-in-spirit still outdo those of scientific teams. Yet Thoreau offered my students access not to data, but to genius, and that, not data, intrigued them. My maths colleagues, intrigued with what I was doing with language, proceeded to AI, and my psychology colleagues drifted off to work some of the same ideas in formulating new network designs at Bell Labs.

The lead writer of "Mafia III," Bill Harms, and its creative director, Haden Blackman, thought hard about how to let players roam free through the streets of their New Orleans-inspired city New Bordeaux -- without losing the plot. Haden Blackman, creative director: When we first started working on "Mafia III," we tried to look at what was the franchise known for. Bill Harms, lead writer: Fictionally the thing about the mob that helps us is that it's a very rigid hierarchy. Harms: It's about freedom and not being confined to a specific game space.

Unlike many classic board games, Pandemic requires cooperation, tasking two to four players to work together to halt the spread of deadly diseases. How have sites like Kickstarter helped independent game makers find an audience to back their projects? That's right, I do a lot of beta testing and usability testing, play testing, whatever you want to call it, prior to publication. Is there a sentiment among independent board game designers that mass-market games are inferior?

The design team behind Firaxis' turn-based, alien-themed combat tactics game "XCOM 2" recently did something that might surprise most people. Even before Firaxis made its game mod-friendly, players were finding ways to alter the title in significant ways. One particularly prominent mod is called The Long War, which significantly extended, revamped and rebalanced both "XCOM: Enemy Unknown" and "XCOM: Enemy Within." Rather than see mods as criticism of the work his team put into the game, Solomon sees it as a labor of love from its biggest fans.