The workers at Bethesda Game Studios have joined the Communications Workers of America (CWA), and they say they're the first Microsoft video game studio to form a wall-to-wall union. A total of 241 workers have either signed an authorization card or have indicated that they wanted to join a union through an online portal. The "wall-to-wall" nature of their organization means the CWA will be representing workers across job descriptions and divisions -- and not just one type -- including artists, engineers, programmers and designers. Bethesda is the developer behind Starfield and the Elder Scrolls and Fallout games. Microsoft has already recognized the union, so workers at the studio's Maryland office have officially joined CWA Locals 2108, while those in its Texas office have become members of CWA Locals 6215.

We present in this article what we believe to be one of the first attempts at video game machine translation. Our study shows that models trained only with limited in-domain data surpass publicly available systems by a significant margin, and a subsequent human evaluation reveals interesting findings in the final translation. The first part of the article introduces some of the challenges of video game translation, some of the existing literature, as well as the systems and data sets used in this experiment. The last sections discuss our analysis of the resulting translation and the potential benefits of such an automated system. One such finding highlights the model's ability to learn typical rules and patterns of video game translations from English into French. Our conclusions therefore indicate that the specific case of video game machine translation could prove very much useful given the encouraging results, the highly repetitive nature of the work, and the often poor working conditions that translators face in this field. As with other use cases of MT in cultural sectors, however, we believe this is heavily dependent on the proper implementation of the tool, which should be used interactively by human translators to stimulate creativity instead of raw post-editing for the sake of productivity.

Is there anyone who's played video games over the last 10 years who hasn't played Skyrim? When it came out in 2011, this must surely have seemed to the outside world like one of the nerdiest games around: potions and spells, axes and swords, dark elves and giants and, of course, dragons. But Skyrim nevertheless became one of the most widely played games ever, a touchstone in the video game world, for players and developers alike. It has been re-released on every console and platform imaginable, to the point where it's become a gaming in-joke. It's still huge on YouTube and TikTok, even with people who were little kids when it came out.

It's only Sunday yet video game fans have been greeted with several big revelations about what they'll play this holiday and beyond. The Electronic Entertainment Expo, E3, is one of the most important events for the video game industry, as fans and retailers get a taste of what to expect from the biggest game publishers. Thursday kicked things off with the Summer Game Fest featuring several game announcements, followed by events from publishers including Ubisoft, Square Enix, Microsoft, Bethesda and more. Although there are still a couple more days of E3 news and reveals, here's a breakdown of the biggest game announcements so far: E3 2021:'Starfield,' 'Redfall,' 'Halo Infinite' and more reveals from Xbox games showcase'Hardcore tile management':Why Upwords is the superior word game (ahem Scrabble) The hype for this upcoming role-playing game has been well deserved, bringing together the creative talents of George R.R. Martin, the author behind the Game of Thrones series, and Hidetaka Miyazaki, who worked on beloved video game properties "Dark Souls" and "Bloodborne." Publisher Bandai Namco says the game will feature a "vast and seamless landscape" with natural weather and time-of-day progression.

You've got to feel for Bethesda Game Studios. It's a big developer that's only growing, with a clear ambition to make new, interesting experiences both in the genres and worlds that have defined it in the past and outside of them. It's got plans for the future that we're going to start seeing more of this year at E3. And yet fans are basically here shouting "Freebird!" Such is the way when you're in the studio that makes Elder Scrolls games.