Three years ago, on a drab, chilly summer day in the Dutch port of Den Helder, Amazon made an extravagant pitch for its first-ever big-budget video game, Breakaway. The event, streamed live on Twitch, was an esports tournament with a twist: It would take place on a 355-foot-long naval patrol ship, the kind that hunts down pirates and drug smugglers in the Caribbean. On the upper decks, sailors stood taut as the camera ogled the vessel's 76mm cannon. Then a pair of emcees from Amazon Game Studios, occasionally shouting over the thrum of passing helicopters, introduced the competitors. They were down below, huddled around high-end monitors--headsets on, knees jiggling anxiously, cans of Red Bull cracked open.

The team behind the competitive battle game Breakaway announced this weekend that the game "is no longer in active development" on Reddit. The brawler was being developed by Double Helix and published by Amazon Game Studios. It was one of three games Amazon's in-house game studio was planning on releasing. Back in October, the team announced that it would be focusing on changes to Breakway's core gameplay. This was in response to feedback that the development team received after a four-month Alpha testing period. As a result, the game was put on hiatus, with no timeline for when the game would finally release.

Individual agent skills, such as kicking and dribbling (running with the ball), are important prerequisites for team collaboration. For each of these skills, many parameters affect the details of the skill execution. For example, in the ball skill of dribbling, there are parameters that affect how quickly the agent runs, how far ahead it kicks the ball, and on which side of its body the agent keeps the ball while it dribbles. The settings for these parameters usually involve a tradeoff, such as speed versus safety or power versus accuracy. It is important to gain an understanding of what exactly these tradeoffs are before "correct" parameter settings can be made. We created a trainer client that connects to the server as an omniscient offline coach client.

Breakaway's Black Knight is a fearsome foe--all 400 pounds of him. Clad in spiky black armor, standing seven feet tall, and with a man-sized axe in his massive gauntlets, he's basically a murderous brick wall standing between me and freedom. In a modern-day David and Goliath situation, I strafe my way around the Black Knight's left side, flitting just past his weapon and making a break for-- I sprint up the stairs of fabled El Dorado, leap into the air like some ancient-world Michael Jordan, and slam a golden ball down into the pit on the ground. It's an interesting phenomenon that the best "Sports" video games are at best an abstract representation of real-world sports. Oh sure, developers have made astonishing simulations of real sports, with the world's best football and hockey and soccer stars meticulously recreated not just in appearance, but with tables upon tables of stats to delve into.

Amazon.com's first big-budget video game is like street basketball, except played in a mythological world where athletes are armed. Wait, Amazon makes video games? Indeed, the leader in online shopping branched into video game development a few years ago. With the unveiling last month of multiplayer online battle sport "Breakaway," Amazon for the first time showed how its gaming acquisitions and initiatives tie together. The PC game integrates into Twitch, the live video streaming app Amazon bought for nearly 1 billion, unlike any game from anyone ever before.

Information in bicycle pelotons consists of two main types: displayed information that is perceptible to others; and hidden information available to individual riders about their own physical state. Flow (or transfer) of information in pelotons occurs in two basic ways: 1) between cyclists within a peloton, which riders exploit to adjust tactical objectives (“intra-peloton”); 2) from sources outside a peloton as it is fed to riders via radio communication, or from third parties (“extra-peloton”). A conceptual framework is established for information transfer intra-peloton and extra-peloton. Both kinds of information transfer affect peloton complex dynamics. Pelotons exhibit mixed self-organized and top-down dynamics. These can be isolated and examined independently: self-organized dynamics emerge through local physical rules of interaction, and are distinguishable from the top-down dynamics of human competition, decision-making and information transfer. Both intra and extra-peloton information flow affect individual rider positions and the timing of their positional changes, but neither types of peloton information flow fundamentally alter self-organized structures. In addition to two previously identified peloton resources for which riders compete - energy saved by drafting, and near-front positions - information flow is identified as a third peloton resource. Also, building upon previous work on peloton phase-transitions and self-organized group-sorting, identified here is a transition between a team cluster state in which team-mates ride near each other, and a self-organized “fitness” cluster state in which riders of near equal fitness levels gravitate toward each other.