The lifespan of a games console has extended a lot since I was a child. In the 1990s, this kind of technology would be out of date after just a couple of years. There would be some tantalising new machine out before you knew it, everybody competing to be on the cutting edge: the Game Boy and Sega Genesis/Mega Drive in 1989 were followed by the Game Gear in 1990 and the Super NES in 1991. Five years was a long life for a gaming machine. The Nintendo Switch 2 will be released in a couple of weeks, more than eight years since I first picked an original Switch up off its dock and marvelled at the instant transition to portable play.

Destiny is 10 years old, which is an aeon in video game terms. On the surface, this is a lavish online prog-rock space shooter made by Bungie, the creators of the Xbox classic Halo. You bundle together with friends, deploy somewhere amid the glittering vistas of a futuristic version of our solar system, and then shoot people/aliens/robots to get better loot. None of this is exactly unprecedented, and that's maybe the point. You could argue that Destiny's touchstones are games like Halo, for its gunplay, World of Warcraft, for its persistent online spaces, and – this is where it gets a bit odd, granted – the deathless British retailer Marks & Spencer.

According to a report from Reuters, ChatGPT is listed as the author or co-author of at least 200 books on Amazon's Kindle Store. However, the number of bot-written books is likely higher than that since Amazon's policies don't require authors to disclose their use of AI. Brett Schickler published on the Kindle Store a children's book written and illustrated by AI. Although Schickler says the book has earned him less than $100 since its January release, he only spent a few hours creating it with ChatGPT prompts like "write a story about a dad teaching his son about financial literacy." Science-fiction publication Clarkesworld Magazine has temporarily halted short-story submissions after receiving a flood of articles suspected of using AI without disclosure, which was reported by PCMag.

When Roe v. Wade was overturned, Team Meat, creator of classic platformer Super Meat Boy, had one thing to say: "The Supreme Court can go fuck itself." It's been little more than a week since the court handed down its landmark ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization, ending the legal right to abortion in the United States. A person's ability to get the healthcare they need will now be determined by a patchwork of state-by-state laws and policies. Team Meat's tweet, composed by the company's social media manager, is the organization's official stance on the matter. "Everyone at Team Meat stands by this fully," cofounder Tommy Refenes tells WIRED.

Even before he leveled up to Nintendo's top U.S. job, Reggie Fils-Aimé knew how to make strategic moves. While interviewing in 2003 to join Nintendo and head its U.S. sales and marketing efforts, Fils-Aimé asked to meet with Satoru Iwata, who had recently been made Nintendo president. Fils-Aimé got the meeting and the job, but years later learned it was "a massive breach of protocol." The request almost "precluded me from even getting the job offer," Fils-Aimé told USA TODAY, "But I knew enough about the company that for me to be successful, I needed to have a strong relationship with Mr. Iwata. This conversation (they had) was supposed to be about 30 minutes and ended up being much longer than that. And as they say, the rest is history."

Though Bungie employees said leadership has assured them there will be "absolutely no layoffs" and nothing "major" in terms of restructuring once the Sony deal closes, the acquisition represents a notable shift for the Washington-based game developers. For roughly the last 15 years, Bungie's business dealings have been marked by repeated pushes to regain independence, an anomaly in the video game industry. After being purchased by Microsoft in 2000, the game developer birthed the "Halo" franchise before splitting from the tech titan in 2007. In 2019, Bungie reached an agreement with its partner in a publishing deal since 2010, Activision Blizzard, to regain control of publishing rights to its "Destiny" series. For a studio that's striven to maintain creative freedom even while creating big-budget video games, the Sony buyout is a surprising turn -- albeit one firmly in step with the industry's pivot toward consolidation, as best exemplified by Microsoft's $68.7 billion purchase of Activision Blizzard in January.

Welcome to Pushing Buttons, the Guardian's gaming newsletter. If you'd like to receive it in your inbox every week, just pop your email in below – and check your inbox (and spam) for the confirmation email. Despite the hundreds of happy hours I spent playing Guitar Hero in the late 00s, I feel slightly resentful towards it. In my late teens I was a decent player of the actual guitar, but Guitar Hero was so much more fun that I ended up ditching my actual instrument and playing that instead. I became superhumanly good at it, and meanwhile I remain an average player of the real guitar to this day.

Sony has agreed to buy the video game maker Bungie for $3.6bn, the latest in a series of takeovers in the video game industry. Washington state-based Bungie developed hit first-person shooter video game Destiny and Halo, a series that has provided some of the biggest ever hits for rival Microsoft's Xbox system. Bungie was acquired by Microsoft in 2000 and split from Microsoft in 2007. Halo is now managed by Microsoft-owned 343 Industries. The sale comes after Microsoft's $69bn acquisition of Activision Blizzard, maker of Call of Duty, Diablo, and World of Warcraft and Take Two Interactive's $12.7bn purchase of FarmVille creator Zynga.

At the start of this year, the games industry has been full of consolidation news. A week before Microsoft announced its deal, Take-Two made waves on Jan. 11 for what had then been the largest video game purchase in history, agreeing to buy mobile game giant Zygna for $12.7 billion.

Popular modders are able to find jobs in the gaming industry because they've proven they can design features fans want to add to their game, says Alex Velicky, a design lead at Bungie, the developer behind the popular multiplayer franchise "Destiny." Velicky would know -- he got his job at Bungie after he created an entire island for "Skyrim" with a full cast of voice actors, which has been downloaded more than 3 million times. Growing up, Velicky always used to build miniature campaigns in "Age of Empires 2" and "Timesplitters 2″ but Bethesda's creator kit from "Skyrim" and "Oblivion" -- an earlier title set in the same world 200 years before the events in "Skyrim" -- felt like the first time he could really build anything in a game.