I have a complicated relationship with marijuana. I wish I liked it more. But I'm a control freak, and so it makes me relax for about three minutes before sending me into a panic attack because I have lost control. I live in Canada, where it's legal, with government shops full of wacky baccy wares in all shapes and sizes. They even have lurid canned drinks, like some form of anti-Red Bull.

If you've spent any time playing Dead Island 2, chances are you've noticed the game's progressive damage system. The Fully Locational Evisceration System for Humanoids, or FLESH, as developer Dambuster Studios call it, is a procedural tool that makes dismembering, melting, or burning zombies look more realistic, as signs of trauma correspond to the attacks you perform, visibly chewing through skin, muscle, organs, and bone. Of course, Dead Island 2 applies all this gore to schlocky, slapstick effect. But FLESH may make you wonder how such gruesome detail might translate to games with more serious themes. Questions around violence in games have a long history, spanning tabloid moral panics to concerted academic research.

An artificial intelligence agent recently flew a Lockheed Martin VISTA X-62A training aircraft for over 17 hours. VISTA (which stands for Variable In-flight Simulation Test Aircraft) normally uses software to simulate the performance characteristics of other aircraft. US Air Force Test Pilot School (USAF TPS) Director of Research Dr. M. Christopher Cotting said in a statement, "VISTA will allow us to parallelize the development and test of cutting-edge artificial intelligence techniques with new uncrewed vehicle designs." This is the first time AI has been engaged in such a way on a tactical aircraft, Lockheed says. It's like they've never seen the 2005 box-office bomb, Stealth… Get our daily audio briefings, Monday through Friday, by subscribing right here.

When Dead Island 2 remerged earlier this year after a lengthy absence, publisher Deep Silver announced it would be the first title to support Amazon's Alexa Game Control, a feature that allows you to use your voice to play a game. On Tuesday, the company shared a trailer showcasing the functionality, albeit one that offers a staged view of things. The trailer opens with a group of zombie apocalypse survivors finding a playable build of Dead Island 2. "What a weird coincidence," says one of the characters, commenting on the meta-narrative. "What's Alexa Game Control?" asks the leader of the group. As one of their friends goes outside for a smoke, the video shows how certain voice commands will trigger actions within the game.