In July, Siyan, a UK-based Discord user, logged on one morning and found himself unable to access some of his text chats marked NSFW. The channel, a popup informed him, was now age-restricted. The United Kingdom had enacted its far reaching child safety laws, which includes an age requirement system to verify users are over 18. Discord's updates required users to verify their age, either by government ID or a face scan. Siyan (who requested to only be referred to by his screen name for privacy reasons) describes himself as "painfully over the age of needing to fake an ID." He didn't want to take a photo of his ID.

For more than a decade, blockbuster comic book adaptations reliably clobbered all competition at the box office. Disney and HBO Max built their streaming strategies around intellectual property from Marvel and DC Comics. The studios turned this pulpy source material into a profusion of interconnected films and series that consistently drove ticket sales and subscriptions--until they didn't. Lately, serious superhero fatigue seems to have set in. Comic book movies regularly tank these days, and not just the ones based on second-string characters like Blue Beetle and Madame Web.

The iPhone 15 Pro is getting a performance boost thanks to a new chipset. One thing we didn't expect from today's Apple event, however, was a detailed list of the games that the A17 Pro will be able to support. Apple said during its iPhone event that Resident Evil Village, this year's Resident Evil 4 remake, Death Stranding and the upcoming Assassin's Creed Mirage are all coming to its mobile devices soon. As Apple notes, this will be the first time that a console-level Assassin's Creed game will be available natively on iPhone. Expect to see Mirage on iPhone 15 Pro and iPhone 15 Pro Max in the first half of next year.

For those whose feel the call of the mountains, video games have proved abundant recently: Death Stranding, The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, and Sable all feature enticing summits, enveloped in clouds, with makeshift rock-paths towards them. Now there is Jusant, the latest title to turn vertiginous traversal into a puzzle, inspiring wanderlust from the comfort of the sofa. It is the new game from Don't Nod, the French studio behind the hit adventure series Life Is Strange. Rather, all its talking is done through dizzying, gravity-defying action. Co-creative director Mathieu Beaudelin wants to give players a taste of being an elite climber, he says, to become one with the massif.

A documentary about Hideo Kojima, one of the most lauded video game designers on the planet, is on the way. A trailer offers a first peek at what's in store for those who plan to check out Hideo Kojima: Connecting Worlds. Kojima wrote on Twitter that the film will provide a behind-the-scenes look at the development of Death Stranding, as well as "shots from the early days of our independent studio, memories from my childhood and my creative journey." The trailer encapsulates all of that while suggesting the film is a celebration of Kojima and his work. Friends, collaborators and fans including Geoff Keighley, Guillermo del Toro, Norman Reedus and George Miller are shown talking up Kojima and his credentials.

For many people, the list of their most hotly anticipated video games will include "whatever Hideo Kojima is working on." If you're one of those folks, you may be interested to learn that a video showing the Death Stranding auteur's next title seems to have leaked ahead of a formal reveal from his studio, Kojima Productions. The video, which has been removed from Streamable for violating the platform's terms of service, shows a character who looks like Mama from Death Stranding. That character was played by Maid and Once Upon a Time in Hollywood actor Margaret Qualley. The character shown here navigates dark corridors with the help of a flashlight while an ominous figure follows them.

On 8 July 2022, former Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe was delivering a political campaign speech outside the Yamato-Saidaiji Station in Nara City, Japan, when a man approached and shot him in the back using a homemade firearm. Even before Abe died from his injuries, footage of the assassination had been posted online. Social media users began to speculate as to the identity and motive of the killer. On the internet forum 4chan, a site notorious for its anarchic, often hateful trolling, an anonymous user posted a photograph of the video game director Hideo Kojima, claiming this "left-wing extremist" was the perpetrator. If the post was intended to bait the gullible, it worked.

Last fall, around the same time as a historic amount of funding for expanding broadband access across the country passed into law, a friend introduced me to a video game called Death Stranding. Within the first few minutes, I realized that while the game was maybe not for me as a gamer. It felt a little too immersive, and I didn't like the huge monsters and assassin types floating around everywhere. But it appealed to me in my professional role advocating for universal access to telecommunications service. Though Death Stranding was released before COVID-19, the pandemic and its ensuing lockdowns created an unavoidable parallel between real life and the world of the game that revealed in both cases, the essential nature of networked communications. The game's designer has explicitly reiterated the importance of connection as one of the game's main themes.

That for me is the instant death knell of that title. A free-to-play game has to be free-to-play from the absolute outset. The concept must be free-to-play.

It has been 469 days since covid-19 cut us off from our colleagues. We've now logged more than 11,256 hours at home, but we've been far from idle. The past year-plus bathed the nation in stress and suffering, a number of us enduring it alone. And as we've self-isolated in our homes, separated by walls and miles from colleagues, friends and family, the distance strained the bonds that unite us and the calm that keeps us sane. As we observed and reported on a year embroiled by racial injustice, marred by an assault on Democracy and the deaths of 593,000 Americans from covid-19, it felt impossible to look away. Lest we be overwhelmed, it was also imperative that, from time to time, we did. For a number of us, video games provided a refuge, proxy worlds to inhabit while ours was unsuitable for life as we knew it. Instead of grabbing beers at a bar, friends paired up in multiplayer lobbies. They donned headsets and delivered life updates in disembodied voices, along with descriptions of which players looked a little "sus." Vacations were scrapped and replaced with byte-sized getaways to war-torn battlefields and post-apocalyptic hellscapes that somehow instilled serenity.