Call of Duty's Vince Zampella was a video games visionary O n Sunday, Vince Zampella, the co-creator of the Call of Duty video game series, died in a car crash in Los Angeles at the age of 55. Though best known for that series of blockbuster military shooters, Zampella touched a huge number of lives - not only the hundreds of people who worked at the game development studios he led under Activision and EA, but the millions of people who played the games that bore his imprint. A lifelong gamer, Zampella had a Pong console as a child, then an Atari 2600 and a Commodore 64. He told IGN in 2016 that his favourite game from childhood was Donkey Kong: "I would spend hours at the arcade playing it." Zampella's first job in the industry was at GameTek in Miami, which specialised in video-game versions of popular US quizshows.

A new challenger has appeared. In the fiercely competitive world of video games, it's common for new contenders to fade away as quickly as they burst on to the scene. But Battlefield 6 is hoping to change that. It's the latest entry in a long-running military shooter series often framed as a grittier, more realistic answer to Call of Duty. The title's never quite managed to match its most famous rival in terms of sales or players, but there are signs the new installment could close the gap.

Sometimes a video game can be thoroughly entertaining, not for any new ideas it brings to the table, but for the way in which it combines a lot of old ideas into an excitingly fresh experience. The latest shooter from Ubisoft's Tom Clancy interactive universe is a fine example. Set in an alternative Rainbow Six timeline where Earth has been invaded by a race of swampy, Lovecraftian aliens known as the Archaeans, it stars the spec-ops warriors from the multiplayer shooter hit Siege as they set out to kick ET's ass. Players form teams of three operatives, each with their own special skills and weapons, and then go into alien invasion sites to kill monsters and get things done. Every site is divided into three escalatingly difficult zones, with different objectives, and players can choose to exfiltrate after each section or gamble on not getting killed and continue on to the end, for greater rewards.

Activision Blizzard has not responded to employees' demands, the employees said, although it sent out a letter to employees the same week the strike began to advise them "to consider the consequences" of signing union authorization cards. Unionization efforts are underway at the company, with employees pushing for a majority of signed cards so they can hold a vote on forming a union. In the meantime, over a dozen Minnesota-based workers were asked to work more closely with Raven developers on "Warzone." Some had interpreted the request as Activision recruiting "scabs," or strikebreakers, current employees told The Post.

Activision Blizzard made over $2 billion in revenue within three months, it said in a November earnings call. The company has recently been under fire on several fronts however, initially stemming from a gender discrimination and harassment lawsuit filed by California's Department of Fair Employment and Housing. Its CEO, Bobby Kotick, was the subject of a recent Wall Street Journal report that stated he knew about sexual misconduct claims at the video game company but failed to inform its board of directors.

NFTs, or non-fungible tokens, are certificates of ownership for a unique digital asset, be it a video clip, music, image or GIF, backed up by blockchain technology and typically purchased with cryptocurrency. The concept burst into the mainstream in early March when a work by digital artist Beeple sold for $69 million at a Christie's auction. Now outfits ranging from the NBA, to the band Kings of Leon, to celebrity chef Salt Bae are rushing to capitalize on the craze.

Part of the issue, according to Goldenberg, a retired Navy captain, is red tape. Medics and hospital corpsman in the Navy, despite having years of experience in the medical field, have to start from square one should they wish to pursue a career in medicine. Without having additional schooling, they're unable to come out of the military and become an EMT or paramedic. The same goes for truck drivers. While they're used to driving 18-wheelers in less-than-ideal conditions, they can't automatically qualify to drive tractor trailers on roads in the U.S. because they haven't been taught how to reverse the vehicle unassisted.

Yesterday we got our first, full look at Call of Duty: Black Ops IIII, the newest iteration in the blockbuster series and arguably the biggest shift in the series since --- actually, it might be the biggest single shift in the series ever. There's a lot to sift through with this thing, and it's going to be fascinating to see how one of the biggest titans in the console gaming space is able to hold its own against a scrappy new titan like Fornite: Battle Royale -- that's what the new battle royale mode "Blackout" is for, after all. Here's what you need to know about what's happening with Call of Duty: Black Ops IIII. It's Not in World War 2: After a brief sojourn into the past, we're heading back into the future -- the present, for now, is just sort of done. There are plenty of fancy gadgets and perks to show off a setting that appears more or less in line with the Black Ops series so far -- we're not going full-on Infinite Warfare, don't worry, and we're staying away from the wall-running and double-jumping mechanics that left players like me confused, bored and dead.

Activision officially revealed "Call of Duty: Black Ops 4" yesterday and confirmed that it will have a Battle Royale mode and it won't have a single-player campaign. Developer Treyarch has revealed that it's still undecided on the player count on the Battle Royale mode and it also explained why it ditched the single-player mode. "We haven't actually decided," Treyarch studio design director David Vonderharr told GameSpot. "We have to create the best experience, and to create that experience in a'Call of Duty' universe, you have to try various flavors of that until you find the right one." The Battle Royale mode in "Black Ops 4" is called Blackout and it will feature a map that is around 1,500 times larger than Nuketown.

The newly emerging field of machine ethics (Anderson and Anderson 2006) is concerned with adding an ethical dimension to machines. Unlike computer ethics--which has traditionally focused on ethical issues surrounding humans' use of machines--machine ethics is concerned with ensuring that the behavior of machines toward human users, and perhaps other machines as well, is ethically acceptable. In this article we discuss the importance of machine ethics, the need for machines that represent ethical principles explicitly, and the challenges facing those working on machine ethics. We also give an example of current research in the field that shows that it is possible, at least in a limited domain, for a machine to abstract an ethical principle from examples of correct ethical judgments and use that principle to guide its own behavior. We need to make a distinction between what James Moor has called an "implicit ethical agent" and an "explicit ethical agent" (Moor 2006).