The sequel to Blizzard's popular first-person shooter "Overwatch" is going to look quite different. On Thursday, the video game studio released details on "Overwatch 2" during a livestreamed event, and the most notable change to the video game is switching from teams of six players to five-person teams. In the first "Overwatch," players could run two of each of the game's character types: Tank, Damage or Support. In "Overwatch 2," players will be limited to one tank per team. How they play will change, too.

PARIS, FRANCE - MAY 03: A gamer plays the video game'Fortnite: Battle Royale' developed by People Can Fly and Epic Games. Fortnite is an online video game of survival and construction available on consoles, PC and, recently, on iPhone. Released in July 2017, it has been growing in popularity in recent months. Fortnite, which brings together more than 40 million players each month around the world, brings a fortune to its creators. Not much is known about the specifics of the claims because neither party were willing to comment on the case.

The day we can't tell the difference between a human and robot just got a little bit closer. A Turing Test of sorts has been put to humans to see if they could differentiate between their fellow human and non-human combatants in a first-person shooter game. For the first time in the five years that the contest has run, humans couldn't tell the difference. The contest, conceived of and organized by Philip Hingston, Associate Professor of Computer Science at Edith Cowan University in Perth, Australia, puts human and computer players on the battlefields of the first-person shooter game UT2004. After a few rounds of combat, the humans have to decide which players are human and which are bots.

A competition pitting artificial intelligence (AI) against human players in the classic video game Doom has demonstrated just how advanced AI learning techniques have become – but it's also caused considerable controversy. While several teams submitted AI agents for the deathmatch, two students in the US have caught most of the flak, after they published a paper online detailing how their AI bot learned to kill human players in deathmatch scenarios. The computer science students, Devendra Chaplot and Guillaume Lample, from Carnegie Mellon University, used deep learning techniques to train their AI bot – nicknamed Arnold – to navigate the 3D environment of the first-person shooter Doom. By effectively playing the game over and over again, Arnold became an expert in fragging its Doom opponents – whether they were other artificial combatants, or avatars representing human players. While researchers have previously used deep learning to train AIs to master 2D video games and board games, the research shows that the techniques now also extend to 3D virtual environments.

For their study, researchers from New York University Shanghai and University of Hong Kong had 80 students and faculty from the University of Hong Kong participate in several experiments involving different video games. Action-based video games, for example, force the gamer to respond to visual cues. Think driving-centric games, like "Mario Kart," or first-person shooter games, such as "Unreal Tournament." Non-action games, on the other hand, include those like "Sims 2" and "Roller Coaster Tycoon," where the gamer is responsible for directing the action. In one experiment, subjects with no action-based video game experience were asked to played "Mario Kart" or a first-person shooter game.