Chappell Roan fans will soon be able to transform into the US pop star when playing the video game Fortnite. The singer has been announced by developers Epic as the latest icon for the game's next festival season, which kicks off on Thursday. As part of collaboration, players will be able to wear some of the singer's most iconic outfits and listen to some of her hit songs. The collaboration comes after Roan told BBC Radio 1 last year that she would love to feature in the game. During the interview with Radio 1 presenter Jack Saunders, the singer professed her love for the video game and asked the developers: Please give me a skin, please.

Players are roleplaying ICE raids in and to prepare for real-world situations. SteveTheGamer55 is live on YouTube . He's streaming a session to his 4.6 million subscribers of, a mod that allows people to role-play with other players. "Really wanna show you guys some real-life scenarios," he says, offering a little background on his character, a man headed to his job while on a work visa. His character doesn't get far before an SUV swings onto the sidewalk in front of him; masked ICE agents spill out of the vehicle.

Fox News Flash top sports headlines are here. Check out what's clicking on Foxnews.com. Athletics' rookie shortstop Jacob Wilson has taken the big leagues by storm. Wilson, 23, has a .347 The shortstop's batting average is second in MLB behind New York Yankees superstar Aaron Judge (.361) and has the second lowest strikeout-rate in baseball at 6.8%.

During my three-decade career as a games journalist I have written a lot of "most anticipated games of the year" articles, and they nearly always have a familiar theme: "Well, the lineup is dominated by sequels (yawn), but at least there are one or two original titles to look forward to!" From today's vantage point that ennui over the predictability of the games industry looks incredibly quaint. We didn't know how good we had it. The past five years have seen seismic shifts in the mainstream industry, mostly connected to the irresistible rise of "live service" games such as Fortnite, GTA Online and Genshin Impact, which survive over multiple years through voracious subscription models. The biggest are insanely profitable: since its launch in 2017, Fortnite is estimated to have earned 20bn ( 15.7bn), maintaining 500 million player accounts into its sixth year. GTA Online still makes an estimated 500m a year ( 399m), more than a decade after its initial release.

The gaming year used to follow a predictable rhythm: we'd have a flurry of announcements in the summer, around the gaming trade event E3, then a rush of releases between September and the end of November – and then absolutely nothing would happen until March at the earliest. But now E3 is gone for good, and the Game Awards – the industry's most glamorous and also most intensely commercial awards show – takes place in early December, so we suddenly have an eye-watering number of new trailers and debuts right as we're all preparing to hibernate. I didn't watch this year's show live (it started at 12.30am UK time last Saturday morning and was over three hours long) and I'm betting that most of you didn't watch it either, so here are the headlines: Baldur's Gate 3 won nearly everything; as ever the awards felt like something that had to be squeezed in around all the trailers; there was not very much time given to developers to speak, which rankled; The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom and Spider-Man 2 were snubbed in several categories (Zelda won best action adventure game, Spider-Man won nothing). In the interest of giving games and developers appropriate airtime, then, instead of going over the merits and problems of the Game Awards again, here are some of the announcements that stood out. If you're into unsettling vibes, ghost stories about haunted arcade machines, and having your expectations put into a blender and served back to you as a milkshake, Daniel Mullins' games should be on your radar.

But the extraordinary popularity of Fortnite: Battle Royale - itself inspired by the Japanese thriller film of the same name and PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds - completely dwarfed the game's other modes, and Fortnite is now known to most as an online shooter with crafting elements.

Over the weekend, almost 45 million people returned to Fortnite. The beginning of the battle royale shooter's's "OG" event saw the map restored to its 2018 state, back before the entire in-game island was memorably sucked into a black hole. Those people played for a combined 102m hours in a single day, an all-time record, according to developer Epic Games. Not bad for a game that has been available for more than six years, and been a topic of playground conversation for half a decade. That's 10 times the number who watched the premiere of The Last of Us, and more people than have ever bought a copy of To Kill a Mockingbird.

In Meta's quarterly earnings call in April, chief executive Mark Zuckerberg was on the defensive. The metaverse, the vision of a globe-spanning virtual reality that he had literally bet his multibillion-dollar empire on creating, had been usurped as the new hot thing by the growing hype around artificial intelligence (AI). Critics had even noticed Meta itself changing its tune, highlighting the difference between a November statement from Zuckerberg, in which he described the project as a "high-priority growth area" and a March note that instead focused on how "advancing AI" was the company's "single largest investment". Not so, said the world's richest millennial. "A narrative has developed that we're somehow moving away from focusing on the metaverse vision, so I just want to say upfront that that's not accurate. "We've been focusing on AI and the metaverse for years now, and we will continue to focus on both … Building the metaverse is a long-term project, but the rationale for it remains the same and we remain committed to it." But more than 18 months after Facebook changed its name to Meta – demonstrating Zuckerberg's firm belief that "the metaverse will be the successor of the mobile internet" – the future he promised seems no closer to existence than it did backthen. Reams of concept art, tech demos and prototype devices have given way to little meaningful progress. The company has even struggled to actually define what it is hoping to build: in a lengthy blogpost published last May, Nick Clegg, the former UK deputy prime minister who is now Meta's president of global affairs, described the ambition only in vague terms, despite elaborating across 8,000 words how it would nonetheless change the world. "The metaverse is a logical evolution.

Last week, at an early showing of The Super Mario Bros. Movie, the lights dimmed and the Nintendo logo glowed out over the audience. From the back, a toddler whose parents were probably their age when Mario first burst onto the scene shouted out "Nintendo!" It was a moment that cut through any debates that people might have been having about the film's quality. Ultimately, The Super Mario Bros. Movie is for the children. And the children turned out in force.

Parents shouldn't take away consoles from children who show signs of gaming addiction because it could lead to physical violence, a psychologist has warned. Professor Henrietta Bowden-Jones, head of the National Centre for Gaming Disorders, says it can become a police matter when kids lose access to gaming. The centre – which along with the World Health Organization recognises gaming addiction as a disorder – is seeing teens who are gaming up to 14 hours a day. Children are hooked on Call of Duty, Fortnite, FIFA, Angry Birds, War Zone and Minecraft, but no game is necessarily more addictive than any other. According to the centre's founder, it has dealt with 745 patients since it opened in October 2019, including 327 last year.