Esports franchise Team NRG cut ties Thursday with pro player Nairoby Quezada, who plays competitive Super Smash Bros. under the handle Nairo. In a Twitlonger post early Thursday morning, another Smash player, Zack "Captain Zack" Lauth, accused Quezada of sexual misconduct at a 2017 tournament event in Orlando, Florida. Lauth alleges the incident occurred when Quezada was 20 and Lauth was 15, and that Quezada and his brother subsequently paid Lauth money to keep quiet.

Spirit AI is using artificial intelligence to combat toxic behavior in game communities. The London company has created its Ally social intelligence tool to decipher online conversations and monitor whether cyberbullying is taking place. It is the brainchild of researchers at New York University, according to Mitu Khandaker, creative partnerships director at Spirit AI and an assistant arts professor at the NYU game center. The company uses AI, natural language understanding, and machine learning to help data science and customer service teams to understand the general tenor of an online community. It also helps predict problems before they escalate.

Following the school shooting in Parkland, Florida, responsible for the loss of 17 lives, Donald Trump held a meeting at the White House. Seemingly intended to disabuse the nation of the imminent threat of semi-automatic weapons, the president shifted attention to other possible culprits: violent video games. He said: "I'm hearing more and more people say the level of violence on [sic] video games is really shaping young people's thoughts." Considering he couldn't maintain focus on violent games for a full speech, let alone a news cycle, it's a challenge to muster concern about what Trump's bluster means for the future of the medium. Nor is the fate of the video game industry as pressing as the fate of the nation's populace, whose lives will remain in real peril, so long as Trump and his supporters continue to turn the conversation away from dramatic change in the commercial gun industry.