With almost laughably low power, a monochrome screen, and unique controls, niche-micro console Playdate shouldn't make any sense in a world of modern gaming. Yet, it's near impossible not to love it. When video game developer and publisher Panic launched its own console, Playdate, back in 2022, it upended just about all conventional wisdom when it came to gaming hardware. Coming just two months after Valve's Steam Deck, the micro-handheld was comparably laughably low in power, brandished a tiny monochrome screen, and took a minimalist approach to physical controls, with only a D-pad, two buttons, and a bizarre crank on offer. Even stranger than the crank was that buyers didn't really know what they'd be playing on it--the earliest games were released in a season pass format, with mystery titles drip-fed to players weekly.

Video Games The Buzziest Video Game of the Year Is Here. Sometimes, in our modern world where every Goliath wants to be seen as a David, where the middle class is evaporating and the working class is crushed and the wealthy play victim, the little guy still manages to win. Sometimes the little guy even wins big. And then sometimes the little guy wins, in a manner that destabilizes a flailing industry, upends media coverage, and incites multiple minor culture wars. That's how it went for Ari Gibson and William Pellen, a pair of Australian game developers known collectively as Team Cherry, who last week released the only video game that every gamer is talking about right now: .

--This paper proposes a structured methodology to evaluate AI-generated game narratives, leveraging the Delphi study structure with a panel of narrative design experts. Our approach synthesizes story quality dimensions from literature and expert insights, mapping them into the Kano model framework to understand their impact on player satisfaction. The results can inform game developers on prioritizing quality aspects when co-creating game narratives with generative AI. While generative AI has surged into public and research consciousness following the release of systems like ChatGPT, video games have a longer tradition of using AI techniques to generate content that would otherwise be authored by human designers. This tradition is well established in the field of Procedural Content Generation, which encompasses a range of methods for algorithmically creating game elements such as levels, characters, quests, and storylines [1].

For anyone looking to gauge the mood of the UK games industry in 2025, there has been only one place to hang out this week: the bar of the DoubleTree by Hilton hotel in Brighton. It's in this building that the annual Develop conference has been bringing together developers, publishers, students and journalists since 2006 – and during the three days of talks, roundtables and keynotes, it's in the bar that everyone meets and unloads their theories and concerns about the state of the business. This year, after many months of cuts and closures, the mood has been dour. On Tuesday, I spoke to many coders, artists and studio heads who have had games cancelled, staff axed and deals obliterated; several senior developers predicted that the recent savage cuts to staff numbers and game projects will lead to a gaping black hole in the release schedules of many triple-A publishers in late 2026 and 2027. Grand Theft Auto VI was always going to be huge; now it's looking like the only game in town.

An artificial intelligence model from Microsoft can recreate realistic video game footage that the company says could help designers make games, but experts are unconvinced that the tool will be useful for most game developers. Neural networks that can produce coherent and accurate footage from video games are not new. A recent Google-created AI generated a fully playable version of the classic computer game Doom without access to the underlying game engine. The original Doom, however, was released in 1993; more modern games are far more complex, with sophisticated physics and computationally intensive graphics, which have proved trickier for AIs to faithfully recreate. Google creates self-replicating life from digital'primordial soup' Now, Katja Hofmann at Microsoft Research and her colleagues have developed an AI model called Muse, which can recreate full sequences of the multiplayer online battle game Bleeding Edge. These sequences appear to obey the game's underlying physics and keep players and in-game objects consistent over time, which implies that the model has grasped a deep understanding of the game, says Hofmann.

The video game industry has been in a troubled place for the past year, with studio closures and job security at the forefront of developer concerns. Increasing layoffs with seemingly no end paint a bleak picture for devs, while companies are busy pumping money into AI initiatives. According to a new report from the organizers of the Game Developers Conference, 52 percent of devs surveyed said they worked at companies that were using generative AI on their games. Of the 3,000 people surveyed, roughly half said they were concerned about the technology's impact on the industry and an increasing number reported they felt negatively about AI overall. The "State of the Game Industry" report, released Tuesday, is one of a series of surveys conducted each year by GDC organizers prior to their annual conference.

"The people who are most excited about AI enabling creativity aren't creatives," says Jess, a member of the Independent Workers Union of Great Britain's game workers branch. She sits on its artificial intelligence working group. Against the backdrop of widespread layoffs, Jess says the suspicion among workers is that bosses see AI as a path to cutting costs when labour is their biggest expense. Jess says she knows one person who's lost work due to AI, and has heard of it happening to others. There are also dozens of accounts online suggesting that jobs in concept art and other traditionally entry-level roles have been affected.

A few months ago I wrote about a consulting agency, Sweet Baby Inc, that found itself at the centre of a conspiracy theory: aggrieved gamers on a Steam forum had erroneously concluded that this small agency was somehow mandating the inclusion of more diverse characters in games. Depressingly but unsurprisingly, the result was a tremendous amount of targeted harassment towards the people who work at Sweet Baby and every journalist who reported on it (particularly the women). It was a disturbing echo of Gamergate, an online harassment campaign 10 years ago that initially sprung from the wild accusations of a game developer's vindictive ex-boyfriend. The language has changed a bit in the past decade: they used to be upset about "SJWs", or social justice warriors, and now they've taken issue with a different acronym, DEI (diversity, equality and inclusion), or just good ol' "woke". But the sentiment from this group is the same: games are for us, and for us only, and if you want games to change, or to tell stories outside the straightforward male-oriented power fantasies that we grew up with, then, well, that's not allowed.

Not to make anyone feel old, but the Game Boy turned 35 at the weekend. That small grey box was millions of people's first introduction to video games. It was shared among families, played with equal enthusiasm by girls, boys, men and women. When I asked people for their most cherished Game Boy memories last week, almost a hundred people got in touch to share their reminiscences of playing it on the commute to work, on long car journeys, on family holidays and under the covers after bedtime (with a torch for the screen, naturally). The Game Boy liberated games from the TV and brought them into those pockets of free time in everyday life.

When she discovered her voice had been uploaded to multiple websites without her consent, the actor Cissy Jones told them to take it down immediately. "Others who have more money in their banks basically sent me the email equivalent of a digital middle finger and said: don't care," Jones recalls by phone. "That was the genesis for me to start talking to friends of mine about: listen, how do we do this the right way? How do we understand that the genie is out of the bottle and find a way to be a part of the conversation or we will get systematically annihilated? I know that sounds dramatic but, given how easy it is to steal a person's voice, it's not far off the mark."