The Way of the Future, a church founded by a former Google and Uber engineer, is now a thing of the past. It's been a few months since the world's first AI-focused church shuttered its digital doors, and it doesn't look like its founder has any interest in a revival. But it's a pretty safe bet we'll be seeing more robo-centric religious groups in the future. Perhaps, however, they won't be about worshipping the machines themselves. The world's first AI church "The Way of the Future," was the brainchild of Anthony Levandowski, a former autonomous vehicle developer who was convicted on 33 counts of theft and attempted theft of trade secrets. In the wake of his conviction, Levandowski was sentenced to 18 months in prison but his sentence was delayed due to COVID and, before he could be ordered to serve it, former president Donald Trump pardoned him.

I climb the stairs, my faithful robot Six warning me not to proceed. Do I heed their warning and take a step back? I can see a tall pillar-like statue up ahead, peering at me over a flight of stairs--the prospect of deciphering another fragment of glyphs is motivating me to proceed through the thinning air. As a linguist and writer, Heaven's Vault is the game that I've been waiting a very long time for. It brings together the craft of compelling narrative games and a BAFTA-nominated interactive story presented in a rich, visual novel interface, taking players on a journey of imagination and exploration within an entrancing game environment.

Procedural generation is used across game design to achieve a wide variety of ends, and has led to the creation of several game subgenres by injecting variance, surprise or unpredictability into otherwise static designs. Information games are a type of mystery game in which the player is tasked with gathering knowledge and developing an understanding of an event or system. Their reliance on player knowledge leaves them vulnerable to spoilers and hard to replay. In this paper we introduce the notion of generative forensics games, a subgenre of information games that challenge the player to understand the output of a generative system. We introduce information games, show how generative forensics develops the idea, report on two prototype games we created, and evaluate our work on generative forensics so far from a player and a designer perspective.

Heaven's Vault, a science fiction adventure told with the appealing restraint of an Asimov classic, begins as something of a reluctant manhunt. Your character, Aliya, an orphan who as a young girl was rescued from a planet of slave traders by an esteemed academic, is summoned home to the university where she grew up. There, her adoptive mother beseeches Aliya to find an old friend who has disappeared while undertaking an archaeological treasure hunt. It's an interruption that Aliya, a freelance archaeologist-cum-treasure hunter herself, could do without. Still, through familial loyalty, or more likely a rivalrous interest in whatever treasure the vanished man was hunting, she glumly agrees to the assignment.

The wood is weather-worn, rough edges smoothed by untold hundreds of years spent floating through space, but still a few symbols remain, meticulously carved into the surface. It's a few words, I think, and the wood was part of a prow--the only remaining bit of a long-lost shipwreck. But I can't quite make out what it says. I recognize a few symbols, one for action and one I associate with movement, and the grouping of glyphs that represents "Me." I'm going to have to make some guesses though.

It's one of those weeks where everyone drops trailers at once. Layers of Fear 2, Heaven's Vault, Far Cry: New Dawn, Yakuza Kiwami's PC port, and more--plus Pillars of Eternity II gets a turn-based mode, and Farming Simulator goes all-in on...esports? This is gaming news for January 21 to 25. What, you're not playing the Resident Evil 2 remake or the Anthem demo this weekend? Well then Amplitude has your back, as it's made two 4X games free-to-try for the weekend, Endless Space 2 and Endless Legend. All three are available through Sunday.

"The game isn't going to tell you if you got that right." It's an ominous way to start a game demo, but one I'm not too surprised by after playing 80 Days and Sorcery! Heaven's Vault is Inkle's new game, and I met up with studio co-founders Jon Ingold and Joseph Humfrey recently to get some hands-on time. At first glance it's a huge step away from Inkle's previous games--where 80 Days and Sorcery mostly played out in text, Heaven's Vault features fully navigable 3D environments. Your character Aliya Elasra is 2D though, her movements more suggested by a series of still frames than fully animated.

By 2029 $1,000 dollars spent on a computer will get you something as powerful as 1,000 human brains --- this isn't based on speculation, Kurzweil asserts, but a mathematical model of how fast computer power is increasing. It will be hard to tell the difference between someone with a disability, and someone without and ailments such as blindness and deafness will be a thing of the past. Nanobots the size of blood platelets will be regularly injected into us as part of routine medical treatment and average life expectancy will be 120. There is no real difference between human and machine intelligence.