Can a video game writer do her best work at the industry's biggest scale? Well: Meghna Jayanth is fine where she is. Last year, with Outerloop Games, she released Thirsty Suitors, a fluorescent fusion of messy flirting and sick skating; coming up next is All Rise, a climate action courtroom drama. These are indie games – Thirsty Suitors' hero is a queer Desi skater and the villain is her feelings; of course it is an indie game – and Jayanth, one of the star video game writers of her generation, is perfectly at home here, where a modest budget is the trade-off for making joyful games about colonialism, identity and sexuality, with people whose values align with hers. The money is smaller, and that hurts getting the work noticed.

The Arcane Kids, a video game collective from Los Angeles, have a manifesto that I think about all the time, but particularly when I find art that surprises me, or approaches traditional formats in new and exciting ways. The second line simply states: "The fastest way to the truth is a joke." Another Crab's Treasure, the second offering from indie Australian studio Aggro Crab, is full of truth and jokes – and something else, something rarer, too. Another Crab's Treasure is ostensibly a combat-oriented adventure game, in which you play a tiny hermit crab whose shell has been stolen. You must explore the depths of the ocean to find a way to retrieve it from the Loan Shark, so you can return the wee crab to his peaceful life in the tide pools on the shore.

Researchers from Carnegie Mellon University and AI startup Hugging Face collaborated to see the carbon footprint of all those whimsical AI images we've generated over the last few years. They discovered that creating an image using artificial intelligence uses the same energy as charging a smartphone. Generating text, whether a conversation with a chatbot or cleaning up an essay, predictably requires much less energy. The researchers examined 13 tasks, ranging from summarization to text classification, and measured the carbon dioxide produced per every 1,000 grams. The researchers urge machine learning scientists and practitioners to "practice transparency regarding the nature and impacts of their models, to enable better understanding of their environmental impacts."

The Game Awards got it wrong this year. One of the titles nominated for Best Independent Game, Dave the Diver, was produced by Nexon, one of the largest video game studios in South Korea. No matter how hard you squint, it is not indie. Dave the Diver is an excellent pixel-art game about deep-sea fishing and restaurant management, but it was commissioned and bankrolled by Nexon subsidiary Mintrocket, with billions of dollars and decades of experience at its back. When The Game Awards nominees were announced on November 13, fans were quick to point out the error, and the recurring debate over what "indie" means was reignited.

Prime Video is playing host to a vast range of sci-fi stories, from the absolute classics to the hidden gems more people need to watch. One of those is Coherence, widely regarded as the best hidden sci-fi gem out there. How cool and intriguing is that title? Beyond the Infinite Two Minutes is a low-budget time travel comedy from Japanese filmmaker Junta Yamaguchi. The wild premise: A café worker discovers his TV can show him what happens 2 minutes into the future.

The peaceful, zen-like puzzle gameplay of Unpacking (the real game, that is) will soon be available to the PlayStation crowd. As Polygon says, Witch Beam and Humble Games have announced that Unpacking will be available on PS4 and PS5 this spring. The game is already available in digital form on Macs, Switch, Windows PCs and Xbox consoles. Unpacking was considered one of the stand-out games of 2021 precisely because it served as an antidote to the chaos and noise of the real world (and, we'd add, many other video games). All you do is unpack items as you settle into a new home -- and, ultimately, a new life.

Last summer, the actor Jay Duplass found himself in the middle of a lush forest in Washington state, his body struggling under the weight of a giant space-helmet. The actor was filming scenes for the sci-fi drama Prospect, in which he plays a planet-scavenger hoping to get rich. Duplass' otherworldly get-up--like nearly all of the film's costume and props--had been designed and hand-made by a team of earthbound artists. But while his beat-up headgear looked cool, wearing it was "a goddamn nightmare," the actor says. Those helmets are not designed to be worn all day, or walked around in.

When Microsoft revealed the ID@Xbox program in 2013, Xbox CVP Phil Harrison said he hoped it would usher tens of thousands of games onto the Xbox ecosystem. Five years on, Microsoft is 10 percent of the way there -- the company has officially published 1,000 games via the ID@Xbox program. Maybe hold off on printing those "Congrats on 10,000 games" banners for another few decades). "We're really kinda happy with where we are right now," ID@Xbox head Chris Charla told Engadget. "That doesn't mean there isn't tons of work to do for developers going forward, or that we're gonna slow down."

THE disruption of the financial services industry, which began as a trickle, is quickly turning into a flood as start-ups introduce innovative products and services designed for a new generation of consumers, and the established providers are forced to reinvent themselves. Robo-advice and artificial intelligence (AI) technologies, which use algorithms and machine learning to do the job of financial advisers, analysts and active fund managers, are expected to grow significantly in the coming decade. It is forecast that robo-advisers could manage about 10% of total global assets under management by 2020, according to a study by BI Intelligence. Gavin Smith, the head of Africa for deVere Acuma, an independent financial advisory firm, says: "Algorithmic trading automatically and immediately adjusts to new developments. Theoretically, robo-advisers should be able to constantly act to perform according to an investment mandate. "There are many advantages to the introduction of robo-advisers and AI into the financial services sector," Smith says. "It brings down fees, speeds up administration and saves time." However, what automated systems lack, he says, is the ability to liaise with you and understand the nuances of your requirements and changing circumstances. "When it comes to understanding your goals, specific circumstances, and blending these with your retirement, tax and estate planning, robo-advisers are nowhere near to replacing good financial advice," Smith says. As a result, some financial services providers are trying to marry the automated and personal approaches in an effort to get the best of both worlds. Last week, Personal Finance highlighted OUTsurance's new investment product, OUTvest, which relies on semi-automated investment advice. Below are four more recent innovations that are likely to contribute to the shake-up of the industry. NMRQL Research, the fintech company co-founded by Michael Jordaan, the former chief executive of First National Bank, this week launched South Africa's first unit trust fund powered by machine learning. The NMRQL SCI Balanced Fund, administered by the Sanlam Collective Investments platform, is a regulation 28-compliant collective investment scheme that invests in a diversified portfolio of domestic and international assets, where the asset allocation and stock selection are systematically managed using machine learning algorithms. The process looks for hidden patterns in underlying big data. These patterns can be exploited to forecast returns across asset classes and markets. Jordaan says: "As humans, we suffer from various cognitive biases.