Gold Treasure Worth a Fortune Was Hidden in a Forest. For years, Jason Rohrer put out bizarre, beloved video games. Now, with Project Skydrop, he launches the real-world treasure hunt of his dreams. The muddy trail levels out and we stop to catch our breath. Which is good, because hiking with my eyes covered has been a pain in the ass. A voice says: "You can take your blindfold off now." I squint as I get my bearings. Then, after a bit more hiking and some bushwhacking, I finally see it. The thing no one is supposed to know the location of, at least for another few weeks. I have to fight a lizard-brain instinct to reach for it.

Tristan covers human-centric artificial intelligence advances, politics, queer stuff, cannabis, and gaming. Pronouns: He/him Tristan covers human-centric artificial intelligence advances, politics, queer stuff, cannabis, and gaming. Did you know Neural is taking the stage this fall? Together with an amazing line-up of experts, we will explore the future of AI during TNW Conference 2021. It's a bit ridiculous that I have to say that, but just in case you're not entirely sure what the world's most powerful AI-powered text generator can and can't do, I thought I might prepare a handy guide to help you out.

One night last fall, unable to sleep, Joshua Barbeau logged onto a mysterious chat website called Project December. It was Sept. 24, around 3 a.m., and Joshua was on the couch, next to a bookcase crammed with board games and Dungeons & Dragons strategy guides. He lived in Bradford, Canada, a suburban town an hour north of Toronto, renting a basement apartment and speaking little to other people. A 33-year-old freelance writer, Joshua had existed in quasi-isolation for years before the pandemic, confined by bouts of anxiety and depression. Once a theater geek with dreams of being an actor, he supported himself by writing articles about D&D and selling them to gaming sites. Many days he left the apartment only to walk his dog, Chauncey, a black-and-white Border collie. Usually they went in the middle of the night, because Chauncey tended to get anxious around other dogs and people. They would pass dozens of dark, silent, middle-class homes. Then, back in the basement, Joshua would lay ...

On a recent Tuesday evening, the video-game creator Jason Rohrer was visiting Manhattan from Davis, California. His work is the subject of "The Game Worlds of Jason Rohrer," the first full-scale museum show devoted to the video games of a single artist, at the Davis Museum at Wellesley College; his game Passage, from 2007, is in the permanent collection at the Museum of Modern Art. That night, he was the star of an event at NeueHouse, the vast private-membership work space "for the ambitious and the curious" on Twenty-fifth Street, in which he discussed video games and art in front of an eager crowd. NeueHouse has the atmosphere of a tech incubator crossed with a popular restaurant--five stories of elegant young professionals drinking wine and espresso, sitting in front of laptops instead of plates, patrons and servers alike zipping around in a mood of anxious exhilaration. Before the event, Rohrer showed me his games on his laptop. "When I first walked in, I thought it was a club," Rohrer told me.