It is my birthday this week. And while that may not sound like a worthy subject for Pushing Buttons, bear with me. I am now 54 – and so officially in my mid-50s – and I still write about video games for a living. I play video games every day; I work in a home office where I'm surrounded by video games. But at times like this, I think: maybe should I stop someday?

The latest season of Black Mirror feels almost therapeutic as we peer over the cliff of civilizational collapse. Everything is awful, but at least we don't have to worry about renting out access to our brains from skeevy startups, or dealing with the consequences of a PC game's super-intelligent AI. While Black Mirror felt like a horrifying harbinger of an over-teched future when it debuted in 2011, now it's practically an escape from the fresh hell of real world headlines. That's not to say that the show has lost any of the acerbic bite from creator Charlie Brooker. But now Brooker and his writers -- Ms. Marvel showrunner Bisha K. Ali, William Bridges, Ella Road and Bekka Bowling -- more deftly wield their talent for cultural analysis. Not all of the new episodes revolve around nefarious new tech, sometimes the tools themselves are genuinely helpful -- it's humans who are often the real problem.

Recent advances in LLM-based role-playing language agents (RPLAs) have attracted broad attention in various applications. While chain-of-thought reasoning has shown importance in many tasks for LLMs, the internal thinking processes of RPLAs remain unexplored. Understanding characters' inner thoughts is crucial for developing advanced RPLAs. In this paper, we introduce ROLETHINK, a novel benchmark constructed from literature for evaluating character thought generation. We propose the task of inner thought reasoning, which includes two sets: the gold set that compares generated thoughts with original character monologues, and the silver set that uses expert synthesized character analyses as references. To address this challenge, we propose MIRROR, a chain-of-thought approach that generates character thoughts by retrieving memories, predicting character reactions, and synthesizing motivations. Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate the importance of inner thought reasoning for RPLAs, and MIRROR consistently outperforms existing methods. Resources are available at https://github.com/airaer1998/RPA_Thought.

I would love to see us change the fundamental paradigm for how we think about AI,

The exhibition House of Mirrors: Artificial Intelligence as Phantasm takes the common clichés about AI as an opportunity to talk about issues such as hidden human labor, algorithmic bias/discrimination, the problem of categorization and classification, and our fantasies about AI. It asks whether (and how) it is possible for us to reclaim agency in this context. Featuring more than 20 artistic works by international artists, the exhibition is divided into seven thematic chapters. The scenography of the exhibition is reminiscent of a giant house of mirrors. In May 2022, a 200-page bilingual catalogue will be published (German/English) as printed matter and as a free online PDF. "Enter the hall of mirrors, which reflects human reality, sometimes in direct reflections, sometimes in a distorting mirror, sometimes through a glass pane that promises transparency or a semi-transparent mirror that reflects on one side and is translucent on the other."

It all looks our Reality, as it is, with its Grand Pandemic 2019-2025, the worst game ever... As its replacement, the Metaverse is coming, as Meta-physics Universe, transcending and transforming the universe. As with the pandemic, digital technologies change in [decade] waves. The 1980's was the PC wave, The next [last] wave will be the metaverse or transverse or omniverse. The waves come on each other.

We just wrapped the Steam Summer Sale and I'm sure your backlog is full to bursting, so I hesitate to be like "Hey, there's another sale going on…" But it's Amazon Prime Day, and if you're a Prime member then there are some video game deals worth checking out. You can find an incomprehensible jumble of deals on Amazon itself, but the easiest way to keep hold of your sanity and navigate today's sale is probably this handy thread in the /r/gamedeals subreddit. Actually, it's kind of the only good way to navigate today's sale. There are some great deals in there though. You can get Saints Row IV for less than the proverbial cup of coffee, Mirror's Edge Catalyst is 40 if you buy the physical copy, Doom is 30 with the same caveat, XCOM 2 is also down to 30, Metro Redux is 7.50, Cities: Skylines is 12, and all the Assassin's Creed games are on sale for 50 percent off.

For the second time in a week, a robot in Russia that is programmed with advanced artificial intelligence as well as an ability to learn from experiences and about its surroundings has escaped the facility that it is housed in. A robot in Russia caused an unusual traffic jam last week after it "escaped" from a research lab, and now, the artificially intelligent bot is making headlines again after it reportedly tried to flee a second time, according to news reports. Engineers at the Russian lab reprogrammed the intelligent machine, dubbed Promobot IR77, after last week's incident, but the robot recently made a second escape attempt, The Mirror reported. Last week, the robot made it approximately 160 feet (50 meters) to the street, before it lost power and "partially paralyzed" traffic. The first time the robot escaped it was due to an improperly latched gate.

Released in 2008, Electronic Arts' Mirror's Edge became a cult classic, unappreciated by some but beloved by others. The concept alone grabbed many--first-person parkour game built around running at nearly-superhuman speeds across the rooftops of buildings and over vertigo-inducing chasms--and led to no small amount of digital ink spilled at WIRED. It made columnist Clive Thompson want to vomit. It had then-editor Chris Baker absolutely enraptured with its dizzying momentum. And it had me wondering why nobody else seemed bothered by its design issues.