Enshrouded is a beautiful combination of Minecraft, Skyrim and resource gathering that makes it at least three games in one. My daughter told me I would love it and I ignored her for too long. I've tackled Elden Ring, but much prefer the often gentler combat of Enshrouded. It sometimes makes me feel like an elite fighter, then other times kicks my arse in precisely the right measures. Its real joy is the flexibility to spend your time doing whatever tickles your fancy. I'll spend a few hours growing crops to make a cake or smelting metals for better armour, then knock off a few quests to unlock new materials and weapons.

Good Job is Slate's advice column on work. Have a workplace problem big or small? One of my dearest friends was recently squeezed into an unwanted early retirement by DOGE. The work she was doing at the government agency where she's spent most of her career is on the verge of being eliminated or slashed into oblivion, and it kills me to know that her life's work is about to be reversed. I want to support her through this.

For a 10-day period the summer of 2006, in between handing in my resignation at my first job on a games magazine and returning to Scotland to start university, I did almost nothing except eat, sleep and play The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion on my Xbox 360. I hauled my TV from the living room of my small, unpleasantly warm flatshare into my bedroom so I could play uninterrupted; it was all I could think about. My character was a Khajiit thief, a kind of manky lion in black-leather armour with excellent pickpocketing skills. One afternoon, I decided to see whether I could steal every single object in the smallish town of Bravil, and got caught by the guards a couple of hours in. I did a runner, dropping a trail of random plates, cheese wheels and doublets in my wake, and the guards pursued me all the way to the other side of the map, where they finally got entangled with a bear who helpfully killed them for me.

A robot trained by machine learning that imitates a human demonstrator can successfully peel a banana without smashing it to smithereens. Handling soft fruit is a challenge for robots, which often lack the dexterity and nuanced touch to process items without destroying them. The uneven shape of fruit – which can vary significantly even with the same type of fruit – can also flummox the computer-vision algorithms that often act as the brains of such robots. Heecheol Kim at the University of Tokyo and his colleagues have developed a machine-learning system that powers a robot, which has two arms and hands that grasp between two "fingers". First, a human operating the robot peeled hundreds of bananas, creating 811 minutes of demonstration data to train the robot to do it by itself.

We've come again to the end of another year, and another twelve months of some pretty impressive tech. We saw Apple release the M1 Pro and M1 Max processors. Phison released a new PCIe controller enabling ridiculously fast SSDs like the Corsair MP600 Pro XT, and Intel finally struck back against AMD's surging Ryzen processors. But amid all the highlights, 2021 also gave us some sad goodbyes. Some were storied products beloved by many, while others were failed experiments, or items that we barely knew were there.

In November 2001, Terry Pratchett was in Chester, famed for its Roman ruins and well-preserved medieval architecture. Staying at a hotel in the city centre, Pratchett opened the window of his room, and looked across the historic skyline. "I realised I could drop down on to a roof," he wrote later. "And from then on there was a vista of roofs, leads and ledges leading all the way to the end of the street and beyond; there were even little doors and inviting attic windows … There is a line break, and then he adds. "I'm going to have to stop playing this game." Pratchett was not considering a new career as a cat burglar. He was reflecting on his favourite video game – Thief II: The Metal Age. Released in March 2000, Thief II was the sequel to 1998's Thief: The Dark Project, a pioneering stealth game set in a gothic fantasy world. In both games, players donned the cowl of Garrett, a laconic master thief partly inspired by Raymond Chandler's PI Philip Marlowe. Thief charged players with breaking into medieval mansions, rooftop apartments, banks, cathedrals even police stations, stealing as much coin and valuables as they could while avoiding patrols of sword-wielding guards. Pratchett's relationship with video games is well documented. Always technologically savvy, he was an early adopter of PC gaming, and enjoyed everything from Doom to Deus Ex and Call of Duty. He even helped to create a mod (an unofficial add-on) for The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, writing lines of dialogue for a character. But Pratchett held a particular affection for Thief. He played all three games in the series, and often contributed to a Usenet newsgroup named alt.games.thief-dark-project. That newsgroup, analogous to a modern forum, has long since been deactivated, but its posts survive in a Google groups archive. Combined, they provide a fascinating record of Pratchett's evolving relationship with both the Thief series and video games in general. Like so many players who become involved in online communities, he posted because he was stuck. In a post titled: "Help!

Is there anyone who's played video games over the last 10 years who hasn't played Skyrim? When it came out in 2011, this must surely have seemed to the outside world like one of the nerdiest games around: potions and spells, axes and swords, dark elves and giants and, of course, dragons. But Skyrim nevertheless became one of the most widely played games ever, a touchstone in the video game world, for players and developers alike. It has been re-released on every console and platform imaginable, to the point where it's become a gaming in-joke. It's still huge on YouTube and TikTok, even with people who were little kids when it came out.

The Cloverfield Paradox isn't the only sci-fi movie Netflix has saved from Hollywood purgatory. Variety has discovered that Netflix bought the worldwide rights to Extinction, a sci-fi thriller from Universal starring Lizzy Caplan and Michael Pena. The studio was originally slated to have released the alien invasion flick on January 26th, but took it off its release schedule just two months prior -- not exactly a resounding vote of confidence. The title is expected to premiere on Netflix sometime later in 2018. The movie stars Caplan and Pena as a couple, with Pena plagued by recurring nightmares of losing his family.

There's a story I tell, when people ask why I love The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind. Basically, I found a shield. But it's how I found that shield that came to define my love for Morrowind. I was walking through a barren wasteland, a place I'd visited probably a dozen times, but this time I took a different route--only to find an unassuming door built into a rock formation. A tomb, and at the end of it, mounted high on the wall where you might think it was just part of the scenery, was Eleidon's Ward--the best shield in Morrowind.

The other day while paging through a collection of George Orwell's writing, I was startled by his angry dismissal of fellow writers Stephen Spender and W.H. Auden as "fashionable pansies." I shrugged my shoulders and kept on reading. I had a similar reaction about a year ago when leafing through a collection of early Pauline Kael film criticism I happened upon a negative review of the screen version of Lillian Hellman's "The Children's Hour." Kael complains that "the lesbianism is all in the mind" before making this doozy of a parenthetical quip: "I always thought this was why lesbians needed sympathy -- that there isn't much they can do." These little homophobic nuggets didn't change my thinking about these great writers, who have too much intelligence and flair to be reduced to their worst statements.