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.

We use notebooks to give form to the intangible, jotting down half-formed ideas and strategies with the aim of corralling them into coherence. We record and reflect on events in our lives, a ritual that narrativises our experiences and makes them comprehensible. Notebooks are a technology, the most ordinary and unspectacular instance of cyborg enhancement – an extension of our memories. And all this makes them a fascinating motif in video games. In Discworld Noir, a little-known adventure game from 1999, you play as a private detective named Lewton, plodding the streets of a hardboiled version of Terry Pratchett's fictional city-state Ankh-Morpork and investigating murders and disappearances that pay homage to classic noir fiction.

It's Friday, which means it's once again time for Replay, WIRED's look at the world of gaming. Since nearly everyone involved in the videogame industry spent the week at the Game Developers Conference discussing the future and reflecting on the past, a lot of news came out of that annual gathering. But a lot of news came from elsewhere too. Well, there are awards, a new title to look forward to, and an old conflict finally (almost) coming to an end. Earlier this week at the Game Developers Conference, the Independent Gaming Festival held its yearly awards ceremony, honoring the best and most exciting works in the indie gaming sphere.

In recent years, members of the alt-right have, in blog posts and in YouTube videos, courted young men who share an interest in video games. This scheme has proved effective. Last month, a YouTube user uploaded a clip from the recent blockbuster video game Red Dead Redemption 2, a cowboy playpen set in the late-nineteenth-century American Southwest. In it, the player guides his character toward a computer-controlled suffragette who is campaigning for her right to vote, and punches her unconscious. The video, titled "Beating Up Annoying Feminist," has been viewed more than 1.7 million times, with a chorus of support in the comments below. This kind of trolling can easily escalate.