China has ordered its online gaming companies to further reduce the services they provide to young gamers, in a move intended to curb what the authorities described as "youth video game addiction". Under the new rule, young gamers are only allowed to spend an hour playing online games on Fridays, weekends and holidays, according to the official Xinhua news agency. The rules, published by the National Press and Publication Administration, said users under the age of 18 would be able to play games only from 8pm to 9pm local time on those days. Online gaming companies would be barred from providing gaming services to minors in any form outside those hours and would need to ensure they had put real name verification systems in place, said the regulator, which oversees the country's video games market. The latest move followed reports that children were using adult IDs to circumvent rules.

Machine learning is critical to computing and the advancements being made with artificial intelligence. All computers use algorithms to provide instructions for how to proceed with processes, solve problems, perform calculations, and more. With artificial intelligence, such operations can be done autonomously, and that requires machine learning. Basically, machine learning creates algorithms that AI systems can use to process data and learn new things without having to be programmed. For instance, AI systems with machine learning capabilities can recognise faces, detect instances of fraud, predict customer behaviour, and much more.

Fall Guys had only been online for two days when it started. This bright, silly multiplayer game, in which rotund Day-Glo bean people race toward a finishing line avoiding giant tumbling fruit pieces – a sort of digital equivalent of a school sports day, albeit a slightly hallucinogenic one – had tens of thousands of players, but it didn't seem like it would attract cheaters. Surely it was too frivolous, too much about the shared joy of slapstick comedy? Yet in they came: players using speed hacks (a type of cheat that increases the speed your avatar can run at) to win races against other Day-Glo bean people. Even if you are not directly affected, it breaks the social contract.

On the morning of the Doomsday War, president Tubbo surveyed the grassy hills of his domain, L'Manberg. His second-in-command, TommyInnit, rested beside him on a bench, nodding stoically. "Listen," TommyInnit began, pausing dramatically. "I know you had to exile me." Gesturing with their Lego-like avatars, TommyInnit and Tubbo were winding up tension in a Macchiavellian political drama that has unfolded over the last year in Minecraft.

LOUISVILLE – Even after Kentucky High School Athletic Association Commissioner Julian Tackett sent out an email notifying school officials that esports teams may not participate in the video game "Fortnite," there was nothing to be done among schools here. That's because "Fortnite," an online video game developed by Epic Games and released in 2017, was never included among the games played by Kentucky students in high school competitions. "Fortnite" is a third-person shooter game that doesn't include any blood, injuries or dead bodies, but nevertheless was given a Teen rating for violence by the Entertainment Software Rating Board. Epic Games and PlayVS, a software company that provides a platform for competitive esports, last week announced last Wednesday a partnership to introduce a competitive league for "Fortnite" across high schools and colleges. "There is no place for shooter games in our schools," Tackett said, adding that the KHSAA and the National Federation of State High School Associations had no knowledge that "Fortnite" was being added as part of the competition platform and are "strongly against it."

A teenager has developed an AI system that can detect over 98% of cheaters in competitive online game CounterStrike: Global Offensive. The global eSports industry has exploded in the past several years, with tournament prize pools now reaching into the tens of millions of pounds and top players around the world becoming millionaires. With such high pressure to succeed, some competitive online games have become breeding grounds for people using cheating software such as auto-aim and wall-visibility hacks to get an edge on the competition. One teenage player of the game CounterStrike: Global Offensive has had enough of cheaters ruining the game and has developed an AI that can successfully detect cheating with a reported 98.36% success rate. The player, who goes by the name 2eggs, was also recently awarded over $11,000 US in bug bounties by CounterStrike's developer Valve for helping to identify security risks, and has helped develop databases that keep track of banned players.

This video covers the action of the 2018 League of Legends World Championship and previews the 2019 event. Riot Games, publishers of "League of Legends," is looking to expand its lore. For starters, there are some new features coming to the super-popular online video game, which turns 10 this month. Beyond that, Riot Games announced Tuesday it is working on several other projects including new shooter and strategy games, as well as a trio of new video games set in the "League of Legends" universe. The game publisher announced these developments as part of its 10th anniversary livestream Tuesday night.

Director Peter Jackson on Amazon's "Lord of the Rings" series: "I'd like to try to be of assistance." Amazon has landed a prime franchise on which to build an online game: the Lord of the Rings. Amazon Game Studios will jointly develop the free online game with Hong Kong-headquartered Leyou Technology Holdings, which owns several game studios including Digital Extremes, maker of sci-fi role-playing action game "Warframe." There is no release date for the console and PC game, a massively multiplayer online action title à la "World of Warcraft." Last year, Athlon Games, an L.A.-based Leyou subsidiary announced it had reached a deal with Middle-Earth Enterprises to create a game based in J.R.R. Tolkien's Hobbit-laden universe during the time before the events in the Lord of the Rings trilogy.

Games culture is struggling with a pervasive lie: that it's simply not possible to stop players from behaving like abusive jerks. Log in to any online game or popular stream and there is a good chance you'll run into hostility, trash talk and aggression from strangers over voice or text chat. As it does everywhere online, this hostility disproportionately affects the marginalised: women, people of colour, LGBT people. The common use of slurs and other demeaning language creates an unwelcoming space. It is certainly not an easy problem to solve, but neither is it an inevitability we have to live with. When game developers choose to prioritise the issue, they can have a highly positive impact.

This is your brain on stories. By tracking the blood flow in people's brains as they listened to a storytelling radio show, scientists at UC Berkeley have mapped out where the meanings associated with basic words are encoded in the cortex, creating the first semantic atlas of the brain. The findings, described in the journal Nature, provide an unprecedented view of language and meaning as it plays out on our neural terrain, and could potentially offer a road map for those looking to help patients with certain types of aphasia or other neurological disorders. For a long time, researchers thought about language as a primarily left-hemisphere function that took place in specific spots of the brain, such as Broca's area and Wernicke's area. But those areas aren't associated with understanding language but producing it – speech, in short.