I Made Terrible Games With Google's AI Playground Neon Don is really pissed at his ex-wife's lawyer. He'll tell you any chance he gets while he shotguns lines of pixelated bad guys. He's also not real--his likeness has only existed for a few minutes in a top-down cyberpunk-style shooter game, generated in the Google Labs service Playground . Neon Don says as he mows enemies down. "Brenda took everything else away!" Playground, which Google launched this week, is part of Google Labs, the company's landing page for its various AI experiments that haven't made it into an app or official service quite yet.

Mashable's Best: E-readers, robovacs, laptops, earbuds, smart home and more Mashable @Home Look Up Trending Now Mashable Selects Say More Top creators, ranked Gift Ideas For Everyone On Your List Creator Playbook In My Bag AI at School Safety Net All Series Google's experimental Playground lets you create, tweak, and share browser games through text prompts. Olivia Tauber is the deputy editor of digital culture, covering creators, media, movies, beauty, and more. Based in New York, her work has appeared in The New York Times, Vanity Fair, The Cut, Teen Vogue, Complex, and Interview Magazine. She holds a Master's degree in Journalism from NYU and a Bachelor's from the University of Michigan. She also runs Fan Mail, a weekly pop-culture newsletter.

Google has launched a new AI-powered experimental gaming platform called Playground, which lets you create games without needing to know how to code or draw. It has an interface similar to most AI chatbots, where you can type in a prompt for the kind of game you want to build. You can also choose whether to create a 2D or 3D game and, for select genres, whether it's single-player or multiplayer. While you can write your prompt from scratch, you can also remix some starter prompts or use guided support. After the initial output, you can shape the game mechanics, physics and graphics with further prompts.

The father of Noah Woods has said the three-year-old will be loved forever and no words can describe the pain of the family's loss. Noah disappeared from a playground in Brantham, Suffolk, at about 15:00 BST on Tuesday after becoming separated from a relative. At least 1,300 people helped to try to find him in the following 24 hours, before a child's body was discovered on Wednesday afternoon at a nearby pond. Noah was the sweetest and most innocent little boy, with nothing but love to give, and we are going to miss him so very much, his father Rhys Woods wrote in a post on Facebook. This was the most heartbreaking outcome for us, we were just hoping that he would be hiding somewhere obvious where someone could find him, that's what we kept telling ourselves the whole time.

'Everybody was as one': Reverend reflects on search effort for Noah Woods The love shown by a community who rallied to search for missing three-year-old Noah Woods was a thread of positivity amongst the tragedy, a reverend has said. Noah disappeared from a playground in Brantham, Suffolk, at about 15:00 BST on Tuesday after becoming separated from a relative. At least 1,300 people helped to try to find him in the following 24 hours, before a child's body was discovered on Wednesday afternoon at a nearby pond. Reverend Chris Willis said: Everybody was as one... what we saw throughout was a real coming together of people and a willingness to work together which, in spite of the deep sadness, was a thread of real positivity seeing how people cared. About 100 bunches of flowers have been left at the playground where he was last seen and more than £21,000 has been donated to a fundraiser to support his family.

A body has been found in the search for missing three-year-old boy Noah Woods, police have confirmed. Noah disappeared at about 15:00 BST on Tuesday from a playground in Brantham, Suffolk, after becoming separated from a relative. Supt Tom Pearse of Suffolk Police said dive teams recovered the body of a child from a nearby pond. He said the death was being treated as unexplained but not suspicious. To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser.

'Darth Vader' Wants You to Know He Definitely Supports Flock Surveillance Anthony Ralphs was frustrated by the San Diego City Council's support for Flock. He decided it would take something more than reasoned argument to get their attention. At the San Diego City Council's most recent budget meeting, Sith Lord Darth Vader had some points to make. Between gasping breaths, Vader praised the council's recent votes to renew its contract with the surveillance company Flock Safety, which has been making headlines recently as more and more stories of police officers abusing its tools have continued to come out--and as a WIRED review of code for a new AI tool already in use by some police departments has made clear that it is watching far more than just license plates. "The emperor is a fan of Flock. And we must continue utilizing Flock technologies so that we can follow and surveil the rebel scum as they move from playground to playground, from playground to pool, from pool to gymnasium."

Pat Gelsinger wants to pave the way to ever more powerful artificial intelligence using tiny beams of light. After Pat Gelsinger departed Intel as CEO in late 2024, he held 100 meetings in 100 days. The idea, he told WIRED recently, was to whittle down his options until he figured out what to do next. The following March, Gelsinger announced that he had taken a position as general partner at Playground Capital, a venture capital firm specializing in deep tech, taking bets on fledgling technologies built on new science. Gelsinger took the role with the aim of helping a new generation of semiconductor startups reawaken Moore's law . Decades ago, Intel cofounder Gordon Moore predicted that the number of transistors on a chip would double roughly every two years, with a corresponding leap in performance.

The company behind the UK's newest video game console is not concerned with the latest state-of-the-art graphics or hardware. Instead, David Lee, chief executive of US technology firm Nex, says its cube-shaped machine, the Nex Playground, is designed to get children moving. The relatively little-known device surprised the games industry when research firm Circana revealed it was the third best-selling console in the US over Black Friday 2025, outselling the Xbox Series S and X. While motion-controlled gaming is nothing new - Nintendo's Wii launched in 2006 - concerns around children's passive screen time remain a hot topic for many parents and politicians. Ahead of the UK launch I spoke to parents who already own the console in the US, and tried the machine myself to find out how it works - and if it can really get families feeling fitter.

Early playgrounds were more about fitness than fun--and children didn't enter the equation for decades. More information Adding us as a Preferred Source in Google by using this link indicates that you would like to see more of our content in Google News results. Playgrounds have never been just fun and games. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent six days a week. You can learn a lot about a society from the way they raise children.