Boston Dynamics has racked up hundreds of millions of YouTube views with viral clips of its futuristic, legged robots dancing together, doing parkour, and working in a warehouse. A group of meme-spinning pranksters now wants to present a more dystopian view of the company's robotic tech. They added a paintball gun to Spot, the company's doglike machine, and plan to let others control it inside a mocked-up art gallery via the internet later this week. The project, called Spot's Rampage, is the work of MSCHF (pronounced "mischief," of course), an internet collective that regularly carries out meme-worthy pranks. Previous MSCHF stunts include creating an app that awarded $25,000 to whomever could hold a button down for the longest; selling "Jesus Shoes" sneakers with real holy water in the soles (Drake bought a pair); developing an astrology-based stock-picking app; and cutting up and selling individual spots from a Damian Hirst painting.

Movies based on videogames have a notoriously bad track record, but fantasy author Erin Lindsey says that the recent Tomb Raider reboot, while hardly original, was surprisingly well done. "They do the work of showing why Lara is capable of what she's capable of, and being believable in what she's not capable of," Lindsey says in Episode 415 of the Geek's Guide to the Galaxy podcast. "It was done on a very human scale, and it was credibly acted, and they put in the work with the characters." Other recent videogame movies such as Sonic the Hedgehog, Detective Pikachu, and Rampage have connected with audiences and even earned respectable, though hardly stellar, reviews. Videogame journalist Blake J. Harris hopes that these successes will change the way people look at videogame movies. "A lot of people always have this caveat, like when Rampage made almost half a billion dollars, and people were like, 'Oh, well that one wasn't really a videogame movie,'" he says.

Gaming retailer Steam will continue to allow controversial content on its online store, the company has confirmed. The announcement comes less than a month after Steam was heavily criticised for allowing a school shooting simulator, which allowed players to take on the role of a gunman on a murderous rampage inside a school, on its online store. Steam eventually pulled the video game, dubbed'Active Shooter', after more than 271,900 people signed an online petition calling for its removal. The move appears to have prompted the online retailer, which is owned by Valve, to review its screening policy. Steam has now confirmed that it will not remove any content from its online store simply because some users deem it to be in bad taste.

This article originally appeared in Vulture. It's extremely easy to see Rampage, the latest blockbuster starring Dwayne "the Rock" Johnson, and have no idea that it's based on a video game. Rampage, which is about genetically enhanced animals turned Godzilla-sized monsters on a path of destruction, seems like boilerplate Hollywood action bolstered by Johnson -- a charismatic video-game hero made flesh -- to please crowds with an appetite for chaos. But Rampage, in the purity of how it sets out to do one thing (wreck stuff) is actually one of the most faithful video-game adaptations ever made, because the 1986 source material is built on the very same idea: wrecking stuff is stupid fun. Rampage came into existence at the very tail end of arcade games' boom years.

As recent efforts – Tomb Raider, Assassin's Creed, Warcraft – continue to show, video games rarely make great movies. Dwayne Johnson's new epic Rampage might change all this, just as giant, genetically modified wolves might fly, but the source material was hardly that compelling to start with, partly because it was already a mish-mash of movie tropes. In the original Rampage arcade game, you could be King Kong, Godzilla or a werewolf and you basically had to re-enact a city-trashing scene out of a monster movie. Now, see the movie of the game of the movie! To turn it around, however, games already have taken over the movies.

When his criminal trial begins next week, attorneys for Andres "Andy" Avalos, a Florida man charged with murdering his wife, a neighbor and a local pastor, will mount an insanity defense on behalf of their client because, as they announced last summer, a PET scan revealed that Avalos has a severely abnormal brain. In March, shortly after an Israeli American teenager was arrested on suspicion that he made bomb threats against Jewish institutions in the U.S. and abroad, his lawyer declared that the teenager had a brain tumor that might have affected his behavior. Both cases are part of a growing movement in which attorneys use brain damage in service of a legal defense. To support such claims in court, lawyers are turning to neuroscience. The defense brings in hired guns to testify that brain scans can identify areas of dysfunction linked to antisocial behavior, poor decision-making and lack of impulse control.

Public debate on the effects of violent video games can become especially contentious in the wake of a rampage shooting, such as the recent killing of nine people in Munich. If it is later discovered the perpetrator was a fan of violent video games, as was the Munich killer, it is tempting to think that perhaps violent games'caused' the rampage shooting. But rampage shootings are rare and complex events caused by multiple factors acting together. One can't accurately predict a rampage shooting based on exposure to violent video games or any other single factor. Laboratory experiments are used to make firm and causal conclusions about violent video game effects.