Next month, Disney's immersive Galactic Starcruiser "Star Wars hotel" in Florida will shut down, less than two years after opening. Best known for being horrendously expensive – $4,809 for a couple for two nights, or a mere $1,500 a person if you fit four to a cabin – most have dismissed the Starcruiser as yet another of Disney's recent spendthrift follies. When I heard the news of its closure earlier this year, I rushed to book one of the remaining cabins. My path into the games industry was by playing alternate reality games (ARGs) that mixed real-world actors and events with online gameplay; I'd go on to make ARGs such as Perplex City and, more recently, augmented reality games like Zombies, Run! Even though I hadn't been impressed by the Starcruiser's marketing, I was desperate to see what an estimated $350m budget had produced.

Mixed reality games are those in which virtual graphical assets are overlaid on the physical world. We explore the use of procedural content generation to enhance the gameplay experience in a prototype mixed reality game. Procedural content generation is used to design levels that make use of the affordances in the player's physical environment. Levels are tailored to gameplay difficulty and to affect how the player moves their physical body in the real world.

What happens when Artificial Intelligence becomes sentient? In the year 2061, Artificial Intelligence has solved most of humanity's problems from global warming to viral diseases, while synthetics have become impeccable lovers for humans. But there are those that resist AI technology, fearing the gradual enslavement of the human mind by an all-powerful superintelligence. Following the mysterious suicide of his wife, history professor Max Wheeler welcomed a synthetic into his home. Programmed to help Max overcome his grief, his synthetic, Miri, is an exact physical and psychological replica of his late wife, Miriam, a fact that provokes revulsion and outrage in Max's daughter, Olivia. As tensions escalate between the United Continents and the Tech-Resistance Territories, Max is recruited to help locate a dangerous quantum-hacker. But, when his friend is murdered and his daughter is lured into the territories of the Tech-Resistance Army, Max begins to question not only his allegiance but also the very nature of reality itself. $3.99 on Kindle.

Despite earlier rumors that Apple intends to focus primarily on improving quality and stability of its operating systems, a new round of rumors from Bloomberg suggests iOS 12 won't be completely devoid of new features. According to the report, Apple intends to introduce a number of new features in iOS 12, but won't be pressured into pushing those features out to the public if they lack the necessary polish and functionality to make them worthwhile. Apple's iOS 12 is rumored to feature Animoji in FaceTime, improved Siri integration, and new Do Not Disturb features and more. Apple's software engineers will be given the ability to delay features that aren't ready for the spotlight and will operate with a two-year roadmap for future iOS releases rather than being rushed into releasing as many features as possible in the upcoming update to Apple's mobile operating system. Even with the new, expanded time frame to work with, Apple apparently has a number of features that it is hoping to sneak into iOS 12 if possible--or at least have ready to go for future versions of OS for iPhones and iPads.

Pokemon Go has been a huge boon for both Nintendo and the Pokemon Company, which holds the rights for the animated franchise. Lesser known is that the game is actually being produced by Niantic Labs, a San Francisco-based startup that was incorporated as a Google subsidiary in 2011 and spun out of the company last year when Google reorganized under the Alphabet moniker. Niantic is being funded by Google, Nintendo and the Pokemon company as well as Fuji TV and a few other high-profile investors. Niantic's team includes some key members of Google's former Maps team. While at Google, Niantic first built Field Trip, an app that would notify users of murals, historic buildings and other interesting places around them while walking through a city -- think of it as a kind of city guide for mobile devices that sends out alerts whenever you walk by something noteworthy.

Augmented Reality (AR) environments are those in which digital and physical objects co-exist and can be interacted with in real time. Augmented reality is achieved via headsets or glasses that render digital graphics overlaid on what the user can already see. With the highly anticipated Microsoft HoloLens and Magic Leap headsets, augmented reality and mixed reality is poised to enter the mainstream for the first time. Google Cardboard is already available. Augmented reality -- or more accurately Mixed Reality (MR) -- is already being eyed as the next new innovation in platforms for computer games.

Location-based games are an emerging paradigm for training, simulation, entertainment, health and many other domains. In this paper, we consider the role of location-based games as a platform for data collection and analysis of human behavior. We also examine how human teams perform in a disaster scenario when such a scenario is mapped to a game environment conducted as a location-based augmented reality game. We use a pilot experiment to study human behavior between simulated disaster rescue teams and an integrated commander for the purpose of future research into improving exploitation of local tasks versus exploration of assigned objectives by disaster response teams. We show the results of our pilot experiment, analyze the effectiveness of this game as a data collection platform and then investigate how additional experiments may be conducted to formalize this problem further.