Video game conventions are typically boisterous affairs, as thousands of visitors queue under a constellation of screens for the chance to play one of the hundreds of as-yet unreleased titles on display. Now in its 10th year, Somerset House's Now Play This is to mainstream exhibitions what folk festivals are to raves. None of the experimental games presented here are destined to be advertised on the sides of buses, not least because many are one-offs that use bespoke controllers – a hatching of thick ropes and copper bands, or an old suitcase lined with speakers – connected to laptops via an umbilical tangle of wires. Few of these games adhere to the conventional rules or fashions seen in mainstream video game design, either. They might have no "win state", or provide an "open play" tool set with which visitors can create their own rules.

For a week or so every year, Somerset House in London becomes home to a mini-festival of experimental video games: last year's were all on the theme of love. Now Play This has been running for 10 years, and this year's theme – liminality – is especially well-suited to the medium. Video games are in-between spaces: they are fictional worlds in which real-world relationships are made; they are an art form that exists across and between technology and culture. You could make a case for the inclusion of plenty of games in this selection, and the ones that are here explore the theme from some unexpected angles. There are games here about transition, expansion, life and death, borders, and skateboarding through cyberspace.

A German artist who won the Sony World Photography Award has refused to accept his prize after revealing his black and white portrait of two women was in fact created by AI. Boris Eldagsen tricked competition organisers with his entry, Pseudomnesia: The Electrician - a haunting close-up of two women in a grainy sepia which won the creative open category last week. He stunned organisers by rejecting the award, claiming that'AI is not photography' - as he hopes to create a discussion surrounding the future of art. The World Photography Organisation, who run the Sony awards, told MailOnline that they had been deliberately mis-led by Eldagsen about the extent to which AI would be involved. In a statement on his website, Eldagsen, 52, described this as a'historic moment', adding: 'I applied as a cheeky monkey, to find out if the competitions are prepared for AI images to enter.

Outside Somerset House this week, you might notice that two lampposts are blinking at each other. Unless you are fluent in Morse code, however, you probably won't clock that they are performing Act II, Scene II of Romeo and Juliet. The installation by Geraint Edwards welcomes you to Now Play This, an experimental games festival, where you could also play a game about getting over a breakup by wielding a sword while riding a motorbike through a neon city, or listen to artist Laurence Young give a talk about getting his mother into the fantasy video game Elden Ring. Now Play This – now in its ninth year at Somerset House – can be relied upon to bring people together in unexpected ways. It has hosted everything from giant ball mazes to outdoor playground games and a game about chucking fascists out of your garden. But this year's theme, love, has created an especially open, even intimate atmosphere.

Maybe it stems from my childhood fascination with crystal balls and the Magic 8 Ball, but I have always been interested in predictions of the future. Machine learning has done a great job with predictions based on past data about events and behaviors, but it hasn't generally been applied to making sense of the broader world. But that is just what Signal AI is doing with machine learning. They produce "external intelligence" intended as an aid to decision-making. It could also be called "environmental sensing."

There are so many companies working on different pieces of the self-driving puzzle, it's hard to keep track of all the partnerships and small developments that are pushing us ever closer to kicking back in a fully autonomous vehicle. While not as visible as some other firms, Bosch is a significant force in the automotive industry, producing various car components alongside the power tools and home appliances most regular consumers will associate the brand with. Naturally then, given its industry experience, Bosch is working on self-driving technologies of its own, recently heading to London's Somerset House to show off some of the things it's doing right now, as well as what it might do in the future. Bosch has already partnered with NVIDIA to develop an AI brain for self-driving cars, with TomTom on mapping systems that'll help vehicles see the road ahead, and with Mercedes on automated valet and taxi concepts. The showcase in London featured a few more tangible developments.

At Facebook's F8 conference in Silicon Valley, David Marcus, the company's head of messaging, proudly demonstrated its new suite of chatbots. Users can now get in a conversation with the likes of CNN, H&M, and HP, and ask for help shopping, or the latest headlines. The chatbots aren't very good, but that doesn't mean Facebook isn't proud of them anyway: "I guarantee you're going to spend way more money than you want on this," Marcus chuckled on stage. But even though Facebook might want to sell itself as the pioneer of chatbots, the real leaders in the field aren't working in the AI research teams of silicon valley; they're collaborating at events like last week's BotSummit in the V&A, or this weekend's Art of Bots exhibition in Somerset House. Move over chatbots: it's time to meet the artbots. BotSummit, now in its fourth year but held outside the US for the first time, is the creation of internet artist Darius Kazemi, whose medium he describes as "bots and generators and other weird internet stuff".