The 1984 Los Angeles Olympics are memorable for a lot of things – the jetpack at the opening ceremony, the historic performance by Carl Lewis, the greater focus on female athletes – but for nerds of a certain age, they will always be remembered for something quite different: broken joysticks. This was the first Olympic tournament of the mass video game era and it prompted a whole new genre of sports sims, designed to replicate the physical exertion of actually doing sport. I can just about recall watching the real Los Angeles games on TV, but it was the household tournaments I held with friends that really bring back memories. There's some disagreement over where the multi-sport sim originated. At the burgeoning games studio Activision, pioneering designer David Crane had thought for a long time about making a sport game that simulated physical effort and his title The Activision Decathlon, arrived in late 1983, riding the growing hype for the LA Olympics to come. It allowed players to compete in 10 events, waggling the joystick left and right as quickly as possible to run faster and jump higher.

Increasingly powered by artificial intelligence, sales in the video gaming industry are anticipated to increase significantly in 2022. If you're a hard-core, veteran gamer, then the recent advances in gaming technology are probably not lost on you. You've likely already seen first-hand how gaming has improved by light years since the old arcade scene. For example, one of the best-selling early video games was Pac-Man. Gamers played Pac-Man on a relic game system known as Atari 2600.

Black history permeates all facets of our lives--and video games are no exception. From the 8-bit days to the 4k Ray Tracing present, Black video game characters have occupied various positions; from the precarious period of early sports games in the '70s, which included titles like Heavyweight Champ and the nameless grayscale sprites, to Spider-Man: Miles Morales as the poster child for a new gaming generation today, Black representation has come a long way. Similar to other mediums, such as film, music, and literature; Black culture has been, and is, integral to grappling with our collective understanding of video game history. People of color have often been portrayed in popular media as stereotypes and tropes that speak to an underlying structure of racism, patriarchy, heteronormativity, and other forms of systemic oppression. As a Black queer gaymer, the only time I ever saw myself on the screen was through character creation, but that's just cheating in the context of this story.

Professional and college sports have been disrupted by the coronavirus pandemic. But sports played on virtual athletic fields and courts have thrived. Video game publisher EA Sports has seen 13% more players taking the field in Madden NFL 21, released Aug. 28 – and that's coming off record activity last year, the publisher says. Now there's another reason for players to keep playing Madden NFL, which is a perennial top-seller. They can help fill out the roster for the Virtual Pro Bowl, which will be played Jan. 31 using Madden video game software and broadcast on ABC and ESPN.

Three Californians say that the video game publisher Electronic Arts is secretly manipulating them. On Nov. 9, they filed a class-action lawsuit accusing EA of surreptitiously using a patented A.I. technology known as dynamic difficulty adjustment in its FIFA, Madden, and NHL games--three of the biggest sports games on the planet. The lawsuit claims EA is using the technology to unfairly increase the difficulty of multiplayer mode online matches in order to encourage players to spend real-world money to boost their chances of winning. EA has denied ever implementing the technology and has called the lawsuit "baseless." For years, players have been stewing over ideas of fairness and balance in games, feeling taken for granted at best and taken advantage of at worst. The class-action complaint, Zajonc et al. v. Electronic Arts, doesn't contain any evidence for its claim, but that's fairly typical for this sort of class-action complaint.

Playing NHL 21 makes me feel old. I say that as someone who used to religiously buy sports games starting way back in the NES days so my brother and I can play them to death. By the time the rivalry between EA Sports and Visual Concepts came about, there were times when we would actually buy their competing games during the same year. That's how much we both enjoyed playing sports games. Somewhere along the way, though, we just stopped.

As journalists face increased layoffs despite the growing appetite for up-to-the-minute, timely news, a new trend has quietly been disrupting the news industry. News organizations are increasingly turning toward artificial intelligence (AI) for production, using a variety of new automated systems to pump out content with minimal need for direct human input. According to a report by The New York Times, Bloomberg News relies on a system called Cyborg to produce about a third of its articles. Most of Cyborg's output takes the form of company earnings reports that are rife with percentages, charts, and other financial data that can be crunched down into a news story quickly and accurately. Increasingly, major news agency like Reuters and Associated Press, along with a number of newspapers such as Washington Post and Los Angeles Times, are using algorithms to crunch out news on everything from local minor league sports games to earthquakes.

Imagine buying a burrito, and getting charged extra for gua-... wait, that's a bad example. Imagine receiving a car for free, but it can only drive at 20 miles per hour. If you wanted to accelerate, you'd have to invite at least five friends to visit the dealership. Alternatively, you could pay ten dollars to accelerate to 30 mph, or pay twenty dollars to accelerate to 50 mph. Don't laugh - with autonomous cars just on the horizon, we may not be too far from such a reality. The digital realm is peppered with similar examples of "Freemium" payment models - offering a mediocre product for free that can be improved by emptying your wallet (making it "premium").