A small group of workers at the video game company Activision Blizzard won an election to form a union. It could signal a big change in an industry that has a bullying and harassment problem.

On the same day the two gaming goliaths announced the deal, the FTC and DOJ launched a joint public inquiry with the goal of better detecting and preventing anti-competitive deals. Shortly after, Bloomberg reported the FTC had assumed responsibility for reviewing the Microsoft and Activision Blizzard deal. The FTC declined to comment or confirm an existing investigation. Stoller, though, pointed out that the stock market appears to be reacting to the looming specter of this investigation. "Activision is [trading at] $80, and the purchase price is at $95," he said.

Free Guy, the new movie about a non-player character who discovers he's trapped inside a video game, is built around a series of fight scenes that are, for want of a better word, extremely video-gamey: Characters move stiffly, some have signature moves they repeat, and the laws of physics seem to have been imported from somewhere between The Matrix and Warner Bros. cartoons. We spoke to the film's fight coordinator, Freddy Bouciegues, to find out he choreographed human actors to fight like video game characters--and how that's different from his work on fights in actual video games. This conversation has been condensed and edited for clarity. I assume the two or three major fight sequences in the movie make up the bulk of your efforts, but were you also working on all random stunts going on in the background? Whenever Ryan Reynolds walks down the street, we get a taste of Grand Theft Auto-style mayhem caused by other players of the game-within-the-movie.

The California Department of Fair Employment and Housing sounds like a bureaucratic borefest, but it's actually pretty important. It files lawsuits against companies and landlords accused of discrimination. Today we talk about California's lawsuit against Activision Blizzard. The Santa Monica company made $8 billion last year on the strength of classic video game titles like "Call of Duty" and "World of Warcraft." But the state argues the company let fester a "pervasive frat boy workplace culture" that led to sexual harassment against women.

In the years after it was founded in 1999, the Swedish video game company Paradox Interactive quietly built a reputation for developing some of the best, and most hardcore, strategy games on the market. "Deep, endless, complex, unyielding games," is how Shams Jorjani, the company's chief business development officer, describes Paradox's offerings. Most of its biggest hits, such as the middle ages-themed Crusader Kings, or Sengoku, in which you play as a 16th-century Japanese noble, were loosely based on history. But in 2016, Paradox decided to try something a little different. Its new game, Stellaris, was a work of sprawling science fiction, set 200 years in the future. In this virtual universe, players could explore richly detailed galaxies, command their own fusion-powered starship fleets and fight with extraterrestrials to expand their space empires. Gamers could choose to play as the human race, or one of many alien species. Another type of alien is a sentient crystal that eats rocks.) The game was an instant hit, selling more than 200,000 copies in its first 24 hours. Later that year, Paradox decided to take Stellaris to China. This would mean navigating the country's notoriously tricky censorship rules, but given that China was, at the time, home to an estimated 560 million gamers, the commercial appeal was irresistible. Paradox had been burned in China before.

This multi-part feature should provide you with a very basic understanding of what AI is, what it can do, and how it works. The guide contains articles on (in order published) neural networks, computer vision, natural language processing, algorithms, and artificial general intelligence. Among the most common misconceptions surrounding machine learning technology is the idea that video games dating back to the 1970s and 1980s had built-in "artificial intelligence" capable of interacting with a human user. If you're curious but in a hurry, video game "AI," in the traditional sense, is not what people refer to in the modern era when they're talking about artificial intelligence. The "bots" in an online multiplayer game, the enemies in a first-person-shooter, and the CPU-controlled characters in old-school Nintendo games are not examples of artificial intelligence, they're just clever programming tricks.

DeepMind, part of Google parent company Alphabet, is going big on virtual world AI training through a deal with game-making software provider Unity Technologies (which powers games like Monument Valley and Pokémon Go). DeepMind will run the software at a giant scale to train algorithms in physics-realistic environments–part of a growing trend in AI. Game engines like Unity or Unreal provide customizable settings for advanced AI techniques such as reinforcement learning (a kind of machine learning), in which an algorithm pursues a goal through trial and error until it's been mastered. "Games are in many, many ways . . . "You get the visual, the physics, the cognitive, and . . . the social aspect–the interaction."

Artificial-intelligence research group OpenAI said it created software capable of beating teams of five skilled human players in the video game Dota 2, a milestone in computer science. The achievement puts San Francisco-based OpenAI, whose backers include billionaire Elon Musk, ahead of other artificial-intelligence researchers in developing software that can master complex games combining fast, real-time action, longer-term strategy, imperfect information and team play. The ability to learn these kinds of video games at human or super-human levels is important for the advancement of AI because they more closely approximate the uncertainties and complexity of the real world than games such as chess, which IBM's software mastered in the late 1990s, or Go, which was conquered in 2016 with software created by DeepMind, the London-based AI company owned by Alphabet Inc. Dota 2 is a multiplayer science-fiction fantasy video game created by Bellevue, Washington-based Valve Corp. Each team is assigned a base on opposing ends of a map that can only be learned through exploration. Each player controls a separate character with unique powers and weapons. Each team must battle to reach the opposing team's territory and destroy a structure called an Ancient.

When I was a child, each year without exception our family would drive to Cornwall in a wheezing Ford Sierra for the summer holidays. We'd stay with my great-uncle, a retired army major (gruff bachelor, suspected womaniser, borderline alcoholic), who was perhaps the last person I'd ever meet who earnestly deployed the phrase: "Children should be seen and not heard." In order to preserve quiet in the house, we went out a lot. We'd eat the same sandy ham sandwiches and shoo the same crabs from under the same rocks. Familiarity might have bred contempt, were it not for the Game Boy my brother and I brought along for the ride.

The opening screen of Variable State's new video "feature" "Virginia" welcomes players to a small town named Kingdom. It's laid before us as if it were a board game, with little trails leading to a cave or a gas station, a schoolyard or an observatory, all of it presented with the simple cheery look of a brightly filled-in coloring book. Come in, stay awhile and bask in the beauty of small-town life, it seems to say. Press play, however, and things get twisted, and not with the typical things-are-not-what-they-seem subversion. Indeed, the first sign that something is out of the norm comes from the word "feature."