Over the weekend, the Guardian published a trio of stories about video game addiction. One was about the 850 people referred to an NHS treatment clinic in the last three years (of whom 227 were under 18). Another was on developers' use of tactics from the gambling industry to keep people spending on games. The third was by the director of the National Centre for Gaming Disorders, calling for industry regulation to better protect young people. These stories concern a problem that is certainly real, especially so for people affected by compulsive gaming behaviour, whose stories are no less affecting than those of gambling addicts.

There's a lot of media hype these days about the "coming of the metaverse" and a fair amount of hand-wringing about what it's going to look like. In computing, the term metaverse is defined as "a virtual-reality space in which users can interact with a computer-generated environment and other users." This definition is both broad and vague. As a result, doomsdayers treat great sci-fi stories like Neuromancer, Snowcrash and Ready Player One as prophetic warnings of a dystopian future metaverse. Meanwhile, today's tech visionaries have called the metaverse the future of computing and are promising a new VR/AR/IRL-blended reality and a total addressable market worth potentially $13 trillion by 2030. It's easy to see why parents might fear for their children's safety, attention spans and ability to socialize IRL.

The proposed purchase of Zynga is some $4.1 billion more than Chinese conglomerate Tencent paid for an 81.4 percent majority in Finland's Supercell -- another mobile game maker that developed the Clash of Clans franchise -- in 2016. That deal of $9.274 billion served as the previous high mark for acquiring video game company. In 2020, Microsoft acquired ZeniMax Media, which includes highly-regarded game maker Bethesda Softworks, for $8.1 billion. In 2015, Activision Blizzard paid $5.9 billion to acquire King, the mobile game maker behind "Candy Crush."

One of the biggest challenges in machine learning workflows is identifying which inputs in your data will provide the best signals for training predictive models. For image data and other unstructured formats, deep learning models are showing large improvements over prior approaches, but for data already in structured formats, the benefits are less obvious. At Zynga, I've been exploring feature generation methods for shallow learning problems, where our data is already in a structured format, and the challenge is to translate thousands of records per user into single records that summarize user activity. Once you have the ability to translate raw tracking events into user summaries, you can apply a variety of supervised and unsupervised learning methods to your application. I've been leveraging the Featuretools library to significantly reduce my time spent building predictive models, and it's unlocked a new class of problems that data scientists can address.

Contrary to popular belief, videogames aren't dominated by 12-year-old boys. In fact, according to the Entertainment Software Association and its just-released report, 2019 Essential Facts About the Computer and Video Game Industry, the median age of a U.S. gamer today is 33 years old and almost evenly split between male and female players (54% compared to 46%, respectively). Conducted by Ipsos for the Entertainment Software Association (ESA), and with additional data provided by the Entertainment Software Rating Board (ESRB) and the NPD Group, this annual study is billed as the most in-depth and targeted look at the evolving interactive entertainment space. The PDF report is free to download at theesa.com. "Today, there are 164 million adults who play video games in the United States, and three-quarters of all American households have at least one gamer in them," states Stan Pierre-Louis, Chief Executive Officer of the ESA, which serves as the voice and advocate for the dollar video game industry.

Our mission at Zynga is to connect the world through games by building games around core social experiences to deliver deep player engagement, organic acquisition and long-term retention. Our portfolio of games - CSR Racing 2, FarmVille, Hit it Rich! While we invest in our live games, we are also proud to be one of the first gaming companies innovating on emerging platforms such as Facebook Messenger and Google Play Instant. We had a great start to 2018, outperforming guidance in the quarter across all key financial measures and delivering our highest mobile audience in over four years. Our Q1 revenue was $208.2 million, above our guidance by $8.2 million and up $13.9 million or 7% year-over-year.

These venture bets on startups that "returned the fund," making firms and careers, were the result of research, strong convictions, and patient follow-through. Here are the stories behind the biggest VC home runs of all time. In venture capital, returns follow the Pareto principle -- 80% of the wins come from 20% of the deals. Great venture capitalists invest knowing they're going to take a lot of losses in order to hit those wins. Chris Dixon of top venture firm Andreessen Horowitz has referred to this as the "Babe Ruth effect," in reference to the legendary 1920s-era baseball player. Babe Ruth would strike out a lot, but also made slugging records. Likewise, VCs swing hard, and occasionally hit a home run. Those wins often make up for all the losses and then some -- they "return the fund." "If you do the math around our goal of returning the fund with our high impact companies, you will notice that we need these companies to exit at a billion dollars or more," he wrote.

A US online retailer has been reprimanded for promoting an explicit ad for a penis extender strap within video games played by children. UK watchdog the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) said that Wish.com had behaved "irresponsibly" and must ensure its adverts were properly targeted at appropriate age groups in the future. It marks the third time in five months that the San Francisco-based firm has been found to have breached the rules. In each case it has failed to respond. The powers the ASA has to punish offenders are limited, but it told the BBC it would "continue to apply pressure on Wish.com The latest ruling concerns an advert that appeared on 26 November.

A few weeks ago Lydia Dishman wrote a fantastic piece characterizing the top tech companies as defined by the "quality" of their talent using the Paysa CompanyRank algorithm and how these companies change in rank over time. CompanyRank is an Expectation-Maximization algorithm applied over space and time to quantifying the network-wide flux of tech workers to/fro/retained at each technical company at each month in time…a distant cousin to Google's PageRank algorithm. Another example of emergent structure learned from perceived independent chaos of a large, sparsely-connected complex system. Figure 1 depicts the Paysa CompanyRank time-series of Uber, Facebook, Google and Zynga over time. The top slot, e.g., most talent dense company gets rank of #1 and decays down to an arbitrary low rank (high number)…think 1 is better than 2 is better than 3 and so forth.