Gaming
In OneZero. More on Medium.
Gamblers flock to a new kind of online casino that’s open 24 hours a day
“I’ve kind of developed a problem,” J.J. tells me over Discord voice chat.
In his early teens, his dad won $50,000 on a scratch-off lotto ticket, dramatically improving the family’s living situation almost overnight. “That helped us not be poor,” he said. But the windfall also colored his views of gambling in ways that didn’t become evident until recently. …
The game’s sudden popularity caught the small development team by surprise — and now there’s a lot of work to be done
At any given moment, there are tens of thousands of people playing Among Us on Steam, the largest platform for PC gaming. Many more join them on their mobile phones and Nintendo Switches. All told, half a billion people reportedly play the game every month. It’s a sprawling player base that’s largely based around text interactions — you complete tasks as a team of colorful astronauts, convening every now and again to root out imposters attempting to sabotage your mission.
It’s also almost entirely unmoderated. Innersloth — the four-person team behind the game — is working with limited resources to…
Christian evangelists use streaming platforms to spread the gospel while playing Fortnite
Catie Dexter is a different kind of evangelist. “The gaming community is definitely a community that’s got some lost people that need Christ,” she says.
Millions of people log onto Twitch every month to broadcast live video — most of them streaming games like League of Legends or Rocket League. Some use it to organize sporting events or political discussions. But a small and growing community of creators is using Twitch to reach gamers on behalf of Jesus Christ. Dexter is the chief operating officer of God Mode Activated (GMA), a group dedicated to “activating gamers in faith.”
BIG TECHNOLOGY
Apple’s identity, the Epic Games beef, and brewing competition with Facebook
OneZero is partnering with Big Technology, a newsletter and podcast by Alex Kantrowitz, to bring readers exclusive access to interviews with notable figures in and around the tech industry.
This week, Kantrowitz sits down with M.G. Siegler, a partner at the investment firm GV. (Siegler is also an investor in Medium.) This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
To subscribe to the podcast and hear the interview for yourself, you can check it out on iTunes, Spotify, and Overcast.
For years, Apple had a clear identity: It was the world’s best devices maker. …
A law firm webinar advised employers on how to avoid becoming a target of CODE, an organizing initiative in tech and video game industries
On July 30, the employment and labor law firm Jackson Lewis put on a one-hour webinar designed to educate employers on a new threat: a wave of union organizing in the video game and technology industries. More specifically, it promised to teach them to defend against it.
The webinar, called “Breaking the CODE: Union Organizing in the Video Game and Technology Industries,” focused on a group called Campaign to Organize Digital Employees (CODE) that was formed in January 2020 by the Communications Workers of America (CWA). CODE won its first campaign in March when it successfully organized employees at the…
Patricia Crowther’s ex-husband coded her cave maps into one of the first hit adventure games in the 1970s, and she had no idea
Claire L. Evans is the author of Broad Band: The Untold Story of the Women Who Made the Internet.
The longest cave in the world is in central Kentucky. Its limestone passages stretch 400 miles beneath the earth in twisting patterns as intricate as the roots of the ancient hickory forests above. Within, cavers skirt bottomless pits, pass fountains of orange stone, and discover deep, icy subterranean rivers. Between the sunlit world and the depths below, white mist swirls at ankle height, like the breath of ghosts.
Kentuckians have fought bitterly to control access to the secrets of Mammoth Cave…
And it’s disappointing
On July 1, Crayta, a game that allows people to collaborate on making other games, exclusively launched on Google Stadia. It brought with it the first beta of the platform’s State Share feature. First announced in March 2019, State Share promised to let players link out to an exact moment in gameplay for others to click on and interact with themselves; the moment when a fully decked-out character approaches a climactic boss fight after hours of questing, for example. It’s the kind of power that’s so far been reserved for save states in emulators and game modders.
Crayta’s implementation of…
And that’s not a bad thing
On March 15, just days before Chicago would issue a shelter-in-place order in response to the Covid-19 pandemic, Max Plenke decided to get really into Counter-Strike.
Recognizing that he was about to spend a lot of time stuck in his apartment, Plenke, a branded content editor, realized that there was probably no better time than now for him to jump back into one of the most competitive online shooters after nearly two decades of not playing. Over the past two months, he’s logged over 200 hours.
“There’s something weirdly comforting about it,” he tells me. “I can’t think about how…
Stadia’s rocky launch left it vulnerable to competition, but Google can turn it around by leveraging its strengths as a tech behemoth
The year 2019 was a big one for the video game industry. With Microsoft, Sony, and Nintendo all announcing plans for new consoles or console upgrades in 2020, no one expected it would be Google that would steal the spotlight with the launch of its subscription cloud gaming platform Stadia in late 2019. Google promised a video game streaming experience that featured incredible graphics: 4K resolutions, 60 frames per second, and low input lag on myriad games in the Stadia library. …
Generative adversarial networks redefine classics for a new era
It’s a golden era of video game remakes. Earlier this year, Final Fantasy VII was updated for 2020 with a complete overhaul of its graphics and core gameplay systems, and fans of 900-degree skateboard turns will soon ollie into complete remasters of the first two Tony Hawk Pro Skater games.
These overhauls typically take years for professional game studios, which rebuild the game from the ground up. But fans have also been hard at work remaking classic games themselves, using artificial intelligence algorithms to upscale the pixelated, blotchy renderings of older games with crisp, modern graphics.
