How one Lithuanian company evacuated dozens of employees, three dogs and one guinea pig as Russia invaded.
Tag Archives: Computer and Video Games
Activision Employees to Cast Union Vote
Employees at a company subsidiary complain about long hours and low pay. On Monday, they could vote to form the first union at a big U.S. gaming company.
Fun, but With Structure
When socializing is stressful, rule-bound role-playing games can offer some relief.
FIFA and EA Sports End Their Two-Decade Partnership
The demise of a relationship that produced one of the most popular games of all time will mean risks for soccer’s governing body but few changes for its players.
How to Separate Parents From Their Money
It takes just a kid and an app.
‘It’s Life or Death’: The Mental Health Crisis Among U.S. Teens
Depression, self-harm and suicide are rising among American adolescents. For M, a 13-year-old in Minnesota, the despair was almost too much to take.
Activision Says It Will Cooperate With Insider Trading Investigations
The company received requests for information that appeared to relate to investigations into whether investors who knew Bobby Kotick, the chief executive, traded Activision stock before a deal with Microsoft was made public.
In Elden Ring, the Struggle Feels Real
The video game evokes the hardship and disappointment of the pandemic, but also the hope of human communion.
Mixing Minecraft and Watches
Lydia Winters, the game’s chief storyteller, now spends her leisure time photographing her 18-piece collection.
What an Oscar Win for ‘CODA’ Tells Us About Apple’s Power
What the best picture Oscar for “CODA” tells us about Apple’s enormous market power.
How Your Sense of Direction Is Shaped by Where You Grew Up
Childhood environments shape people’s navigational skills, researchers reported. The findings one day may lead to better tests for early dementia.
Genshin Impact, Smash Hit From China, Beats Japan at Its Own Game
Genshin Impact, a nearly picture-perfect reproduction of Japanese fantasy role-playing games, has raked in billions of dollars and sent shock waves through the world’s aging video game superpower.
TikTok Ukraine War Videos Raise Questions About Spread of Misinformation
The Chinese-owned video app is dealing with a flood of war videos and the question of whether it is spreading unverified information.
Twitch Says It Will Bar Chronic Spreaders of Misinformation
The new policy will take down channels that persistently lie about vaccines and election fraud, as well as Russian state-run media.
Epic Games, Who’s Behind Fortnite, Buys Bandcamp
Epic Games is acquiring an online music platform that has been embraced by musicians for its eclectic offerings and a payment system that favors artists.
Are We Measuring Our Lives in All the Wrong Ways?
The philosopher C. Thi Nguyen believes that to understand modern life, we need to understand how games work.
Hacker Who Sold Pirated Video Games Gets More Than 3 Years in Prison
Gary Bowser, 52, pleaded guilty for his role in a group that sold pirated video games for devices like the Nintendo Switch, costing companies more than $65 million, prosecutors said.
Nvidia Deal to Buy Arm From SoftBank Is Off After Setbacks
The deal, which was initially valued at $40 billion, encountered regulatory scrutiny, including an F.T.C. lawsuit.
How The Sims Became the Internet’s Most Exciting Place to Eat
The 22-year-old life-simulation video game has evolved into a world where players can farm, forage, cook and learn about the many ways people experience food.
How Instagram, FedEx and Wordle Hook You
The brand architect Debbie Millman says it’s all about design.
The New York Times Buys Wordle
The word game, released in October, has millions of daily users.
Microsoft and the Metaverse
Why are so many major companies investing in this new digital world — and what is it, anyway?
Why Microsoft Wants Activision
Activision has a lot of popular games that fit into Microsoft’s plans to build a vast library of titles that can be played on all sorts of devices. The metaverse can wait.
Gamers Greet Microsoft’s Activision Deal With Guarded Optimism
Some players, unhappy with Activision in recent years, said the Microsoft deal could reverse a decline in quality.
What’s All the Hype About the Metaverse?
Microsoft cited the metaverse as a reason for buying Activision Blizzard for $68.7 billion. Let’s break down what that really means.
Microsoft to Buy Activision Blizzard for Nearly $70 Billion
With the deal, the largest in the software maker’s history, Microsoft will gain Activision’s nearly 400 million monthly users and access to some of the world’s most popular games.
Behind the Movement to Create More Black Video Game Characters
The lack of Black representation in games stems from a failure to understand the Black gaming audience, creators say.
Cryptocurrency Enthusiasts Meet Their Match: Angry Gamers
Game publishers are offering NFTs, but skeptical gamers smell a moneymaking scheme and are fighting back.
Crypto Enthusiasts Meet Their Match: Angry Gamers
Game publishers are offering NFTs, but skeptical gamers smell a moneymaking scheme and are fighting back.
How Big Sports Leagues Are Trying to Woo the Gamer Generation
Here’s what sports marketers are doing to win back a lost generation and save the future of fandom.
What if Work Were a Video Game?
Xbox head Phil Spencer discusses how the gaming industry is already peeking into the metaverse with avatars, virtual worlds and online economies.
Wordle Is a Love Story
The word game has gone from dozens of players to hundreds of thousands in a few months. It was created by a software engineer in Brooklyn for his partner.
The Video Games That Got Us Through 2021
These are not the year’s best video games, and some of them aren’t even that new. But they are the ones that helped us through yet another unexpected year.
Big Tech Journeys Into the Virtual Reality Reaches of the Metaverse
Tech’s biggest companies are joining game makers and start-ups in pursuit of an immersive digital world that some have been working on for years.
How John Madden Became the Face of a Video Game Empire
Madden, who died Tuesday, helped bring to life a series of football video games that has generated $7 billion in revenue since 1988.
How Discord, Born From an Obscure Game, Became a Social Hub
Jason Citron created a video game that was going nowhere fast. So he stripped it down to a chatting feature that eventually boomed during the pandemic.
5 Ways Young People Are Using Discord
Discord users from 12 to 23 years old describe how they use the messaging site, which has boomed during the pandemic.
Meet The Two Teenage Brothers Dominating Tetris
The best player in the world over the last two years is a 14-year-old boy from Fort Worth. One of his main challengers? His 16-year-old brother.
Tesla Agrees to Stop Letting Drivers Play Video Games in Moving Cars
A federal regulator said the electric vehicle maker agreed to disable the feature after an investigation was opened.
The Rise of E-Sports Has Big Implications for Traditional Sports
Kids were already drifting away from traditional sports before the pandemic, with ramifications for the entire sports industry. The trend has accelerated in the pandemic.
Masayuki Uemura, 78, Dies; Designed the First Nintendo Console
He developed the Nintendo Entertainment System in the 1980s, which laid the foundation for today’s enormous video game console market and franchises like Super Mario Brothers.
The Game Awards Returns With Glitz and an Industry Asserting Its Muscle
On Thursday night, the video game industry held its big awards event, which is quickly becoming as important — and as long — as certain other entertainment occasions.
I Play Video Games With My 4-Year-Old, and That’s OK
Video games may not be harmless, but what are you going to do?
Tesla Drivers Can Now Play Video Games Even With Car Moving
The feature raises fresh questions about whether Tesla is compromising safety as it rushes to add new technologies.
PlayStations and Xboxes Are Hard to Find. Meet the People Trying to Help.
New gaming consoles remain in short supply this holiday season, spawning cottage industries of tipsters and scalpers making money off their scarcity.
The Tech Gifts That Are Hard to Buy This Holiday Season
The list of scarce gadgets is long, driven by a chip shortage. Don’t wait until Black Friday for the best deals.
Bobby Kotick, Activision’s C.E.O., Faces Calls to Step Down
More than a hundred employees protested at the company’s studio in Irvine, Calif., on Tuesday.
Halo Infinite Release Aims to Lift Xbox Prospects
Though interest in Halo has waned over the years, the company is banking on a new version to goose sales of its Xbox and subscription gaming service.
Roblox Goes Down, Forcing Children Outside for Halloween
The popular gaming site said Sunday that it was working to resolve the outage. In the meantime, children were freaking out.
Anonymity No More? Age Checks Come to the Web.
To protect children online, more companies and governments are forcing users to prove how old they are.