A judge has ordered Activision Blizzard to pay $18 million to settle a federal lawsuit accusing the company of fostering a sexist, discriminatory workplace. The US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission filed the suit in September and that same afternoon, Activision Blizzard agreed to set up an $18 million fund for employees who experienced sexual harassment and gender-based discrimination at the studio. Today's ruling approves this plan.

The fund will be distributed among people who worked at Activision Blizzard from September 1st, 2016, to today. Eligible employees and former employees have to opt-in to receive a payout, and they can submit claims relating to sexual harassment, pregnancy discrimination and retaliation.

Today's ruling isn't the end of the legal issues for Activision Blizzard, and it may even complicate efforts still underway by other agencies. California's Department of Fair Employment and Housing first sued the studio in July 2021 following a two-year investigation into allegations that sexism, gender-based harassment and a "frat boy culture" pervaded the Activision Blizzard offices. That state-level lawsuit is still in progress, while the $18 million ruling today applies only to the federal case filed by the EEOC.

Anyone who signs on as a claimant in the EEOC suit will not be eligible to participate in the state's case, at least when it comes to harassment, retaliation or pregnancy discrimination. If they have additional claims, such as pay inequities, they can bring those to the DFEH lawsuit.

The DFEH and EEOC have been battling for dominance with their lawsuits against Activision Blizzard. Lawyers for the California agency have expressed concern that a federal settlement might prevent them from pursuing additional damages at a state level. The DFEH case is scheduled to go to trial in February 2023.

"The DFEH will continue to vigorously prosecute its action against Activision in California state court,” spokesperson Fahizah Alim said last week.

Additionally, the DFEH, activists and Activision Blizzard employees have argued the $18 million figure is far too low to properly compensate all potential claimants, which could add up to hundreds of people. Communications Workers of America, the labor union backing Activision Blizzard employees during this time, called the sum "woefully inadequate" in a letter to the EEOC in October.

"This would provide the maximum settlement for only 60 workers," the CWA letter reads. "If any significant number of workers received the maximum under federal law, there would be little available for many other workers adversely affected. We are concerned about how the EEOC got to that number and how it believes that number will be fairly distributed. Please explain."

California's DFEH fought against a similar ruling in the case of Riot Games. Following a 2018 class-action lawsuit claiming rampant sexual harassment and discrimination at the studio, Riot was originally ordered to pay $10 million to claimants. The DFEH blocked that payout, arguing it was much too small, and the amount was eventually increased to $100 million.

A spokesperson for the EEOC provided the following statement to Engadget following today's federal ruling: "We are pleased that the judge has indicated her intent to sign the consent decree. The consent decree not only provides monetary relief to potential claimants that were impacted by sexual harassment, pregnancy discrimination and related retaliation at Activision Blizzard throughout the United States, but also puts in place significant injunctive relief at Activision Blizzard to prevent and address discrimination, harassment, and retaliation."

Meta is adding a handful of features to the Messenger app that will be familiar to anyone who's used Slack, most notably with a new @everyone function. Starting today, typing @everyone in a chat in Messenger will alert the entire group to your message — so make sure it's a good one.

Messenger is also adding a /silent function, which ensures your message will arrive in the chat without alerting anyone, like a ghost in the night. Just type /silent before your message and you're in sneak mode. Both @everyone and /silent commands are live on Android and iOS today.

Meta has more Messenger plans in the works. Over the coming weeks, Android and iOS Messenger users in the US will be able to use a /pay shortcut to send and receive money in-chat. On top of that, iOS users will get /gif, which drops searchable gifs directly into the chat. Messenger on Apple devices will also get /shrug and /tableflip commands, which populate the ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ and (╯°□°）╯︵ ┻━┻ emoticons, respectively.

Roberta and Ken Williams are back. After 25 years out of the video game industry, the legendary founders of Sierra On-Line are working on a new project with an old twist – they’re rebuilding the classic text-based game Colossal Cave Adventure as a 3D experience with a VR component.

Maybe that’s an old project with a new twist, but regardless, Colossal Cave 3D Adventure is a complete reimagining of the original title and it’s due to come out this fall for PC and Quest 2 VR headsets. Not only will this new interpretation add graphics to the text adventure, but it’ll be in first-person 3D, with details filled in by the minds that brought us King’s Quest and Phantasmagoria.

In traditional Williams fashion, Ken is in charge of the code as chief engineer, while Roberta is creative director, building the narrative and working across all aspects of the project. There are 16 people on their team at Cygnus Entertainment and they’ve all worked together remotely through the COVID-19 pandemic.

“We've had our stressful moments,” Roberta said. “There have been moments that Ken and I have said, what are we doing? Why did we do this? And other moments are just really exhilarating and exciting. I've learned a lot, Ken has learned a lot. We have a really good team and I'm just so excited to have met them – not in person – but they're very experienced in 3D graphics and programming.”

Cygnus Entertainment

That last bit is especially important, considering 3D development is a new arena for Roberta and Ken, who are best known for ’80s and ’90s narrative adventures and full-motion video titles. It’s been a quarter of a century since they last stepped into the world of game development, and they’re jumping straight into VR and Unity, a 3D development platform.

By her own admission, Roberta hasn’t even played games for the past 25 years. She and Ken have kept tabs on the industry, but mostly, they’ve been checked out.

“It was like, if we thought about it too much, we could be drawn back in,” Roberta said.

Instead of staring at computer screens and dreaming of digital worlds, Roberta and Ken spent 15 years traveling the planet on a 60-foot boat. They would land wherever they wanted and spend a few months, half a year, in one spot before hopping back on the trawler and sailing to a new location. Ken wrote four books about their travels during this time, plus another one about Sierra On-Line; Roberta wrote a historical novel about the Great Famine in Ireland.

“Which didn't sell as well as his book,” Roberta said, laughing. “But anyway, after that we were looking for something to do and I noticed that Ken was doing a lot of YouTube tutorials on some sort of 3D engine, some sort of 3D programming language.”

She didn’t think much of it at first. Ken outlined a game idea he was toying with, where players would learn programming as they went, building simple experiences within his digital ecosystem. Kind of like Roblox, but with more emphasis on learning real-world programming skills.

“He was telling me this and he had some ideas on how to do it and make it fun,” Roberta said. “And I said, well, will it be fun?”

Ken assured her it would be, but she wasn’t convinced. That night when she was in bed, mulling over her husband’s dull-sounding idea, Colossal Cave Adventure popped into her head.

“I remember laying there and thinking, why did it do that?” she said. “You know, it's like, is this a sign?” In the morning, Roberta brought her late-night revelation to Ken.

“I hadn't really wanted to get back in the industry, but I just suddenly felt this urge, almost kind of like when I sat down and did Mystery House,” Roberta said. “And I don't know why, and I mentioned it to him and I saw his eyes kind of light up.”

Cygnus Entertainment

Mystery House was Sierra On-Line’s debut game and when it landed in 1980, it was the first-ever graphic adventure. Roberta mapped out Mystery House in a quiet frenzy after playing the original Colossal Cave Adventure, a text-only game, in the late 1970s – as an avid reader, she was inspired by its interactivity and narrative heft, and her imagination got to work. She acquired a giant piece of paper from a local stationery store and started drawing rooms, connecting them and finding creative ways to get from one area to another. This ended up being the flowchart for Mystery House, and Ken, an avid programmer, brought it to digital life.

“Colossal Cave is the game that started Sierra On-Line,” Roberta said. “It started my career.”

Colossal Cave Adventure creators Don Woods and Will Crowther never copyrighted their work, which means anyone can do what they want with the IP, including the Williamses. Still, they got on the phone with Woods himself to ask permission, and the original developer had one request: Never try to copyright it. Keep the Colossal Cave franchise open, unowned and free for anyone to play with.

Roberta and Ken agreed, and they got to work. In June 2021, they revealed there was a new, secret game in development at their studio, Cygnus Entertainment. Colossal Cave 3D Adventure is due to come out this fall, primed to capture the imaginations of a new generation of players.

Following a large-scale virtual health study, Google has submitted Fitbit's passive heart rate monitoring algorithm for review by the US Food and Drug Administration. Approval would allow Google to market the Fitbit as a medical device in the States.

The study, which went live in May 2020, was open to all US Fitbit users over the age of 22, and it was designed to test how accurately the device could detect atrial fibrillation, or irregular heart rhythm. The system used photoplethysmography to track the blood flow in a user's wrist and determine if there are any concerning irregularities. Google said its algorithm correctly identified undiagnosed AFib 98 percent of the time in this study, and the company presented its results to the American Heart Association at its most recent meeting.

Fitbit's Sense Smartwatch was approved by the FDA in 2020 for its ability to assess AFib using built-in electrocardiogram technology.

In addition to the Fitbit FDA news, Google is rolling out a few other healthcare-related tools. Google Search in the US will soon show available appointment slots with local doctors and clinics when looking for care, with an emphasis on the CVS MinuteClinic.

"While we’re still in the early stages of rolling this feature out, we’re working with partners, including MinuteClinic at CVS and other scheduling solution providers," Google chief health officer Dr. Karen DeSalvo said. "We hope to expand features, functionality and our network of partners so we can make it easier for people to get the care they need."

Google is also rolling out "health source information panels" and "health content shelves" on YouTube videos in Japan, Brazil and India this week, in an effort to highlight credible information from legitimate sources.

The Uber app will lose the "split fare" option in April as the company attempts to build a better system for sharing the cost of a ride. A replacement feature should roll out within the next few months, according to an Uber spokesperson.

Uber riders in the UK received an email this week alerting them of the shutdown, as spotted by Mashable. A spokesperson confirmed to Engadget that the feature is on its way out.

“We are in the process of reworking how riders split fares and the feature will be temporarily removed from the Uber app next month," they said. "We know this is a popular feature, so rest assured that we are planning to roll out a new, improved version in the coming months.”

This change eliminates the ability to split the cost of a ride within the Uber app itself, but it doesn't stop you from using Venmo, Cash App or other services to make things equal. The original email to UK Uber customers said the "split fare" feature would be discontinued on March 21st, but it's definitely sticking around until April, the company clarified.

A bipartisan group of legislators today introduced bills in the House and Senate that would expand transparency requirements when it comes to government surveillance of US citizens, adding email, text, location and cloud data to the existing reporting framework. Currently, the US government is required to alert Americans who have been targeted by wiretaps and bank record subpoenas, but this doesn't apply to digital or cloud data. The Government Surveillance Transparency Act aims to adjust the parameters of this rule, expanding it to cover more common, modern forms of digital communication and data storage.

The Senate bill is sponsored by Oregon Democrat Ron Wyden, Montana Republican Steve Daines, New Jersey Democrat Cory Booker and Utah Republican Mike Lee, while a companion bill in the House of Representatives is backed by California Democrat Ted Lieu and Ohio Republican Warren Davidson. They argue that hundreds of thousands of criminal surveillance orders from US authorities go unreported each year, keeping Americans in the dark about the broad scope of government monitoring programs.

The bill also addresses the government's use of gag orders to halt technology companies from informing their customers of surveillance campaigns. While many tech companies have tried voluntarily reporting government subpoenas and data requests to their customers, authorities have used gag orders to keep these campaigns secret, according to the legislators.

“When the government obtains someone’s emails or other digital information, users have a right to know,” Wyden said in a press release. “Our bill ensures that no investigation will be compromised, but makes sure the government can’t hide surveillance forever by misusing sealing and gag orders to prevent the American people from understanding the enormous scale of government surveillance, as well as ensuring that the targets eventually learn their personal information has been searched.”

Alongside reforms to notification requirements and the gag-order process, the legislation would force authorities to publish online general information about every surveillance order they complete. It also would require law enforcement to notify the courts if they search the wrong person, house or device in the scope of an investigation, and also if a company shares unauthorized information.

When it comes to online games, we all know the “report” button doesn’t do anything. Regardless of genre, publisher or budget, games launch every day with ineffective systems for reporting abusive players, and some of the largest titles in the world exist in a constant state of apology for harboring toxic environments. Franchises including League of Legends, Call of Duty, Counter-Strike, Dota 2, Overwatch, Ark and Valorant have such hostile communities that this reputation is part of their brands — suggesting these titles to new players includes a warning about the vitriol they’ll experience in chat.

It feels like the report button often sends complaints directly into a trash can, which is then set on fire quarterly by the one-person moderation department. According to legendary Quake and Doom esports pro Dennis Fong (better known as Thresh), that’s not far from the truth at many AAA studios.

“I'm not gonna name names, but some of the biggest games in the world were like, you know, honestly it does go nowhere,” Fong said. “It goes to an inbox that no one looks at. You feel that as a gamer, right? You feel despondent because you’re like, I’ve reported the same guy 15 times and nothing’s happened.”

Game developers and publishers have had decades to figure out how to combat player toxicity on their own, but they still haven’t. So, Fong did.

This week he announced GGWP, an AI-powered system that collects and organizes player-behavior data in any game, allowing developers to address every incoming report with a mix of automated responses and real-person reviews. Once it’s introduced to a game — "Literally it's like a line of code," Fong said — the GGWP API aggregates player data to generate a community health score and break down the types of toxicity common to that title. After all, every game is a gross snowflake when it comes to in-chat abuse. 

GGWP

The system can also assign reputation scores to individual players, based on an AI-led analysis of reported matches and a complex understanding of each game’s culture. Developers can then assign responses to certain reputation scores and even specific behaviors, warning players about a dip in their ratings or just breaking out the ban hammer. The system is fully customizable, allowing a title like Call of Duty: Warzone to have different rules than, say, Roblox.

"We very quickly realized that, first of all, a lot of these reports are the same," Fong said. "And because of that, you can actually use big data and artificial intelligence in ways to help triage this stuff. The vast majority of this stuff is actually almost perfectly primed for AI to go tackle this problem. And it's just people just haven't gotten around to it yet."

GGWP is the brainchild of Fong, Crunchyroll founder Kun Gao, and data and AI expert Dr. George Ng. It’s so far secured $12 million in seed funding, backed by Sony Innovation Fund, Riot Games, YouTube founder Steve Chen, the streamer Pokimane, and Twitch creators Emmett Shear and Kevin Lin, among other investors.

GGWP

Fong and his cohorts started building GGWP more than a year ago, and given their ties to the industry, they were able to sit down with AAA studio executives and ask why moderation was such a persistent issue. The problem, they discovered, was twofold: First, these studios didn’t see toxicity as a problem they created, so they weren’t taking responsibility for it (we can call this the Zuckerberg Special). And second, there was simply too much abuse to manage.

In just one year, one major game received more than 200 million player-submitted reports, Fong said. Several other studio heads he spoke with shared figures in the nine digits as well, with players generating hundreds of millions of reports annually per title. And the problem was even larger than that.

“If you're getting 200 million for one game of players reporting each other, the scale of the problem is so monumentally large,” Fong said. “Because as we just talked about, people have given up because it doesn't go anywhere. They just stop reporting people.”

Executives told Fong they simply couldn’t hire enough people to keep up. What’s more, they generally weren’t interested in forming a team just to craft an automated solution — if they had AI people on staff, they wanted them building the game, not a moderation system.

In the end, most AAA studios ended up dealing with about 0.1 percent of the reports they received each year, and their moderation teams tended to be laughably small, Fong discovered.

GGWP

“Some of the biggest publishers in the world, their anti-toxicity player behavior teams are less than 10 people in total,” Fong said. “Our team is 35. It’s 35 and it's all product and engineering and data scientists. So we as a team are larger than almost every global publisher’s team, which is kind of sad. We are very much devoted and committed to trying to help solve this problem.”

Fong wants GGWP to introduce a new way of thinking about moderation in games, with a focus on implementing teachable moments, rather than straight punishment. The system is able to recognize helpful behavior like sharing weapons and reviving teammates under adverse conditions, and can apply bonuses to that player’s reputation score in response. It would also allow developers to implement real-time in-game notifications, like an alert that says, “you’ve lost 3 reputation points” when a player uses an unacceptable word. This would hopefully dissuade them from saying the word again, decreasing the number of overall reports for that game, Fong said. A studio would have to do a little extra work to implement such a notification system, but GGWP can handle it, according to Fong.

“We've completely modernized the approach to moderation,” he said. “They just have to be willing to give it a try.”

Hogwarts Legacy will arrive on PC, PlayStation 4, PS5, Xbox One and Xbox Series consoles in holiday 2022. And that's not all — during today's State of Play livestream dedicated to the open-world RPG, WB Games Avalanche dropped a trailer offering the first real look at how this sucker will look and play.

Hogwarts Legacy is a spinoff of the Harry Potter universe, but it takes place long before the events of the books. It's set in the 1800s, and places players in their fifth year at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, where they'll learn spells, brew potions, grow magical plants, tame wild beasts and attend classes. Players have a unique ability to manipulate ancient magic, and with that, they hold the key to saving the wizarding world from dark forces. 

As familiar as that sounds, this is a game filled with original storylines and Harry Potter author JK Rowling (She-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named) isn't directly involved in its development. Hogwarts Legacy features fresh professors, students, villains, mentors and creatures, plus some familiar ghosts. Players will be able to fly on broomsticks, gain friends who will join them on quests and upgrade their abilities based on how they like to play. It's not all contained to Hogwarts, either. The shops at Hogsmeade are also available to explore.

Hogwarts Legacy was announced in late 2020 and it was originally due to come out in 2021, but it was later delayed to 2022. 

"Creating the best possible experience for all of the Wizarding World and gaming fans is paramount to us, so we are giving the game the time it needs," Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment said at the time.

Immortality, the latest game from Her Story and Telling Lies creator Sam Barlow, is set to hit Xbox Series consoles, Game Pass and PC this summer. Like its predecessors, Immortality is shot in full-motion video and uses interactive cinematic scenes as a main mechanic. However, unlike the previous games, Immortality has a distinct horror vibe, not just psychological thrill.

The game is broken into three parts, each one a mysterious, unreleased movie starring the actress Marissa Marcel. Marcel disappeared after filming wrapped on these movies, and players have to investigate the lost footage to figure out what happened to her. The movies are Ambrosio (1968), Minsky (1970) and Two of Everything (1999).

Barlow revealed the Immortality trilogy back in 2020 and released a teaser in June 2021, though details about the game have remained scarce. Today's new trailer, which debuted during the ID@Xbox showcase on Twitch, was the first real dive into the game — and it looks delicious.

Barlow brought on three screenwriters to help with the Immortality script, Allan Scott (Queen's Gambit), Amelia Gray (Mr. Robot) and Barry Gifford (Lost Highway). It looks like the game will come to additional consoles down the line, as Barlow said on Twitter, "Other platforms to be announced."

Therapy has an engagement problem. Despite the benefits of treatment plans and at-home exercises, people generally resist anything that feels like work, and this impedes the mental-health recovery process across the board. Clinicians have attempted to bridge this gap with various devices and reward systems, but still, it’s often incredibly difficult to motivate patients to help themselves.

Video games have the opposite problem. Players can spend hours immersed in a single digital experience, seated in one spot and lost in their own world, but they’re often branded as “lazy” for this behavior. Video games are widely viewed as a waste of time, even with growing research demonstrating the psychological benefits of play.

So, why not smash these industries together and see what happens? DeepWell Digital Therapeutics is a new video game publisher and developer from Devolver Digital co-founder Mike Wilson and medical device creator Ryan Douglas, and their goal is to alter the way people think about games and mental health. The DeepWell DTx advisory council includes more than 40 medical researchers, doctors and veteran game developers, including Tom Hall (Doom), Zoe Flower (Hellbent Games), Rami Ismail (Nuclear Throne), Lorne Lanning (Oddworld) and American McGee (American McGee's Alice).

“We fight with engagement all the time,” Douglas said. He worked for years with light therapy and other interventions designed to treat anxiety, depression and stress, but said accessibility and participation were constant battles. “And these [game developers] had cracked that code at a level that they were really hitting hard neurological reward centers in the brain, in a way that the availability to effectively change what people do and think in certain times of mental illness was vastly improved over anything I'd seen before.”

DeepWell DTx

DeepWell DTx isn’t about gamifying therapy tools or building digital experiences based on strict medical templates. Instead, the studio will analyze existing games for potential mental health benefits and, in some cases, work with interested developers to enhance these mechanics. The team will then secure approvals from regulators for these games to treat mental health issues including PTSD, anxiety, depression, OCD and addiction.

This is where Douglas’ expertise comes in. He's the founder and former CEO of medical device company Nextern and he's secured FDA approval for more than 25 medical devices over the past 15 years; he knows how to navigate this regulatory process and he sees games as a natural fit. He and Wilson started working on DeepWell about 18 months ago, in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic.

“There's a very specific regulatory pathway for this work,” Douglas said. “So, a couple key things — agencies have done a lot of work in the last couple years to figure out how software as a medical device and specifically digital therapeutics are going to work. The FDA has been collaborative in that work. And then in this emergency time, there has been more opportunity to do the work that we need to do to get these in people's hands as quickly as possible. It's arduous but not impossible.”

Additionally, DeepWell DTx will provide a framework for players to recognize these benefits as they play – whether that’s a label on the game’s storefront, a welcome screen or another digital signal – allowing them to adjust their mindset before pressing start.

“We're super excited largely because of some intellectual property Ryan filed long before he met me, a couple years before he met me,” Wilson said. “We believe we've got a system built to enable game developers — eventually other media creators, as well — to work their magic and in a way that is already quite beneficial.”

It takes one whole minute before Wilson drops the phrase “digital psychedelics” into the conversation. This is kind of his thing; he’s an evangelist for psychedelics, with endless stories about Burning Man and the personal, therapeutic benefits he’s reaped from trips. Psychedelic therapy was a starting point for Wilson and Douglas, and they’re looking to mimic the perspective-shifting, calming effects of these substances through accessible digital experiences. They’re focused on alleviating a mental health crisis that was exacerbated by the global quarantine, using tools that people already have and naturally reach for.

“While it might not be as powerful as sitting with a macro dose of mushrooms and a couple of therapists, it might not be one session or two sessions or three, but it is an adjunct therapy that is good for you, that you might be way more likely to engage in and that the whole world has access to, even if they don't have access to health care,” Wilson said. “These will be interventions that are helpful to people that are just paying regular game prices.”

Literally every game is up for review from the DeepWell DTx crew, from platformers and narrative adventures to RPGs and shooters, and interested developers can apply starting today. There’s also an in-house development arm of the DeepWell beast, and its first game is already halfway through development, with a few others in pre-production. The first DeepWell games are due to start rolling out in 2023.