An anonymous reader quotes Forbes: Rockstar Games co-founder and VP Dan Hauser unleashed a storm of controversy when he casually stated in an interview with Vulture that "We were working 100-hour weeks" putting the finishing touches on Red Dead Redemption 2. Reaction was swift with many condemning the ubiquitous practice of crunch time in the video game industry in general and Rockstar's history of imposing harsh demands on its employees in particular... Hauser responded that he was talking about a senior writing team of four people working over a three-week period. This kind of intense short-term engagement was common for the team which had been working together for 12 years. Hauser went on to say that Rockstar doesn't "ask or expect anyone to work anything like this". Employees are given the option of working excessive overtime but doing so is a "choice" not a requirement.

A QA tester at Rockstar's Lincoln studio in the UK has taken to Reddit to answer questions and clarify misconceptions about overtime at Rockstar that have arisen in the wake of Hauser's comments.... He has no knowledge of working conditions at other Rockstar studios. The first thing the poster points out is that he and other QA testers (with the possible exception of salaried staff) are paid for their overtime work. He then writes "The other big thing is that this overtime is NOT optional, it is expected of us. If we are not able to work overtime on a certain day without a good reason, you have to make it up on another day. This usually means that if you want a full weekend off that you will have to work a double weekend to make up for it... We have been in crunch since October 9th 2017 which is before I started working here...."

[A] requirement to opt into weekly overtime shifts and more than a year of required crunch time ranging from 56 to 81.5 hours spent at work each week is a far, far cry from Hauser's claim that overtime is a "choice" offered to Rockstar's employees. The good news is that Rockstar has changed its overtime policies in response to the negative press engendered by Hauser's 100-hours comment [according to the verified Rock Star employed on Reddit]. Beginning next week "all overtime going forward will be entirely optional, so if we want to work the extra hours and earn the extra money (As well as make yourself look better for progression) then we can do, but there is no longer a rule making us do it."
The videogame correspondent for Forbes argues that this "crunch time is the norm" idea in the videogame industry "is unconscionable and untenable. No one, in any line of work, should be expected to sacrifice their family for their job. If people want to devote their life to their job, they should be able to do so but those who would rather work a standard work-week should also be able to do so without suffering adverse job-related consequences." But what do Slashdot's readers think?

Should 'crunch' overtime be optional?

The November issue of Popular Mechanics includes a message from its editors that Elon Musk is "under attack," arguing that while some criticisms have merit, "much of it is myopic and small-brained, from sideline observers gleefully salivating at the opportunity to take him down a peg." But what have these stock analysts and pontificators done for humanity? Elon Musk is an engineer at heart, a tinkerer, a problem-solver -- the kind of person Popular Mechanics has always championed -- and the problems he's trying to solve are hard. Really hard. He could find better ways to spend his money, that's for sure. And yet there he is, trying to build gasless cars and build reusable rockets and build tunnels that make traffic go away. For all his faults and unpredictability, we need him out there doing that. We need people who have ideas. We need people who take risks.

We need people who try.
The magazine includes statements from 12 high-profile supporters, including investor Mark Cuban, who writes "When you invest in a company run by an entrepreneur like Elon, you are investing in the mindset and approach that an entrepreneur brings to the table as much as you are valuing the net present value of future cash flows. That is not typical for public companies that are overwhelmingly run by hired CEOs. My advice for Elon is simple: Be yourself. Be true to your mission. Respect your investors. Ignore your critics."

Meanwhile, in a Friday post on Twitter, Musk jokingly claimed that he'd purchased and then deleted the game of Fortnite, posting a doctored Marketwatch article quoting him as saying "I had to save these kids from eternal virginity."

"Had to been done," tweeted Musk, adding "ur welcome".

Steam VR is introducing a new feature called "Motion Smoothing" that will give PCs with low-end hardware the power to deliver VR experiences more smoothly. "It functions like Motion Smoothing for TV and Asynchronous Spacewarp for Oculus devices, which are frame-rate smoothing techniques that generate synthetic frames between two real ones in order to avoid a stuttery experience," notes Engadget. From the report: When Steam VR determines that an experience is lagging or dropping frames, Motion Smoothing automatically kicks in. It drops an app's framerate from 90FPS to 45FPS and generates a synthetic frame for every real one to mimic real 90FPS. If things get especially bad, it can generate two to three frames for every real one instead. Steam explains that the feature "dramatically [lowers] the performance requirements," allowing PCs with lower end hardware to "produce smooth frames." Take note, however, that the feature will not work with the Oculus Rift or with Windows Mixed Reality headsets. You can only take advantage of it if you have an HTC Vive or a Vive Pro, and if you're running Windows 10 -- all you need to do is right-click on Steam VR and select beta under Tools in Library.

The publisher of video game Grand Theft Auto V has been granted the right to search the homes of five people accused of making cheat software. From a report: The court order allowed Rockstar Games and its parent company, Take-Two Interactive, to search two properties in Melbourne, Australia, for evidence related to a cheat known as Infamous. The Australian federal court has also frozen the assets of the five, who have not yet filed a defence. The cheat went offline six months ago. It allowed players who paid about $40 to manipulate the gaming environment, generate virtual currency and use a "god mode" feature that makes players invincible.

Hoping to avoid injuries, gamers get physical training; squat jumps, ginger smoothies and yoga. From a report: Esports, the world of professional videogaming, is looking more and more like other sports, with big sponsors, prize money, fan bases -- and player injuries. In response, teams are educating players on ergonomics, hiring personal chefs and sending gamers to the gym [Editor's note: the link may be paywalled]. Sweden's Ninjas in Pyjamas, one of esports' most accomplished teams, distributes an illustrated fitness guide to players with nearly two dozen recommended "core" exercises like burpees, Superman lifts and squat jumps. It has also instituted a "no pizza" rule before morning matches and mandated teams take pregame walks.

Before matches, hand-warming packets are doled out to its two dozen players. "If you have warm hands, you reduce the risk of injury versus cold hands," says Hicham Chahine, Ninjas' chief executive. The potential for injuries -- most frequently in the wrists, hands and fingers -- is rising due to the popularity of the $900 million esports universe. With new leagues and a proliferation of competitions, for some games, tournaments are popping up nearly every other week. "Everyone is susceptible to injuries in everything that is done to an extreme," says Veli-Matti Karhulahti, of Finland's University of Turku, who along with co-author Tuomas Kari, has published peer-reviewed research on physical activity in esports.

South Korean team KT Rolster hired a nutritionist two years ago who dictates breakfast, lunch and dinner. Brown rice was substituted for white rice. Players craving fast food or instant ramen must now make a special request to do so, says Jeong Je-seung, KT Rolster's coach and a former professional gamer. In his playing days, Mr. Jeong says low salaries meant "if you could eat three times a day as an esports player back then it was enough." Top players can now earn millions of dollars annually in prize money and sponsorships. The 2018 world championship for "Dota 2," a game where teams raid opponents' bases, carried a purse of nearly $25 million.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Earlier this year, Google made a seemingly crowd-pleasing tweak to its Chrome browser and created a crisis for web game developers. Its May release of Chrome 66 muted sites that played sound automatically, saving internet users from the plague of annoying auto-playing videos. But the new system also broke the audio of games and web art designed for the old audio standard -- including hugely popular games like QWOP, clever experiments like the Infinite Jukebox, and even projects officially showcased by Google. After a backlash over the summer, Google kept blocking autoplay for basic video and audio, but it pushed the change for games and web applications to a later version. That browser version, Chrome 70, is on the verge of full release -- but the new, autoplay-blocking Web Audio API isn't part of it yet. Google communications manager Ivy Choi tells The Verge that Chrome will start learning the sites where users commonly play audio, so it can tailor its settings to their preferences. The actual blocking won't start until Chrome 71, which is due in December.

"The first published RPG was Dungeons & Dragons, shortly followed by some other imitative games," Greg Stafford once said. "Chaosium, however, was never content to imitate but published games that were original in style of play, content and design."

Greg Stafford died Thursday at the age of 71. Long-time Slashdot reader argStyopa shares this memorial from Chaosium's Michael O'Brien. As one of the greatest game designers of all time; winner of too many awards to count; and a friend, mentor, guide, and inspiration to generations of gamers, "the Grand Shaman of Gaming" influenced the universe of tabletop gaming beyond measure. Greg founded The Chaosium in 1975... Under his leadership, the company quickly became renowned for its originality and creativity, and was responsible for introducing numerous things to the hobby that are standards today. As John Wick (7th Sea, Legend of the Five Rings) memorably said, "The older I get, the more I hear young RPG designers say 'Never been done before!' And then I just point at something Greg Stafford did a few decades ago."

Greg's work in roleplaying games, board games, and fiction have been acclaimed as some of the most engaging and innovative of all time. There will doubtless be many valedictory messages over the coming days from the countless people that Greg inspired and enthused across his many interests and passions -- Glorantha, Oaxaca, King Arthur, shamanism, mythology and more. For now, we leave you with the words of the Myth maker himself, speaking at the 2018 ENnies Awards ceremony, his last public engagement
"When I started Chaosium in 1975... we never imagined, truly, that it would reach the magnitude that it has today," Stafford tells the audience. "It went through a long period of being some strange thing that just random geeks did... I figure when role-playing games get on The X-Files and The Simpsons, we've made it..."

""It's true that it's not us. We're a bunch of obsessive-compulsive, detail-minded game designers, people looking desperately for a job that doesn't make them wear a tie to work, artists who would've never had a market without our industry. We all do a lot of work, but in fact we're just a small handful of people, and truly the phenomenon that we have today is not due to us, but is due to you, the fans and the players. We really appreciate everything that you've done... I want to say thank you to all of you fans."

The forum at Basic Roleplaying Central has started a condolences thread.

The Internet Archive has launched a free, browser-based Commodore 64 Emulator with over 10,500 programs that are "working and tested for at least booting properly." Interestingly, the emulator comes just before the launch of Commodore's own C64 Mini. "It's based off the VICE emulator version 3.2, which is a triumph of engineering," adds HardOCP.

Patrick Klepek tells the story of a PlayStation Network user who had their 13-year-old account stolen via what appears to be a social engineering scheme against Sony. Klepek managed to track it down and start negotiating for its release. An anonymous Slashdot reader shares an excerpt from the report: 1,200. That's how much someone is asking for a PlayStation Network account I've been investigating for the past few weeks. "Secure," the person calls it, claiming the account will "never be touched" by the original owner again. "He won't be getting it back," they claim. More than a thousand dollars? That's a little rich for my blood, and so I counteroffer: $700. "Btc?" they respond, accepting my bid. (BTC refers to bitcoin. The majority of transactions like this take place using cryptocurrency; it's generally harder, but not impossible, to trace.) I didn't purchase the account, of course. But I could -- anyone could, if they only knew where to look. This account wasn't on a shady market because someone was clumsy with their digital security. They had a strong password and two-factor authentication. When they were notified about problems with their account, they called Sony and asked for help. Despite all this, despite proving their identity over and over, they lost access to their PSN account, including any trophies earned or any games purchased. It was gone...well, sort of. The original owner no longer had access, but this person -- the individual asking for $1,200 but who quickly and without hesitation dropped to $700 -- did.
[...]
More than likely, Sony itself is a victim of a clever social engineering scheme, in which a user, or series of users, repeatedly spammed their representatives, until it found someone willing to accept the limited information they did have, and calculated the system would eventually lock the account in their favor. Even a "failed" social engineering attempt can be a success, if the person calling comes away with new information about the account. Every company in the world can fall victim to social engineering, as there are no true fail safes. But Sony's setup seems especially ripe for it. Why didn't the system get flagged as "sensitive" sooner? Why can a user flip off two-factor authentication over the phone? How can an account get abandoned, when it's still active? There are ways Sony could have prevented this from happening. In the end, the original account owner was magically handed the account. "Sony promised that they were going to set it up so no reps could make any changes," the account owner said, "but they are still investigating how this happened."

Sony's president has confirmed that the company is working on the next PlayStation, but stopped short of calling it "PlayStation 5." From a report: "At this point, what I can say is it's necessary to have a next-generation hardware," Kenichiro Yoshida told the Financial Times on Monday. He didn't give a sense of the form the next PlayStation might take, but FT sources suggested that it wouldn't be a major departure from the PS4 and that its fundamental architecture would be pretty similar. The report suggests Sony isn't quite ready to jump from consoles to cloud-based gaming, even as direct competitors such as Microsoft and potential ones like Google reveal game streaming services.

Microsoft has unveiled "Project xCloud," its new game streaming service designed to work across consoles, PCs, and mobile devices. "Scaling and building out Project xCloud is a multi-year journey for us," explains Microsoft's cloud gaming chief Kareem Choudhry in a blog post. "We'll begin public trials in 2019 so we can learn and scale with different volumes and locations." The Verge reports: Microsoft has built custom hardware for its datacenters, as The Verge previously exclusively reported, so that existing and future Xbox games will be compatible with the services. Games will be streamed to devices, and Microsoft has been testing the xCloud service with Xbox wireless controllers connected to consoles, mobile devices, and PCs. Microsoft says its research teams are "creating ways to combat latency" via advanced network techniques combined with video encoding and decoding. This should make game streaming viable on 4G networks, too.

Four years after Microsoft acquired Minecraft developer Mojang, the company has decided to open source some of Minecraft's Java code. According to Kotaku, Microsoft and Mojang released two parts of Minecraft's Java code in library form, so that "anyone can pick them up and use them in their own game," says Lead Engineer Nathan Adams. From the report: For now, there's just the two libraries: "Brigadier," a "command parser and dispatcher"; and "DataFixerUpper," designed for "incremental building, merging and optimization of data transformations ... [to convert] the game data for Minecraft: Java Edition between different versions of the game." While the news doesn't mean much for players, it will be a boon for interested programmers and developers, keen to see the guts of Minecraft. The plan is to open source more components in the future, though no time frame is specified. For now, if you want to check out Brigadier or DataFixerUpper, both can be found on Mojang's GitHub page.

An anonymous reader writes: The 24th annual Interactive Fiction Competition kicked off Monday, unveiling 77 new text adventures which will vie for nearly $9,000 in prize money. The contest's organizers are encouraging people to play and rate the free games, and encourage their friends to join in the fun (or to donate more prize money or other prizes). They're dedicating this year's competition to the memory of Stu Galley, who co-founded the pioneering text adventure company Infocom back in 1979 with his classmates from MIT. Infocom went on to create everything from Zork to a popular Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy game, and Stu is credited as the driving force behind text adventures like Moonmist, Seastalker, and The Witness.
Meanwhile, long-time Slashdot reader paulproteus reminds us that the "Roguelike Celebration" is happening today and tomorrow at the GitHub office in San Francisco -- and is streaming on Twitch. The Roguelike Celebration is a community-generated weekend of talks, games, and conversations about roguelike [games] and related topics, including procedural generation and game design... It's for fans, players, developers, scholars, and everyone else, including people new to this type of game.

AmiMoJo quotes Rock, Paper, Shotgun: Sandbox space sim Limit Theory has been cancelled, six years after a successful crowdfunding campaign on Kickstarter, because main developer Josh Parnell is simply exhausted from working on it for so long. He's spent, he says: emotionally, mentally, physically, and financially. "Not in my darkest nightmares did I expect this day to ever come, but circumstances have reached a point that even my endless optimism can no longer rectify," Parnell said on Friday. He plans to release the source code for folks to poke around but makes clear "it's not a working game."

Though Limit Theory blew past its $50,000 goal, drawing $187,865 in pledges (and remember Kickstarter takes a cut), development has gone on years longer than anticipated. Costs have burned through that initial cash and started eating into Parnell's personal savings but, more than that, he's just exhausted.

AmiMoJo shares a report: Tencent Holdings, the world's top-grossing games publisher, will use facial recognition technology to detect minors amid tighter scrutiny by the Chinese government over concerns excessive video gaming is hurting public health. Tencent's blockbuster mobile title, Honour of Kings, will be the first to test the technology, with some 1,000 new users in Beijing and Shenzhen selected to verify their identities through camera checks, the company said in a statement. In mid-September, Tencent found that almost half of the 600 game-playing minors and their parents who took part in its survey doubted facial-recognition checks in games, according to the statement. Tencent said it hoped to see how to use facial recognition and unearth problems through the scheme.

According to The Wall Street Journal, Nintendo is planning to release a new version of its Switch gaming console next year (Warning: source may be paywalled; alternative source) "to maintain the sales momentum of the device," which is "no longer delivering the favorable surprises that marked the machine's first year on the market." From the report: Nintendo is still debating what new hardware and software features to include in the upgrade and weighing the cost of the features, people with knowledge of the discussions said. One option is improving the display, they said. The current Switch uses a lower-end liquid-crystal display without some technologies that are standard in more recent smartphone LCDs. Updating the display with these technologies would make it brighter, thinner and more energy-efficient. The updated Switch isn't expected to adopt the organic light-emitting diode or OLED panels used in Apple's iPhone X series. Nintendo is looking to release the new Switch in the latter half of 2019, perhaps as soon as summer, the people said. [...] The upgraded Switch would likely share many features with the current version and be compatible with existing Switch game software.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Nintendo of America President and COO Reggie Fils-Aime appeared at Seattle's Geekwire Summit on Wednesday to speak broadly about the company's future, and, while the talk didn't include new product reveals, it proved illuminating about what to expect from the big N in the future. The short version: Nintendo would rather be defined as an "entertainment" company, not a gaming one. Fils-Aime says the company currently has three "pieces of business": a dedicated video game business ("the way most of our consumers interact with us"), a mobile gaming business, and "leveraging our intellectual property (IP) in a variety of ways." The latter includes previously announced plans for a Universal Studios attraction in Osaka, Japan (still slated to open ahead of Tokyo's next Olympics hosting run in 2020) and a Super Mario film produced by Illumination Entertainment (Minions, Despicable Me). When asked about Nintendo's future focus on a company-wide level, Fils-Aime said: "It's about Mario, Zelda, Pokemon -- all these wonderful intellectual properties. How we leverage these across a variety of entertainment platforms is how we're looking to grow the company."

He went on to say that he doesn't see Xbox and PlayStation as competitors. Ars reports: "He counted the exact number of minutes per day and said that outside of the time a consumer spends eating, sleeping, working, and going to school, 'all of the rest of that time is entertainment time. That's what I compete for, minute by minute. That time you spend surfing the Web, watching a movie, watching a telecast of a conference: that's all entertainment time we're competing for. My competitive set is much bigger than my direct competitors in Sony and Microsoft. I compete for time. When I do that, I have to be creative and innovative in order to win that battle.'"

Earlier this year, we heard rumors that Google was working on a game-streaming service. It looks like those rumors were true. From a report: The company today unveiled "Project Stream," and while Google calls this a "technical test" to see how well game streaming to Chrome works, it's clear that this is the foundational technology for a game-streaming service.

To sweeten the pot, Google is launching this test in partnership with Ubisoft and giving a limited number of players free access to Assassin's Creed Odyssey for the duration of the test. You can sign up for the test now; starting on October 5, Google will invite a limited number of participants to play the game for free in Chrome. As Google notes, the team wanted to work with a AAA title because that's obviously far more of a challenge than working with a less graphics-intense game. And for any game-streaming service to be playable, the latency has to be minimal and the graphics can't be worse than on a local machine.

During a talk at the Oculus Connect conference today, Oculus' CTO, John Carmack, compared the company's newly announced Oculus Quest headset to the Xbox 360 and PS3 in terms of power. Ars Technica reports: That doesn't mean the Quest, which is powered by a Qualcomm Snapdragon 835 SoC, can generate VR scenes comparable to those seen in Xbox 360 or PS3 games, though. As Carmack pointed out, most games of that generation targeted a 1280x720 resolution at 30 frames per second. On Quest, the display target involves two 1280x1280 images per frame at 72fps. That's 8.5 times as many pixels per second, with additional high-end anti-aliasing effects needed for VR as well. "It is not possible to take a game that was done at a high-quality level [on the Xbox 360 or PS3] and expect it to look good in VR," Carmack said. Expecting Rift-level performance from a self-contained mobile headset like the quest isn't realistic, Carmack said, partly for simple electrical reasons. While a high-end gaming PC often draw up to 500 watts of power, Carmack said the Quest only uses about 5W, a tidbit that should be of benefit to the Quest's still unconfirmed battery-life statistics.

That relative lack of hardware power is going to require some developers to adopt "a different programming style that's been necessary on the PC," Carmack warned. "With a modern PC, you have so much extra power, you don't need to be a hotshot programmer to make a game people love. You don't really have that convenience on any mobile platform, really, but especially not on our platform." That's not an insurmountable problem, Carmack suggested, as long as developers focus on the dozen or so things that players really need to concentrate on in an average game, rather than "thousands" of pieces of graphical fluff. He suggested developers look back to the lessons of platforms like the original PlayStation and Nintendo DS to see how developers crafted memorable experiences on much less-powerful hardware. Carmack went on to say that "realistically, we're going to end up competing with the Nintendo Switch... they'll pick up Quest as [a] mobile device, just like Switch."

Sony announced this week a major policy shift regarding crossplay with other consoles. PlayStation 4 previously wouldn't allow online games to connect to Xbox One or Switch players. This week, Sony is starting a beta test for Fortnite crossplay. From a report: Crossplay between consoles once seemed like a fantasy, but Xbox One and Switch have enabled people to play together for games like Fortnite and Rocket League. PlayStation 4 would permit crossplay with PC players, but it refused to connect to other consoles. Sony's excuse stated that such crossplay would hamper its capability to deliver a consistent experience. But the decision drew criticism from PS4 fans, especially those that were angry when they tried to install Fortnite on their Switch and found out they couldn't carry over their PS4 progress.