Last year changed the way many of us thought about software. It certainly changed the way I did. I spent much of 2025 building, probing, and questioning how to build software, and in many more ways what I want to do.
PlayStation has announced a new contest called The Playerbase, allowing winners to have their likenesses scanned to appear in PlayStation games, starting with Gran Turismo 7.
Timber Rush is about numbers going up in the crudest way imaginable, a clicker game that barely even features clicking, in which you move your woodcutter side to side as increasing numbers of increasingly silly logs fly around the screen.
The neural networks that process written and oral language are deeply intertwined and largely overlap when reading print books or listening to audiobooks. There isn't much of a difference between the brain network for reading and the brain network for language comprehension. The brain area we call the 'letter box,' which processes print, is not as engaged when you listen, but it has been shown that when some people listen to words, they visualize them, so the letter box gets activated as well.
To deny one's own experiences is to put a lie into the lips of one's own life. It is no less than a denial of the soul. The concept I stick to - my core principle - is simple: I write in plain English, and only when I actually have something to say.
I wanted to write a book about how the smartphone changed the world, but the more I researched, the clearer it became that phones were actually the latest step in this evolution of storytelling technology that stretches all the way back to prehistoric times.
Storytelling is shaped by the way we engage with it. In the past, narratives unfolded slowly, giving the audience time to reflect and analyze at their own pace. Classic games, podcasts, and films provided the audience with time to settle into the narrative, and for emotions to build up gradually. These slower forms of media created room for reflection and engagement, allowing audiences to process narratives thoughtfully.
The new chapter will include not only a game but a novel and music, the company said in a press release. The developer revealed the new IP via a live-action teaser, with an actor reading lines from William Blake's poem, The Sick Rose. A painting then fell from the wall, and the actor then turned over an hourglass with red sand, with a tagline stating "The door won't stay closed."
Trails Beyond the Horizon's new character, Ulrika, is like staring into the abyss of a broken TikTok algorithm, and while my knee-jerk reaction might have been shock and even a little disdain, over the next 100 hours, I grew to find the character's bit surprisingly genuine and, admittedly, hilarious. What first felt like a gimmick grew to become one of my absolute favorite parts of the game, enhancing the already distinct personality of the Trails games.
What this means for the future of , once pitched as the first building block in an ambitious open-world metaverse , is currently unclear. But apparently the mission, the shooter's highest-profile bit of upcoming content, is canceled. Build a Rocket Boy and IO Interactive didn't immediately respond to requests for comment. The most surprising part of Insider Gaming 's report is that Build a Rocket Boy was apparently the one pushing to end the ill-fated partnership, a decision influenced by the 's "desire to bring its publishing in-house and gain more control over its future."
A writer is a kind of magician. Their job is to create living, three-dimensional people out of the ordinary stuff of ink and paper. This is no easy task, because readers can't literally hear, touch, or observe a character. Everything that defines a human being in real life-the physical space they occupy, or how they smell, feel, and sound-is stripped away, replaced by description. But authors have one major, mystical advantage: They can show you what's happening inside of someone's brain.
