Nintendo has brought support for its Labo VR goggles to another flagship Switch game. Super Smash Bros.Ultimate now gives its players a way to watch and play certain matchups in virtual reality by using the craftable VR goggles from a recent Nintendo Labo kit. Nintendo Labo offers a look at how the Switch’s more unique features can be put to creative use to create some non-traditional game experiences, and rolling out Labo Kit support for its first-party games is another way the company is highlighting those potential uses. Nintendo’s foray into console-powered VR launched last month as a standalone experience that, with a little cardboard and specialized lenses, lets Switch owners transform their console into a…

AI researchers at Google’s DeepMind have trained an artificial intelligence agent on Quake III and published a paper on how it performed in matches with and against humans. Video games can be a useful tool for researchers looking to evaluate the capabilities of AI technology, and several including StarCraft II and Dota 2 have attracted the attention of companies like DeepMind and OpenAI. As outlined in a Science paper spotted by Kotaku, researchers at DeepMind trained the AI agent “For the Win” on thousands of hours of Quake III play data with the goal of demonstrating the technology’s ability to function in cooperative environments. The company broke down the whole process in a blog post on Google’s DeepMind last year, and the Science…

Jay Silver, one of the minds behind the Makey Makey invention kit, is working on a plug-n-play game console called GameBender that introduces children to programming by letting them create and modify games on the fly. At its most basic level, GameBender allows its players to jump right into a game, and then modify different elements of that existing game mid-play. It’s an approach that aims to let kids learn code while playing, and make the whole process more appealing from the get-go. The concepts they learn from modifying an existing GameBender game can be used in other games on the platform, or even used to create and share entirely…

In this 2017 GDC session, veteran art director Denis Rogic presents nine major lessons drawn from the mistakes he made as an art director so that you can learn from them — and hopefully avoid some similar misstep! When Rogic was promoted to art director, he had no clue what was waiting for him. He learned he needed to acquire a completely new, social skillset. While not all of his lessons learned are art-related, they made his work so much easier that he considers them essential to run an artistic team. He gave a great talk and if you missed it live, no worries — you can now watch Rogic’s talk free over on the official GDC…