“Over time, it became a master at [Diplomacy], reportedly achieving ‘more than double the average score’ of human players and ranking in the top 10 percent of people who played more than one game.”
(Andy Baio adds “building extremely persuasive AIs that are more effective negotiators than humans, what could go wrong”.)
“[T]he developers are testing it on Annie, Zach Adams' wife. After a failed attempt with an earlier version, the latest tutorial took Annie far enough to where she could ‘tunnel under a bog and drown her fortress.’ Presumably, that is good.”
“There’s another previously underserved audience that’s responded to Wingspan: women. Stegmaier doesn’t have gender breakdowns of who’s purchased Wingspan, but he does note that the game’s official Facebook group is 40 percent women — which may not sound particularly high, but the group for Stonemaier’s other bestselling game, Scythe, is 90 percent men.”
“For years, Judy Malloy would not get the credit she deserved for being one of the earliest pioneers of ‘electronic literature,’ as the literary hypertext movement came to be called: pieces by men writing later became more famous and better-studied.”
“It might be embarrassing today to admit that I learned my first bits of English from the three volumes of the adventures of Larry, a game series that even back then wasn’t particularly respectable. But this was the only such game I knew, school in 1989 was still exclusively into Russian.”