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The thoughts and opinions expressed are those of the writer and not Gamasutra or its parent company.

[Do you know who these superheroes are? Did you expect them to return?]

We’re back again, and thanks to those who made additional formatting comments on the revamped Video Game Deep Cuts. A couple more tweaks this week, and it’s approaching its final form!

As it evolves, there’s a few shifts. For example, a minority of the links are now to ‘cool/interesting stuff’ and notable new games, rather than longform articles or videos. Like, uhh, Chex Quest. Oh no, the $218 fan bundle sold out just as I was finishing this newsletter. Sorry, folks!

– Simon, curator

The Current: Recent Games In The Spotlight

The Culture: Game Culture & Deep Dives

The Past: Game History

The Other Goodness

Hope you liked this one, and see you next week!
Simon.

Riot Games is incentivizing internet security enthusiasts to report vulnerabilities and exploits in its offerings with newly posted bug bounties, including a sizable fund for specific Valorant flaws.

More and more game developers have turned to bug bounty programs in recent years to suss out potential vulnerabilities and security issues in their services and software, including the likes of Valve and Nintendo.

While Riot’s posting offers up a sum of cash for bugs involving any of its games or online portals, a significant part of Riot’s initiative aims to track down any issues in the Vanguard anti-cheat used in its in-beta FPS Valorant. Specifically, Riot notes that it’s interested in “high quality reports that demonstrate practical exploits leveraging the Vanguard kernel driver” and is willing to pay a bounty of up to $100,000 for reports on any vulnerabilities that could lead to a network or local attack.

Details on exactly what sort of flaws Riot is interested in hearing about, and the steps for reporting each, can be found on the full HackerOne listing.

I am very pleased to announce that, today, Microsoft is committing to the Open COVID Pledge by making its patents available free of charge for use in efforts to end the COVID-19 pandemic and minimize the impact of the disease.  This step joins our other efforts to use technology and innovation to help track the disease and develop solutions, such as mobilizing AI for Health to fight COVID-19 and the Bing COVID19 Tracker. Additional information about Microsoft’s COVID-19 efforts can be found here.

We are always looking for ways we can use our patents to contribute to positive outcomes, and the fight against COVID-19 is one of the most urgent issues of our time. Pledges and open licensing of this kind can help spur innovation, especially in a crisis like this one. Researchers, scientists and others working to fight the virus should be able to develop and deploy effective solutions at scale without obstacles such as being threatened with patent litigation.

The terms and conditions of Microsoft’s COVID-19 patent license, which are effective immediately, can be found here. We encourage other intellectual property holders, including other technology companies and universities, to also commit to the pledge and ensure that their intellectual property is working for, and not against, efforts to stop the pandemic.

Tags: COVID-19, Open Data

Team17 and Blacklight Interactive have revealed that Golf With Your Friends, a multiplayer mini-golf game, will be launching on Switch next month.

It’ll be teeing off on 19th May, but you can actually go ahead and pre-purchase the game from the eShop as we speak. If you do, you’ll receive ‘The Caddy Pack’ downloadable content which includes a selection of hats and floaties for further ball customisation.

Up to 12 players can join up for some mini-golf fun, and there’s even a course based on Team17’s very own Worms franchise. Check out the feature list below:

Key Features
– Friendly competition: Players can ‘putt’ their skills to the test against 11 people in online multiplayer.
– Golf, with a view: Normal golf greens are so last year, Golf With Your Friends offers more than 10 unique courses, each with their own theme and location, including one based on the iconic Team17 franchise, Worms.
– Super-powered golf: Players can hinder their friends progress with powerups available in custom game modes. Throw down honey, turn their ball into a square, or freeze them on the spot to take the lead and drive a wedge between friends.
– Multiple game modes: Sometimes golf is just golf, and sometimes it’s golf with a basketball hoop or a hockey goal – both game modes are available alongside the classic mini golf mode.
– Fabulous golf: Rock the fairway in style, with unlockable skins, hats and trails for the golf balls.

It’s available to pre-order right now for £14.99 / $19.99 / €19.99.

Do you like the look of it? Think you’ll give it a go? Why not putt a comment in the box below?

Since we announced Microsoft 365 Personal and Family subscriptions a few weeks ago, I’ve been uplifted by the unique and creative ways people have been using Office and other Microsoft tools to work, learn, and connect from home. From giving piano lessons over Skype to virtual family workouts at home to teachers using Microsoft Teams to read stories to their students, it’s moving to see us all adapting and maintaining connections with those who matter most in this time.

As everyone adapts to different and innovative ways of living, working, and organizing, we are here to help in that process. Today, we’re excited that Microsoft 365 has more to offer across free and premium experiences. Here are 10 ways Microsoft can help you and your family experience more efficiency, more enjoyment, and more ease—across your whole lives.

1. Connect with loved ones and friends over Skype—This continues to be critical in this time. Maintaining our relationships looks different for all of us. It could be wishing your friend a virtual happy birthday, setting up a weekend trivia night with family, or having a video happy hour with your neighbors. With the Meet Now feature in Skype, it’s easy to connect over video (for free) with up to 50 people in just a few clicks.

2. Become a better writer—Our desire and need to communicate during this time has not diminished, it has simply shifted. Quick café catch-ups are now social media discussions, and chats with coworkers are IMs. This is where Microsoft Editor can be a huge help. Now available as a browser extension in Microsoft Edge and Google Chrome, Editor offers writing assistance whether you are relaying a story on Facebook, writing an email to your child’s teacher, or posting on Twitter. Across the web, Microsoft Editor is your virtual assistant to help you write more clearly and concisely.
3. Discover resources for your family, job, and schooling—There are thousands of free and premium templates available for you to use across Word, Excel, and PowerPoint, many of which are very relevant today. With kids learning from home, we’re proud to offer a variety of Home Learning templates like alphabet flash cards, a reading log in Word, or multiplication tables in Excel. When you’re looking for ways to connect with your kids and family at home, we have Family Activity templates including an animal doodle coloring book in PowerPoint and Sudoku puzzle solvers in Excel. For those working from home, or on the hunt for their next job, we offer wide range of Presentation templates as well as Resume and Cover Letter templates.
4. Multi-task with ease—The Play My Emails feature in Outlook can be a lifesaver for those with a lot going on. Taking the dog on another walk? Fixing an afternoon snack for the kids? Have your emails read aloud to you so you can multitask effectively. And in this home/work/life blend we are all experiencing, it’s as important as ever to stay on top of your schedule. Outlook allows you to share calendars (so you can coordinate schedules with family members) and add calendars (so you can plan around important events).
5. Keep a handle on your to-dos—For most, our homes are now a hub for much more than what they used to be. They’ve become our workspace, classroom, cafeteria, gym, and living area. Our realities and locations may have shifted, but that doesn’t mean we can’t remain organized. With Microsoft To-Do, you can create the grocery list and share it with your spouse so they can order it. You can make a task list for the kids to check-off before time on their Xbox. You can share workout routines with friends. Whatever you need to accomplish, we’ve got you covered.

6. Craft standout presentations—PowerPoint has always been a wonderful tool to help you get your ideas across. Now, as we share more information and ideas with each other digitally, a strong presentation can make all the difference. Using intelligent technology, PowerPoint Designer offers beautiful layouts, rich animations, cinematic motion, 3D models, and modern icons to bring your presentation to life with a few clicks. Your subscription unlocks access to over 8,000 beautiful images and 175 looping videos, plus 300 fonts and 2,800 icons to create high-impact and visually appealing documents.
7. Become a top-notch presenter—While we might not be standing in conference rooms or on stage for the time being, many of us are still presenting to live audiences on a daily basis. It could be a formal performance on a live stream to many, or simply talking through a document on a video call with your colleagues. Either way, verbal communication is a vital skill—as well as something many folks wish they were better at. Presenter Coach uses artificial intelligence (AI) to help your speaking. It aids with pacing, filler words, and speaking suggestions. Now, you’ll also get real-time feedback as the AI analyzes monotone speech and speech refinement—giving you tips on variation, grammar and phrasing.

8. Share special moments and keep up connections—Do you have some cute photos of the Easter Egg hunt that took place around the living room? The grandparents would love to see them. Maybe you had a birthday celebration and want your friends to see the incredible cake your boyfriend baked? With 1 TB of OneDrive cloud storage for Microsoft 365 subscribers, you can store these photos and any other files, as well as share them with others, with the knowledge they are always secured and backed-up.
9. Get peace of mind when tech issues arise—Our homes have grown into bigger tech hubs with family members working and learning from home. With your Microsoft 365 subscription we’ve got your back with ongoing technical support for Windows 10 and all included Microsoft 365 apps readily available through chat or phone.
10. Learn, meditate, manage, create and control—With a Microsoft 365 Personal or Family subscription comes access to incredible partner apps and services through free, limited-time offers. Find mindfulness with Headspace, create with Adobe, and learn new skills with CreativeLive. You also get access to TeamSnap, Bark, Experian, and Blinkist.

On the horizon, we have even more exciting news to debut. Money in Excel* will soon allow you to manage, track and analyze all your money and spending in a single place. Also, in Excel, you will be able to make sense of your data with informative and interactive visualizations of everything from food to movies to Pokémon**. Also coming soon is the Microsoft Family Safety App, which empowers families in a variety of ways with both free and premium offerings, including managing screen time across Windows PCs, Android, and Xbox. There will also be new features in Microsoft Teams that make it easier to connect, organize, and collaborate with family and friends.

Today is just the first step in delivering new features and value that helps us all navigate life. Microsoft 365 Personal and Family subscriptions are generally available today worldwide, with additional benefits added over time.

*U.S. only, subscription required.
**English only, subscription required.

Today, Microsoft is launching an Open Data Campaign to help address the looming “data divide” and help organizations of all sizes to realize the benefits of data and the new technologies it powers. We believe everyone can benefit from opening, sharing and collaborating around data to make better decisions, improve efficiency and even help tackle some of the world’s most pressing societal challenges.

The goal of our campaign is to advance a much-needed discussion about how the world uses and shares data. To start, today we’re announcing three steps:

• First, we’re publishing new principles that will guide how Microsoft itself approaches sharing our data with others.
• Second, we’re committing to take action by developing 20 new collaborations built around shared data by 2022. This includes work with leading organizations in the open data movement like the Open Data Institute and The Governance Lab (GovLab) at the New York University Tandon School of Engineering. And we’ll seek to lead by example by making our Microsoft social impact initiatives “open by default,” beginning with sharing data on broadband access from our Airband initiative and combining it with data from others to help accelerate improvements in broadband connectivity.
• Finally, we’ll invest in the essential assets that will make data sharing easier, including the required tools, frameworks and templates.

In recent months, we’ve again seen the benefits that better data sharing can bring not just for companies and other organizations, but also in tackling the world’s biggest challenges. From climate change to the COVID-19 pandemic, it is clear that data plays a critical role in helping us understand these challenges and in addressing them. To fully realize the benefit of data, we need to develop the ability to share data across organizational boundaries in a way that is safe and secure, and allows the data to be used effectively.  If ever there was a time to accelerate the world’s efforts around open data, it is now. We hope our steps today can contribute to these efforts. We’re committed to the cause, and to learning from and working with others.

What do we mean by the “data divide” and why now?

Despite the enormous growth in data and AI, both are increasingly concentrated in the hands of a small number of companies. Indeed, fewer than 100 companies now collect more than 50% of the data generated by online interactions (based on analysis of similarweb.com, appfigures.com and alexa.com) and around half of all people with technical AI skills work in the technology sector (according to figures from LinkedIn). Not surprisingly, these businesses are then able to reap the enormous benefits of data and AI while others are left at a disadvantage. This data divide poses a serious challenge for society and, if left unaddressed, could lead to huge economic power flowing to just a few countries and companies. Based on current trends, for example, PWC predicts that around 70% of the economic value generated by AI will accrue to just two countries: the USA and China. But we do not believe that an ever-growing data divide is inevitable. By doing more to open up and share data, organizations can unlock value, share expertise and make data more useful for all, allowing everyone to benefit in ways they are not able to by going it alone. By acting now and joining together, more civil society organizations, governments and businesses of all sizes will be able to realize the full value of data.

Charting a principled course

To help guide our own efforts on open data, we are adopting a set of principles to inform how we at Microsoft open and share data in a responsible way. We’ve learned through our work on protecting privacy, responsible AI and sustainability that it is valuable to define a clear set of principles when engaging with important and complex societal issues. We hope these principles will inform the broader conversation on open data and that others can build on and improve them. The five principles that will guide our contributions to trusted data collaboration are:

• Open – We will work to make data that is relevant to important social problems as open as possible, including by contributing open data ourselves
• Usable – We will invest in creating new technologies and tools, governance mechanisms and policies to make data more usable for everyone
• Empowering – We will help organizations generate value from their data according to their choices, and develop their AI talent to use data effectively and independently
• Secure – We will employ security controls to ensure data collaboration is operationally secure where it is desired
• Private – We will help organizations to protect individuals’ privacy in data-sharing collaborations that involve personally identifiable information

Each of these principles is important. However, as has become clear to us in our work in this area, one stands out as the most challenging but vital key to success: the need to make data more usable. Unless organizations are able to collect and categorize data in a standardized way, they will not be able to aggregate and analyze it in a manner that produces the transformative insights that shared data has the potential to unlock.

Committing to new collaborations

In addition to charting a principled course, we believe success will depend on building deep collaborations with others from across industry, government and civil society around the world. We want to try and lead by example and do more to learn firsthand about the challenges and solutions around open data. To this end, Microsoft is committing to launching 20 data collaborations by 2022, building partnerships to tackle the major challenges of our time. To help seed these collaborations, Microsoft will make its social impact initiatives “open by default” and explore whether our data related to initiatives such as Airband, AI for Good and our work on sustainability and accessibility might be able to be opened up and built on to help solve major challenges. We are excited to be partnering with the Open Data Institute in this effort, working together to develop our initial collaborations and share the lessons we learn with others so that they may also benefit. Our initial work will focus on:

• Tackling connectivity challenges: Microsoft is publishing under open agreement on GitHub a small, but important, dataset around broadband usage in the United States, gathered as part of our Airband Initiative. We will be working with the Open Data Institute and BroadbandNow, a company that help consumers find broadband access in the U.S. to add to this dataset to help improve broadband availability. The BroadbandNow dataset provides county-level pricing and competition data.

• Addressing COVID-19: As one of the most pressing challenges today, we will contribute to the work being done to use data to address the COVID-19 crisis. This includes expanding work Microsoft is doing with partner Adaptive Biotechnologies to decode how the immune system responds to COVID-19 and share research findings via an open data access portal for any researcher to use in the fight against the pandemic. More broadly, Microsoft has also built a COVID-19 tracker on our Bing search engine and is releasing aggregated data to those in academia and research. We are also working with GitHub, which is hosting a range of collaborative COVID-19 projects, including open source software, hardware designs, models and many leading COVID-19 datasets.

• Helping cities collaborate around data: Microsoft will partner with Arup and the Oliver Wyman Forum on the London Data Commission, an open data initiative run by London First working with the Greater London Authority and others, to lead a data collaboration project around city-based data that can help address social and economic challenges in London. 

• Helping governments collaborate around data: To help governments better open up and collaborate around data, we will co-launch the Open Data Policy Lab with The GovLab at NYU. The Lab will provide a live repository of best practices and resources with a focus on: 1) analysis, in the form of comparative research of data initiatives that contribute to economic development; 2) guidance, to include toolkits, frameworks and best practices to support data sharing and data-driven decision-making; 3) community, of data stewards and other data stakeholders within the public and private sectors; and 4) action, to implement proof-of-concept initiatives.

• Advancing data-driven healthcare: This work will enable the first global data collaborative to improve cardiovascular health, bringing together data from a range of sources to help address one of the world’s leading causes of death. Microsoft is working with the Novartis Foundation, Apollo Hospitals in India and Coala Life in Sweden to consolidate their respective cardiovascular datasets from hospitals and primary-care centers around the world. The collaborative aims to further develop and use the leading cardiovascular AI tool – AICVD Risk Score, created by Apollo Hospitals – to accelerate the use of data-driven decisions in tackling cardiovascular disease and informing the direction of health policy.

Making data sharing easier and safer

If data is open and available but unusable, it serves little to no purpose. We are therefore committing to helping tackle the problems created by the lack of easy-to-use tools and frameworks for sharing data to ensure that we are able to help make data more usable. One big challenge we have seen in our work on data sharing and the analysis we’ve been doing to help fight the COVID-19 crisis is the difficulty around inconsistent data collection. Currently, data is collected in a variety of different formats and document types – some in Word documents, some in PDFs, some in spreadsheets, some still on paper. This makes it all but impossible to share and aggregate data in a way that is valuable and provides a huge barrier to collaboration. The campaign will work to address this challenge and also continue our work to develop scalable tools that any organization can utilize, reducing the friction around sharing.

In this work, there are valuable lessons to be taken from the world of open source software. While there are important differences between data and code, particularly around the steps needed to address privacy and security considerations when dealing with data, our experience with open source provides us with insights for enabling successful collaboration. A priority will be continuing our work on open data use agreements, providing templates that anyone can use to easily share data and continue to build on the governance, licensing and legal tools provided on the Open Data Campaign microsite. We will also continue to advance our work on differential privacy with Harvard’s IQSS, providing tools to allow people to extract useful insights from datasets in a way that safeguards the privacy of individuals.

Closing the data divide is a big challenge. But the benefits for organizations of all sizes, and the broader community are significant if we can work together to make progress on open data. We’re committed to making our contribution, and we look forward to working with, and learning from, others so that everyone can realize the benefits of data.

Tags: AI for Health, Airband initiative, COVID-19, data sharing, Open Data, Open Data Campaign

Headup Games has revealed that The Coma 2: Vicious Sisters will be bringing another dose of the series’ survival-horror adventure to Switch next month.

The game picks up right where The Coma: Recut left off, although developer Devespresso Games is keen to note that you won’t need to have played the original to understand what’s going on. This new title sees you taking on the role of Mina Park, a minor side-character from the first game who is forced to escape her deserted high school to elude the clutches of a relentless, psychotic slasher. Ooer.

Here’s an official description and feature list:

Mina Park, a student of Sehwa High, awakens in the dead of night in her school. It isn’t long before she realizes that something is amiss. The once-familiar school where she spends her evenings studying looks twisted by something dark and sinister. She finds herself pursued by someone or something that looks eerily like her English teacher. To survive, Mina must venture beyond the boundaries of her school and into the surrounding district. There, she will encounter strange creatures, mysterious strangers, and uneasy allies.

Features:
– Fear Dark Song’s relentless pursuit to kill you, now with an all-new AI.
– Craft items to prepare for critical life-or-death situations or risk permanent injury.
– Explore the nightmarish district of Sehwa and discover its dark secrets.
– Scavenge resources to survive deadly encounters and afflictions.
– Unlock tools and upgrades to reach previously inaccessible areas.
– Hide to avoid detection and certain death. Pass challenges to conceal your location.
– Featuring vibrant, hand-illustrated in-game visuals and comic strips.

The original game left us with mixed feelings, so we’re hopeful that this sequel will address the flaws that kept it from being a must-play experience. Here’s just a little of what we had to say in our review of The Coma: Recut:

The Coma: Recut is interesting in concept, but flawed in its execution. Mixing survival horror with stealth and visual novel elements provides a unique side-scrolling experience. While the anime art style and slow pace might detract from the horror, along with the main mechanic becoming repetitive instead of scary, there is still enough narrative content to get invested in the twisted tale of Sehwa High.

Will you be checking out this sequel? Have you played the original? Tell us below.