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Naked and Unafraid to Exercise in Virtual Reality

I can without bashfulness say that I have logged hundreds of hours on Beat Saber as naked as the day I was born. It was neither fetish nor high-concept performance art; it grew from simple need. In the spring of 2018, I was trying to keep a VR startup afloat, navigating a never-ending flurry of emails, Slack messages, video calls, and tweets from the confines of my efficiency in San Mateo, California. Though typically an active person, I’d deluded myself into believing that I just didn’t have the time for…

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The App That Wants You to Treat Self Care Like a Garden

Amber Discko’s descent into a state of emotional turmoil started as a slow trickle. It began around the time Donald Trump won the presidential election in November 2016 and when Discko’s social media and voter registration work for the Hillary Clinton campaign ended. But then, when Trump was inaugurated in January 2017, the emotional levee broke. The extremes of the campaign—working late into the night just to start again at 4 am, day after day—had drained Discko of all their usual enthusiasm and radiance. Discko, who uses they/them pronouns, hustled…

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I Am Not At All Relaxed by Animal Crossing

My house in Animal Crossing: New Horizons looks like the “guys really live in apartments like this” meme. My landscaping looks like the set of Holes. The host of a Netflix gardening show might issue a begrudging nod toward my patchy garden before they trip on a half-buried tire on their way out and stumble into a bramble of unpruned weeds. Widely lauded—including by WIRED—as the perfect pastime for this quarantine moment, Animal Crossing: New Horizons must mean to be relaxing. It has the telltale signs: chibi animals talking in…

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The Resident Evil 3 Remake Seems Doomed to Fail

Playing the Resident Evil 3 remake—which is called, confusingly, Resident Evil 3—is like watching a group of game developers try to rewrite their company's own past. It's fascinating but a bit uncomfortable. The history of the Resident Evil franchise is one of the most heavily reported stories in gaming. How it started as an attempt to re-create a spooky Nintendo game called Sweet Home; how it became rapidly dominant in a new genre that came to be called survival horror; how it had a subsequent identity crisis and went careening…

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E3 2020 Is Canceled Due to Coronavirus

Greetings all, and welcome to Replay, WIRED's rundown of all of the week's big videogame news. Today, we've got quite a few coronavirus-related updates and one very good recommendation of something you can play while you're at home. E3 2020 Is Canceled No surprises here: E3 2020 has been canceled due the coronavirus pandemic. The Entertainment Software Association made the decision last week as many other public gatherings around the world were put on hold in an attempt to slow down the spread of Covid-19. "Following increased and overwhelming concerns…

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Google Is Opening a New Studio to Make Stadia Games

Welcome to Replay, WIRED's rundown of the week's biggest videogame headlines. This week, we've got news about Google Stadia, Riot Games, and some more coronavirus updates. Let's dive in. Google Opens a New Studio to Make Stadia Games First up, some good news for people who actually want things to play on Google Stadia. According to Business Insider reported last weekend, Stadia simply isn't pulling in indies because Google isn't offering the type of incentives, in terms of money or promotion, needed to pull developers away from other platforms. Plus,…

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ILM Used Fortnite Tech to Make The Mandalorians Virtual Sets

George Lucas was dreaming of a Star Wars live-action TV show long before The Mandalorian got off the ground. One of his collaborators at Industrial Light & Magic, Richard Bluff, remembers Lucas talking about it as far back as 2008. There was just one problem: Going to a galaxy far, far away on a TV budget was nearly impossible. “At the time, he felt he was limited in regards to how he was able to tell the story based upon the vast number of locations and worlds we would need…

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The Race to Save Flash Games From Internet Oblivion

A burning meteor is headed for the wide, weird world of online Flash games. Adobe will discontinue support for Flash at the end of 2020, rendering the delightful—and sometimes disturbing—’90s- and aughts-era browser games unplayable. It’s bigger than losing access to classic time-wasters like Desktop Tower Defense and Line Rider. A seminal digital culture is at risk. To stave off annihilation, a small underground movement of digital preservationists is fighting hard to spare the little Flash games from their fate. Ben Latimore, a 26-year-old Australian who goes by the handle…

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Downloads of a Pandemic-Themed Game Surge As Coronavirus News Spreads

Interest in the continued spread of the coronavirus has had an unintended side effect for UK-based Plague Inc. The eight-year-old game—which asks players to shepherd a worldwide pandemic that destroys all of humanity—has seen a spike in popularity in recent weeks, becoming the most-downloaded iPhone app in China on January 21 and in the United States on January 23, ARS TECHNICA This story originally appeared on issue a statement urging players not to rely on the app for information on staying safe from the coronavirus' current spread. "Please remember that…

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