This year will go down in history for being not only the first World Cup with 48 teams on the fields of the United States, Canada and Mexico, but also the year in which Electronic Arts' dominance in the world of soccer video games was shaken. The industry is undergoing an unprecedented transformation, and the result is games that are more varied than ever before. It is no longer a matter of just playing whichever version of EA Sports FC you like best. Now there are four big contenders vying for your time, each with a different strategy and a specific audience in mind. EA Sports FC 26 has shown that it didn't need the FIFA name to remain a moneymaking machine. At its launch in late 2025, Electronic Arts' game ranked number one in sales in 16 of the 17 major European markets, reaffirming its dominance among those looking for a premium, fully licensed experience. HyperMotion V technology has elevated realism in the FC games to the point of resembling a live television broadcast. However, this commercial success is now facing competitors who are not looking to sell you an expensive box, but to conquer the challenges between friends without charging a cent....

Obviously, it has evolved since. It pivoted to video games in the 1970s and thereafter created Donkey Kong, Super Mario Bros., Pokemon, the Game Boy, the Wii, and the Switch. Meanwhile, what has the Eiffel Tower done'...

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang used the company's keynote at Nvidia GTC on Monday to introduce DLSS 5, a new version of the chipmaker's AI graphics tech designed to make video games more realistic while using less compute power. The new DLSS 5 system combines traditional 3D graphics data with generative AI models that can predict and fill in parts of an image, allowing Nvidia's GPUs to produce detailed scenes and lifelike characters without rendering every element from scratch. 'We fused controllable 3D graphics, the ground truth of virtual worlds, the structured data ' with generative AI, probabilistic computing,' Huang said during his keynote speech. 'One of them is completely predictive, the other one is probabilistic yet highly realistic.' Gaming makes up a smaller portion of Nvidia's revenue today than it has historically, though that's the industry that made Nvidia into what it is today. Huang framed DLSS 5's approach as an example of a broader computing shift, suggesting the approach could extend far beyond gaming and even into enterprise computing....

Most of my research is in Chinese religions, and I find it fascinating that popular video games ' like many popular films before them ' draw from the mythologies, cosmologies, unseen powers and heroic narratives found across the world's religious traditions. Recent examples such as 'Black Myth: Wukong' and 'Raji: an Ancient Epic' draw explicitly from mythologies and religious narratives of China and India, respectively, putting the player in direct contest against pantheons of gods. Meanwhile, games such as 'Sid Meier's CIV VI,' where players develop an historical civilization from the Stone Age to Space Age in a quest for global domination, explicitly utilize religion as ways to develop and conquer the world. At the same time, the interactive experience of a video game makes it an especially interesting place to study religion. When your character uses magic, interacts with powerful deities, or even achieves godlike status themselves, the player also shares such experiences on some level as well. Sometimes, viewers' experiences blur the lines between 'real life' and on-screen....