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The New York Times is getting in on the year-end roundup bandwagon. The publication's new Year in Games wraps up stats about which of its daily puzzles and brain-teasers readers played over the course of 2025. People can get their own personalized reports, or just look over the community stats for the Wordle, Connections, Spelling Bee and Strands games. The Year in Games reviews are available on the iOS and Android apps for The New York Times, as well as on a dedicated mobile web page.Annual analysis of all your activities has become a common feature for lots of services. Reports like Spotify Wrapped or the other many entertainment-related ones are usually a fun time, with splashy graphics and high shareability. Uber feels like an odder match.This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/gaming/nyt-games-has-a-year-in-review-thing-now-too-203000878.html?src=rss
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Marketing and Advertising
Behold: Ken Paxton will now demonstrate that broken clocks are indeed right twice a day. The Texas Attorney General is notorious for, well, a very long list of reasons. But in this case, he at least appears to be doing consumers a solid: He sued five television companies for using ad-targeting spyware on their TVs.Texas sued Sony, Samsung, LG, Hisense and TCL for allegedly recording what viewers watch without their consent. The predatory technology, Automated Content Recognition (ACR), identifies the content being played on a device by matching short content fingerprints to a database.ACR is essentially a Shazam for video. Except in this case, its sole purpose is to target your viewing habits to help line advertisers' pockets. "This software can capture screenshots of a user's television display every 500 milliseconds, monitor viewing activity in real time and transmit that information back to the company without the user's knowledge or consent," Paxton's press release says.An LG Ad Solutions website boasts how ACR helps advertisers "target by content viewership, including show, network, app, service or genre." Since it works with anything running on the device, it can identify purchases and subscriptions, track gamers' habits and pinpoint users by region, city or zip code.There should be a setting on your TV to turn it off. But, as Texas' lawsuit against LG notes, TV software often "deceptively guides consumers to activate ACR and buries any explanation of what that means in dense legal jargon that few will read or understand."Paxton's press release emphasized Hisense and TCL's home base of China. "These Chinese ties pose serious concerns about consumer data harvesting and are exacerbated by China's National Security Law, which gives its government the capability to get its hands on US consumer data," the statement reads.This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/cybersecurity/texas-sues-five-tv-manufacturers-over-predatory-ad-targeting-spyware-201500248.html?src=rss
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Marketing and Advertising
Google's at it again, once more insisting that AI is something people need or want more of in their lives. The latest move comes from YouTube Gaming, which announced an open beta for a project called Playables Builder. This allows select YouTube Creators to use a "prototype web app built using Gemini 3" to make bite-sized games, no coding required. YouTube is launching a closed Beta test for Playables Builder, a prototype web app built using Gemini 3 where users create games with short text, video or image prompts. weve partnered with YouTube Creators like @sambucha, @AyChristene, @goharsguide and @Mogswamp to start making pic.twitter.com/1Gx0v4oZFA YouTube Gaming (@YouTubeGaming) December 16, 2025 YouTube was testing the addition of small-scale games to its desktop and mobile platforms back in 2023, then added multiplayer capability to Playables last year. Since AI is appearing all over Google-owned services, today's news probably shouldn't be a surprise. The premise sounds similar to the Disco and GenTabs projects that Google Labs recently announced. They offer an AI layer to web browsing: provide a natural language input, get an interactive widget that does what you asked for. Despite my skeptical attitude toward AI, I can see those tools having some practical applications for search, where the goal is to aggregate whatever data you're looking for into a manageable, easy-to-read interface. But a game is not simple. A good game takes what might be a simple idea and, with finesse and iteration and skill, transforms it into a genuinely fun experience. It's a cute parlor trick that AI assistants can help people to make stuff without technical knowledge, but there's a reason professional game devs work hard to amass all their know-how. Playables Builder is a peak example of misunderstanding what artificial intelligence is best at. Just because a chatbot can make a game doesn't mean anyone will enjoy playing it.This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/ai/youtube-is-letting-creators-make-playable-games-with-a-gemini-3-tool-195500318.html?src=rss
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Marketing and Advertising
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