Author: admin

BUILDING YOUR OWN PC comes with unique thrills. Sure, it can be frustrating as all hell—there’s a reason it’s a lot easier to buy a fully cooked PC than go homebrew. If you haven’t had the joy of putting together your own PC, it’s not as simple as just throwing the components in a tower, connecting them, and booting it up. There can be so many compatibility issues you’ve never even thought of, from your processor to your motherboard to your graphics card. Are you going to overclock your processor? Does your system need liquid cooling? Can it even support liquid cooling?

I used to live this geek life on the edge. I’d look for sales on components, swap out graphics cards to get the best performance, stare blankly at my monitor during a BIOS flash, and just hope for the best. My PC was a source of endless frustration, but there was also so much joy when I held my breath, booted things up, and everything just worked.

It’s honestly a lifestyle—one I left behind more than a decade ago. I finally decided that I preferred console gaming because it usually wasn’t much more involved than turning on the console. I was tired of tinkering, of trying to get things to work. I wanted simplicity, and I haven’t regretted it since. Honestly, I haven’t even missed it.

That is, until I got my hands on a Steam Deck. I’ve written about this incredible little piece of technology quite a bit. When I first got it, I didn’t think I’d do much experimenting with it. I was just going to use Steam to catch up on some of the PC games I’d missed.

But then, I saw someone talking about how they’d managed to get Xbox Game Pass Ultimate working on their Steam Deck. And let me tell you, it felt like a beacon in the night. That innocuous little post blew my mind. Suddenly, all I wanted to do was figure out how to access as many different platforms’ worth of games on my Steam Deck as possible.

I have a subscription to Xbox Game Pass Ultimate, thanks to my husband, and I have a PlayStation 5. So I got to Googling. I know next to nothing about Linux, but I knew next to nothing about Windows when I first started building my own PCs, and I made that work.

THE BEST THEORY physicists have for the birth of the universe makes no sense. It goes like this: In the beginning—the very, if not quite veriest, beginning—there’s something called quantum foam. It’s barely there, and can’t even be said to occupy space, because there’s no such thing as space yet. Or time. So even though it’s seething, bubbling, fluctuating, as foam tends to do, it’s not doing so in any kind of this-before-that temporal order. It just is, all at once, indeterminate and undisturbed. Until it isn’t. Something goes pop in precisely the right way, and out of that infinitesimally small pocket of instability, the entire universe bangs bigly into being. Instantly. Like, at a whoosh far exceeding the speed of light.

Impossible, you say? Not exactly. As the Italian particle physicist Guido Tonelli has pointed out, it actually is possible to go faster than light. You simply have to imagine spacetime, and the relativistic limits imposed by it, not quite existing yet! Easy peasy. Besides, that’s not even why the theory makes no sense. It makes no sense for the same reason every creation myth since the dawn of, um, creation makes no sense: There’s no causal explanation. What, that is to say, made it happen in the first place?

Tonelli, in his confidently titled book Genesis: The Story of How Everything Began, calls the “it” that made it happen the inflaton. It’s the mystery thing/field/particle/whatever that jump-starts the engine of cosmic inflation. (They thought it might be the Higgs boson, but it’s not. The true God particle is still out there.) Imagine, Tonelli says, a skier cruising down a mountain, who then stalls a little in a depression on the slope. That depression, the unexpected dip or hiccup in the ordered way of things, is the inflaton-induced disruption in the foam out of which the entire known universe, and all the matter and energy it would ever need to make stars and planets and consciousness and us, suddenly springs. But, again, the same question intrudes: What made the inflaton make the dip?

It makes no sense … until you imagine something else. Don’t imagine a snowy slope; it’s too passive. Imagine, instead, someone sitting at a desk. First, they boot up their computer. This is the quantum-foam stage, the computer existing in a state of suspended anticipation. Then, our desk person mouses over to a file called, oh I don’t know, KnownUniverse.mov, and double-clicks. This is the emergence of the inflaton. It’s the tiny zzzt that launches the program.

In other words, yes, and with sincere apologies to Tonelli and most of his fellow physicists, who hate it when anybody suggests this: The only explanation for life, the universe, and everything that makes any sense, in light of quantum mechanics, in light of observation, in light of light and something faster than light, is that we’re living inside a supercomputer. Is that we’re living, all of us, and always, in a simulation.

THREE THINGS NEED to happen, and probably in this order, for any crackpot idea to take hold of the culture: (1) its nonthreatening introduction to the masses, (2) its legitimization by experts, and (3) overwhelming evidence of its real-world effects. In the case of the so-called simulation hypothesis, you could hardly ask for a neater demonstration.

ON SEPTEMBER 17, a user called teapotuberhacker went to a Grand Theft Auto forum with what they claimed were 90 clips from Rockstar Games’ next big presumed hit, Grand Theft Auto VI. “[It’s] possible I could leak more data soon, GTA 5 and 6 source code and assets, GTA 6 testing build,” they wrote.

The hack was real. The next day, Rockstar confirmed that it had “suffered a network intrusion in which an unauthorized third party illegally downloaded confidential information from our system.” That included early footage from its upcoming game, leaving parent company Take-Two scrambling to get videos posted on platforms like YouTube and Twitter removed as quickly as possible. (Rockstar did not respond to requests for comment.)

Grand Theft Auto’s leak is one of, if not the, biggest leaks to happen in the game industry. The scope of what the hacker managed to steal, from videos to, potentially, GTA V and GTA VI source code—the building blocks that allow developers to uniquely craft their games—is mind-boggling. Yet despite suffering a massive breach, Rockstar Games isn’t alone. This week, a Reddit user posted 43 minutes of beta footage from Blizzard’s upcoming Diablo IV. Earlier this month, news about Ubisoft’s next Assassin’s Creed, Assassin’s Creed Mirage, was outed online ahead of the company’s flashy announcement; a YouTuber has since come forward to confess responsibility for the leak after he broke an embargo. In the past, hackers have targeted prominent developers like Naughty Dog, posting unreleased information about The Last of Us Part II.

In the immediate aftermath of the GTA VI leak, Take-Two’s stock dipped and the company assured investors it had “taken steps to isolate and contain this incident.” But the real impact may not be felt for some time. Content leaks are a development nightmare. Gamemakers WIRED spoke to describe it as a demoralizing, even demotivating incident. “You work for years on a project and then a partially finished version of it is online,” says longtime creative director Alex Hutchinson, whose projects include Assassin’s Creed III and Far Cry 4. “And you are getting endless negative comments about it, which you can’t defend because then you’re just giving oxygen to a bad moment.” And the knock-on effects can be even worse.

Players have already been critical of Grand Theft Auto VI’s leaked build and how the game—still in progress—looks. Much of this is driven by a misunderstanding of how development works, and how games will appear when they’re finished. Consider Uncharted 4: A Thief’s End. On Twitter, Naughty Dog developer Kurt Margenau posted an early build of a car chase featuring hero Nathan Drake driving a jeep down what looks like a 3D graph, road neatly squared, past buildings that could be made of children’s building blocks. “Its goal is to represent the gameplay experience as closely as possible,” he tweeted. “Then iterate.” The video ends with a look at the final version, a glossy city brimming with color.

Leaks, developers say, skew the public perception of the game, imprinting on players that the version they’ll buy is going to be … well, trash. “If you watched a Marvel movie filled with green screens and no special effects, you would have a completely tarnished impression of the final quality, and if you never saw the final film then this would be your permanent impression,” Hutchinson says.