#best lawyers in Seattle for trade secrets

[peopleslawtalk]

🛡️ The Role of Trade Secrets in Startup Growth and Valuation

For startups, innovation is everything. But beyond the buzz of new ideas lies a powerful asset that often determines long-term success: trade secrets. These confidential elements—whether formulas, algorithms, or client databases—can significantly shape a startup’s growth trajectory and company valuation.

🔍 What Is a Trade Secret?

A trade secret is confidential business information that gives your company a competitive edge. It can be a unique sales method, a proprietary process, or even a customer list. As long as it’s not publicly known and efforts are made to protect it, it falls under trade secrets protection.

Maintaining secrecy is critical. If a trade secret becomes public—or falls into the wrong hands—it can lose its value instantly. That’s why many businesses in Washington rely on a trade secrets attorney in Seattle for legal guidance on protecting intellectual assets.

📈 How Trade Secrets Boost Startup Valuation

Trade secrets play a significant role in attracting investors and increasing market value:

Competitive Edge: Proprietary knowledge can set a startup apart in crowded markets.

Investor Trust: A clearly defined intellectual property protection strategy builds confidence among potential backers.

Cost Efficiency: Trade secrets don’t require public filings or renewal fees like patents.

Long-Term Value: A well-guarded secret can retain value indefinitely—making it a key asset during acquisitions or funding rounds.

Startups in Seattle and beyond can benefit from working with an IP law firm in Seattle to secure these valuable assets.

⚖️ Legal Protection: Attorneys and Litigation

Trade secrets aren’t protected automatically—you need legal safeguards. This includes strong internal policies, secure storage systems, and non-disclosure agreements (NDAs) with employees and contractors.

But what happens if your secret is leaked or stolen?

That’s where trade secrets litigation in Seattle comes in. A skilled misappropriation of trade secrets attorney can help your startup pursue legal action for:

Trade secret misappropriation

NDA breach litigation in Seattle

Corporate espionage legal services

If your business faces trade secret theft, an experienced trade secret theft lawyer or business litigation attorney in Washington can help recover damages and stop further misuse.

Whether it’s responding to a breach or proactively setting up legal protections, working with a Seattle lawyer ensures you’re covered under Washington trade secret law.

✅ Final Thoughts

In the fast-paced startup world, ideas alone aren’t enough—protecting intellectual property in Seattle is vital for survival and growth. By treating trade secrets as a core part of your business strategy and working with a trusted trade secret lawyer, you can scale with confidence, knowing your competitive edge is secure.

Bogdanov PLLC offers top-tier Seattle legal services for businesses, helping founders identify, protect, and defend their most valuable trade secrets. Reach out today for smart, proactive counsel from the best lawyers in Seattle for trade secrets.

[rockislandadultreads]

Book Recommendations: Let It Snow!

Best in Snow by David Rosenfelt

Christmas has come early to the town of Paterson, New Jersey, in the form of a snowstorm that dumps two feet of snow on the ground. Lawyer Andy Carpenter likes snow - white Christmas and all that - but it can cause problems for the walks he takes his dogs on every day.

When Andy’s golden retriever, Tara, goes to play in the snow and instead discovers a body, Andy ends up on the phone with the local newspaper editor. The murder victim is Mayor Alex Oliva, who had an infamous relationship with the newspaper. Last year a young reporter published an expose, and Oliva had him fired for libel. Now, the young reporter - and prime suspect - is in need of a lawyer. Andy agrees to take the case, though it’s not looking good this holiday season.

This is the 24th volume in the “Andy Carpenter” series.

Cover of Snow by Jenny Milchman

Waking up one wintry morning in her old farmhouse nestled in the Adirondack Mountains of New York, Nora Hamilton instantly knows that something is wrong. When her fog of sleep clears, she finds her world is suddenly, irretrievably shattered: Her husband, Brendan, has committed suicide.

The first few hours following Nora's devastating discovery pass for her in a blur of numbness and disbelief. Then, a disturbing awareness slowly settles in: Brendan left no note and gave no indication that he was contemplating taking his own life. Why would a rock-solid police officer with unwavering affection for his wife, job, and quaint hometown suddenly choose to end it all? Having spent a lifetime avoiding hard truths, Nora must now start facing them.

Unraveling her late husband's final days, Nora searches for an explanation - but finds a bewildering resistance from Brendan's best friend and partner, his fellow police officers, and his brittle mother. It quickly becomes clear to Nora that she is asking questions no one wants to answer. For beneath the soft cover of snow lies a powerful conspiracy that will stop at nothing to keep its presence unknown... and its darkest secrets hidden.

Dashing Through the Snow by Debbie Macomber

Ashley Davison, a graduate student in California, desperately wants to spend the holidays with her family in Seattle. Dashiell Sutherland, a former army intelligence officer, has a job interview in Seattle and must arrive by December 23. Though frantic to book a last-minute flight out of San Francisco, both are out of luck: Every flight is full, and there's only one rental car available. Ashley and Dash reluctantly decide to share the car, but neither anticipates the wild ride ahead.

At first they drive in silence, but forced into close quarters Ashley and Dash can't help but open up. Not only do they find they have a lot in common, but there's even a spark of romance in the air. Their feelings catch them off guard - never before has either been so excited about a first meeting. But the two are in for more twists and turns along the way as they rescue a lost puppy, run into petty thieves, and even get caught up in a case of mistaken identity. Though Ashley and Dash may never reach Seattle in time for Christmas, the season is still full of surprises - and their greatest wishes may yet come true.

Blood on Snow by Jo Nesbo

This is the story of Olav: an extremely talented “fixer” for one of Oslo’s most powerful crime bosses. But Olav is also an unusually complicated fixer. He has a capacity for love that is as far-reaching as is his gift for murder. He is our straightforward, calm-in-the-face-of-crisis narrator with a storyteller’s hypnotic knack for fantasy. He has an “innate talent for subordination” but running through his veins is a “virus” born of the power over life and death. And while his latest job puts him at the pinnacle of his trade, it may be mutating into his greatest mistake...

This is the first volume in the “Blood on Snow” series. 

[hvilleicehockey-blog]

Affiliate marketing

If you use this image in any way, shape or form, please give credit to: joshmacdonald.net

Tags: internet marketing strategies jobs inc company salary association services definition degree consultant agency forum course bar blog manager tips training los angeles articles analyst affiliate atlanta program ads advertising awards and design an hour a day associates academy advice acronyms assistant technology africa business books basics plan boise blueprint benefits boca raton 2015 models budget best practices for beginners ideas bsg cards topics by roberts zahay certificate channels refer to classes conferences careers campaign coach programs online 2016 quizlet coordinator costs chicago director denver dallas data directory documentary daily tasks job description demographics degrees dictionary dubai dojo direct diploma definicija essentials expert events examples ebooks orlando education group entrepreneur pdf ethics quiz experience issues larson email swipes ezine solo explained dummies firms small lawyers fort lauderdale funnel fiduciaries real estate facts fundamentals franchise florida contractors facebook attorneys newbies from home system gurus guide glossary goals genius growth buy google groups on guyz graphics getting started ranking guru list gold coast guest post guidance houston help how history tx get headlines handbook hashtags make money helpline hub halifax hacks highway headline generator hospitality industry it works hall of fame integrating offline infographic images glassdoor in wellsboro pa internships income information interview questions institute reviews intern statistics icons las vegas the 1990s jacksonville titles outlook journal tampa jokes jargon kenya jakarta pune keywords kings kansas city knjiga kurs kaskus kursus kotler knowledge kent kpi kampanja beograd kongress kursevi kerala kolkata leads lancaster laws lead generation leaders law leadership series lifestyle launches lingo building launch calendar là gì logos learning ltd miami minneapolis magazine michigan mastermind alliance master’s mentor mba metrics masters mlm magicians meetup made easy major methods music ninjas news nj new york newsletter niche near me nashville pricing naics code seo tools nederland notes optimization opportunities courses orange county offers options ca objectives outsourcing ottawa line srl overview herbal products oakville party podcast packages template product sample proposal plr pros professional portland paradigm pittsburgh cons quotes questionnaire question paper research answers qualifications quotations quizzes ask q&a quora quick query resume review resources reddit rich agents report rss feeds roi rochester retirement rates card example specialist software solutions san diego scams seminar systems school designation success secrets seattle sites terms trends tree techniques tutorial tactics textbook trade shows center typically is one-way impersonal university utah uae unimelb uk unit 12 untuk pemula upstart udemy u turizmu updates upwork test canada usa uses using usf twitter uci video vs traditional vocabulary social media virtual network digital e vancouver physical vector tutorials va vikipedija web webinars websites wiki west palm beach wordpress theme work warsaw indiana workshop website what words washington dc without templates ways with warriors xl xmg xiaomi xeo india x xib xing youtube yang efektif yahoo videos your yorkshire bagus you tourism gej yu ve yogyakarta strategy privat enter yourname@yourkeywords done zoom password zaključak zarada zealand zimbabwe zero hero z a-z ebook zaddle zichron zappos zara zion zenergy llc complaints ppt improvement approaches hotels 2012 2013 ebay ecommerce 2014 musicians powerpoint among ghana apple amazon analysis axe implementation practice b2b strategic bristol dell excel effective free startups retailers hotel store games 4th edition download dave chaffey fourth 3rd 5th practise book nonprofit organizations nike & presentation retail restaurants sales travel used agencies australia commerce universities voice actors various viral explain webranx xls singapore chandigarh chennai mumbai hyderabad gurgaon toronto at albany ny austin available amsterdam abroad auckland abu dhabi asia associate bangalore boston buffalo bournemouth birmingham barcelona brisbane belgium brussels bangkok berkshire brighton buckinghamshire bath baltimore calgary charlotte nc cape town cleveland ohio columbus ct cardiff charleston sc cambridge cork california delhi detroit dublin deutschland devon derby ireland durban donegal ncr dehradun edmonton edinburgh egypt europe exeter east midlands essex executive entry level london freshers students freelance college fashion france 17 year olds finance glasgow germany gauteng galway greece gibraltar guildford gloucestershire graduate goa sandton gujarat ga hong kong based hertfordshire hampshire hawaii hull harrogate hiring humberside bhopal indore ahmedabad jaipur nairobi fl johannesburg jeddah japan noida pakistan knoxville tn karachi kelowna kettering wichita ks milton keynes kuwait köln karlsruhe kiel konstanz liverpool leicester leeds loughborough lancashire luxembourg lincolnshire lebanon legit limerick lucknow montreal manchester malaysia milwaukee mn malta melbourne mississauga maryland memphis naukri nyc nottingham no orleans norwich newcastle northampton north northern ontario omaha ne oxford overseas odisha oman timisoara philadelphia philippines phoenix part time pay perth paris portsmouth peterborough plymouth preston prague professor qatar

Posted by JoshMacDonald on 2016-01-17 17:39:56

Tagged: , internet , marketing , business , blogging , seo , affiliate , strategies , jobs , inc , company , salary , association , services , definition , degree , consultant , agency , forum , course , bar , blog , manager , tips , training , los , angeles , articles , analyst , atlanta , program , ads , advertising , awards , design , an , hour , day , associates , academy , advice , acronyms , assistant , technology , africa , books , basics , plan , boise , blueprint , benefits , boca , raton , 2015 , models , budget , best , practices , for , beginners , ideas , bsg , cards , topics , by , roberts , zahay , certificate , channels , refer , classes , conferences , careers

The post Affiliate marketing appeared first on Good Info.

[dinafbrownil]

Pharma Sells States On ‘Netflix Model’ To Wipe Out Hep C. But At What Price?

When a long, black bus bearing the logo of drugmaker AbbVie rolls through Washington state next year, it will promote a new effort to eradicate hepatitis C infections.

The state is paying for the marketing campaign as part of a deal to give AbbVie the exclusive right to treat its citizens who have the potentially deadly liver disease. Armed with its medication, Mavyret, AbbVie beat out rivals Merck and Gilead Sciences in a blind bidding process.

It’s the second time this year that a state has struck a novel deal with a pharmaceutical company to obtain drugs that can cure hepatitis C ― with discounts from a price that came to market at $84,000 for a course of treatment.

The drugmakers are in a race to treat the 2.4 million people in the U.S. with the viral infection. Left untreated, its most chronic form can cause liver damage, including cirrhosis, as well as liver cancer and death. States are weighing the price of curing those infected with hep C using the new drugs against the medical and economic costs of long-term care for those with untreated infections. The state bears the medical expenses of the Medicaid and prison populations as well as public employees and retirees.

The money paid to AbbVie buys a package of services that includes outreach and testing to identify patients as well as the drugs to treat them. But the price and other details of the deal are secret under the Washington state Public Records Act, even though they involve massive commitment of taxpayer dollars.

Email Sign-Up

Subscribe to KHN’s free Morning Briefing.

Sign Up

Please confirm your email address below:

Sign Up

Washington officials said they’re prohibited from releasing details by federal rules that hide drug pricing to protect what companies consider trade secrets. Lawyers for the three pharmaceutical firms that submitted bids vowed to go to court to halt the release of bid documents requested by Kaiser Health News under state public records laws.

Without transparency about the details, however, it is impossible to evaluate whether the spending amounts to smart public policy or a boondoggle that primarily benefits manufacturers hoping to lock down payments of perhaps $10,000 per patient for drugs from Medicaid. The same drugs from the same manufacturers can cost less than $100 per course of treatment in other parts of the world.

The secrecy troubles Dr. John Scott, medical director of the University of Washington’s Hepatitis and Liver Clinic at Harborview Medical Center in Seattle, which treats most of the 65,000 hepatitis C patients in the state ― even as he welcomes the curative drugs and wider access to treatment.

“I absolutely support greater transparency,” Scott said. “I think the public needs to know how much these things cost.”

Many people don’t realize that such obscurity is “baked into the system,” said Pam Curtis, director of the Center for Evidence-Based Policy at Oregon Health & Science University.

“That definitely hamstrings our ability to weigh the facts in front of us,” she said. “You want policy to be driven by the highest-quality evidence.”

Other states are eyeing the experiments “with a healthy skepticism but a high level of interest,” said Jennifer Reck, project director for the National Academy for State Health Policy.

In Washington, officials would describe the terms of the AbbVie contract only in the broadest terms. After federal rebates, the state spent about $80.4 million in 2018 on the drugs, known as direct-acting antivirals, to treat more than 3,300 patients, figures show.

Under the new contract, officials expect to spend about the same amount of money per year, while treating twice as many patients, said Dr. Judy Zerzan, chief medical officer for the Washington State Health Care Authority.

That works out to more than $321 million to treat about 30,000 patients over four years, with options for two-year extensions.

But that would be an improvement over the nearly $387 million state officials have spent since 2014 to treat just 10,377 people, according to state records. That works out to an average cost of $37,259 apiece, though actual fees vary by program.

Washington’s request for proposals included a provision that other states could join its program in the future ― also a potential benefit to AbbVie.

“There’s probably an alignment of interests all the way around here,” said Alan Carr, a senior analyst focusing on biotechnology with the Wall Street firm Needham & Co.

Another reason it’s a race for the drugmakers: The overall market for hepatitis C drugs has been “falling fast,” as more patients are treated and cured, Carr said.

“The companies are trying to find a way to ensure the remaining patients use their drug,” Carr said. “[They] have a lot less leverage than they once had, and that’s why they’re willing to do these deals.”

Many patients with hepatitis C have no symptoms and are silent carriers. Only a fraction of people with the virus will develop the serious consequence of the disease, liver failure or cancer. Still, most public health experts urge screening ― and treatment.

The new contracts ― sometimes referred to as “the Netflix model” because they mimic that media-streaming service ― call for capped costs or flat-rate subscriptions for cheap access to the drugs.

But the plan is much broader than creating a drug discount for the state, said Michael Staff, AbbVie’s vice president of U.S. market access.

“Simply stating you want to eradicate hepatitis C without a very detailed plan is probably not going to be effective,” he said. AbbVie’s contract includes payments for services that include outreach, such as the bus, to identify infected patients.

In Washington, the arrangement would treat about half of those in the state infected with hepatitis C, but the average per-patient cost would be about 40% less than before the deal, Zerzan said.

In Louisiana, the first state to announce a flat-rate hepatitis C drug agreement, Asegua, a subsidiary of Gilead, will provide an unlimited amount of its drug, Epclusa, for a set price — roughly $58 million a year for five years, or up to $290 million. Louisiana plans to treat about 31,000 of 39,000 Medicaid patients and prisoners believed to have the disease. Costs could drop to less than $10,000 per patient, according to the contract, which the state health agency made available after a public records request.

The flat-rate concept was put forward by Dr. Peter Bach, director of Memorial Sloan Kettering’s Center for Health Policy and Outcomes, and his colleagues. Australia implemented a similar arrangement in its national health plan. England’s National Health Service has one as well.

In Egypt, which has the highest hepatitis C rate in the world, negotiations and generic pricing have reduced costs to $84 for a course of treatment.

U.S. drugmakers likely wouldn’t have considered such a plan when they first introduced their medications. Gilead’s Sovaldi, the first antiviral for hepatitis C, launched at $84,000 for a course of treatment; the second, Harvoni, started at $94,500. Three years later, AbbVie introduced Mavyret at $26,400.

Now, Bach said, drugmakers are staring down a sharp decline of their once-hot market.

“They were losing market share and price per share,” Bach said. “If payers [like state Medicaid programs] can give them the same revenue with much more certainty, they’ll prefer that to uncertainty over what’s happening now.”

Hepatitis C poses dilemmas for public health officials and drugmakers alike.

Louisiana has been under pressure from the American Civil Liberties Union regarding prisoners who said they were denied effective hepatitis C treatment. And Washington state’s Department of Corrections faces at least one lawsuit from a prisoner who said he was denied timely care for his disease.

In Washington, Gov. Jay Inslee directed health officials last year to negotiate the best deal to eliminate hepatitis C in the state by 2030, which mirrors goals of global health agencies.

The federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention warned last month that new hepatitis C infections are on the rise ― 44,300 in 2017, the seventh consecutive annual increase. New cases of hepatitis C have spiked among adults in their 20s and 30s, largely because of the opioid epidemic, according to the CDC.

Between 15% and 25% of people with acute hepatitis C will clear the infection on their own; the rest become chronically infected with the virus.

Hundreds of thousands of people have been treated ― and cured ― since the drugs were introduced early this decade. Deaths from hepatitis C fell from almost 20,000 in 2014 to a little more than 17,000 in 2017, which could be an effect of the new drugs.

“It’s just been transformational,” said Scott, of the University of Washington’s Hepatitis and Liver Clinic. Previous treatments for hepatitis C had to be taken for a year, had toxic side effects and helped only 40% of patients, he added.

The Center for Evidence-Based Policy has advised Washington state in the effort to eradicate hep C, Curtis said. She noted that the arrangements Washington and Louisiana struck share an overall goal of reining in runaway drug prices, especially in state-run Medicaid programs, which can’t shift costs like the commercial market and would be forced instead to cut services.

“States are already struggling,” Curtis said. “A larger and larger part of their budget is being eaten up by these new high-cost drugs.”

“This is not a solution,” she said, “but it’s a step in the right direction.”

from Updates By Dina https://khn.org/news/pharma-sells-states-on-netflix-model-to-wipe-out-hep-c-but-at-what-price/

[itsiotrecords-blog]

http://ift.tt/2qXBG8p

Time travel has long captured the imagination of people worldwide. The ability to move between certain points in time is an interesting concept. Usually, it is believed that a time machine is necessary if one wants to travel through space and time. There have been many stories of time machines being built and used for the purpose of time travel. However, there are no legitimate sources that would confirm that an actual time machine has ever been successfully built. While time machines are often mentioned when talking about time travel, some say that accidental time travel is also not unusual. Accidental time travel usually involves time slips and moving time portals. People who have supposedly experienced accidental time slips describe their shock at witnessing completely different surroundings than the ones they’re used to. The biggest fear concerning accidental time slips is that one may not be able to return to the time and place he or she is originally from and will end up stuck in the past or the future forever. Still others claim that the government has figured out time travel and is now carrying experiments related to teleportation. Of course, since time travel would most certainly freak some people out, the government must keep this revelation under wraps. Many people claim to have experienced time travel. Their stories are curious and not always believable but they do make us wonder nonetheless. There are also legends and stories describing people who have come from non-existent countries, speaking non-existent languages. They too could be evidence of time travel.

#1 Andrew Basiago Claims He Participated In A Secret Government Project Testing Time Travel Andrew Basiago is a Seattle lawyer who in 2016 ran for president as an independent. But he’s not famous for his skills as a lawyer or for being an exceptional presidential candidate. He’s famous for his claims of travelling through time. According to Basiago, between the time he was 7 and 12, he was enrolled in a secret government project known as “Project Pegasus”. “Project Pegasus” experimented with teleportation and time travel under the Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency. Basiago claimed that both children and adults were trained. Children, however, were seen as having an advantage over adults because they were quicker to adapt to the hardship of moving between the past, present and future. Basiago supposedly experienced 8 different time travel technologies but he mostly used a teleporter that was made based on papers found in Nikola Tesla’s apartment.

#2 Al Bielek Lived In The Future For 2 Years Al Bielek was a man who was supposedly recruited into the Montauk Project. The Montauk Project was a number of secret United States government projects conducted at Montauk Air Force Station on Montauk, Long Island. The purpose behind the project was to supposedly develop psychological warfare techniques and exotic research such as time travel. In the 1980s Bielek participated in a number of time travel experiments. He claims that during these experiments he traveled to Mars and to other planets to get Light and Dark energy, as well as to a research station in 100,000 BC, and the year 6037. Somehow, Bielek’s memories were suppressed but in 1988, after Bielek saw the movie The Philadelphia Experiment, more and more of his memories regarding time travel began to return. He realized that he had also spent 2 years in the future 2749. According to Bielek, by then, the third world war had occurred and there was no government. Instead, the world was run by a Synthetic Intelligence Computer System. Floating cities was a reality and the structure of society was completely socialistic.

#3 Andrew Carlssin – The Insider Trader From The Future With No Prior Record Of His Existence The story of Andrew Carlssin is a curious one. According to the Weekly World News, a man named Andrew Carlssin was arrested for insider trading: he had invested $800 in businesses and in just 2 weeks made $350 million return. It was believed that he had illegally used insider information to gain his wealth. However, when Carlssin was questioned he claimed that he had traveled back in time from the year 2256 and thus had knowledge of future stocks. Of course, no one believed his crazy story. But when he was released on bail, he suddenly disappeared. Rumor had it that he went back to the future. The really interesting thing is that when Carlssin was questioned he correctly predicted the date of the US invasion of Iraq. Plus, no record of him existed before 2002.

#4 John Titor Traveling To 1975 To Get Himself An Old IBM Computer With A Pit-Stop To 2000 In 2000, the internet community was shook to the core when a man named John Titor began posting on various internet platforms, claiming he was a time traveler. His first post said: “Greetings. I am a time traveler from the year 2036. I am on my way home after getting an IBM 5100 computer system from the year 1975.” People immediately began asking questions and John Titor answered them all. He even posted a picture of his time travel machine. John Titor was active between November 2000 and March 2001. During that time, he answered many questions online and was even interviewed on a national talk show. John Titor said that he was really time traveling to 1975 but that he had stopped by in 2000 for personal reasons. Titor revealed that he was a member of a military unit tasked to go back in time and retrieve various items that could help society get back on its feet. An internet cult grew around John Titor. However, as with most time travellers, one day he simply disappeared.

#5 A Man From A Country That Doesn’t Exist In 1954, a man was trying to get through customs at Haneda Airport in Tokyo. But things were not going smoothly for him. In fact, he had quite some trouble with the customs agents. The problem? He was insisting that he was from a country that did not exist. And he had the passport and stamps to prove it. His passport said that he was from a country named Taured. According to the man, Taured was between France and Spain. Exasperated, the officials pulled out a map and asked if the man meant to say he was from Andorra. The man, quite angry by now, said that the location they were pointing out was correct but the name of the country was wrong. According to him, Taured had existed for at least 1,000 years. Unsure of what to do, the officials gave the man a hotel room for the night. Armed guards were posted outside his room and his passport was stored in the security office in the airport. But the next day, both the man and the passport had vanished.

#6 Space Barbie Is A Time Traveling Alien Sent To Teach Us To Be Demi-Gods Valeria Lukyanova is best known as “Human Barbie”. But is she really human? In 2013, Vice documentary Lukyanova claimed that she is “not a real girl at all, but a time-traveling spiritual guru whose purpose is to save the world from the clutches of superficiality and negative energy.” In other words, she came to Earth to make people realize that they must move on from being “human consumers” to being “human demi-gods”. And according to her, her unusual appearance only makes humans more inclined to hear her message. Lukyanova has since been dubbed as “Space Barbie”. She now teaches seminars on meditation and out-of-body travel. After all, Lukyanova claims to have the ability to travel around the world and into the past and the future. She also speaks to the aliens.

#7 Håkan Nordkvist Met His Future Self Hakan Nordkvist is another man who claims he has traveled through time. On the day that he supposedly time traveled, Nordkvist came home after work, walked into the kitchen and saw water on the floor. Thinking the water came from a pipe under the sink he got his tools and tried to reach the pipe. However, the pipe was too far inside the cupboard and so Nordkvist had to keep crawling further and further inside the cupboard. Suddenly, Nordkvist had somehow crawled to the other side of the cupboard where he met his future self – a 70 year old man. The two talked, compared their matching tattoos and bonded. Since Nordkvist knew that no one would believe his time travel, he filmed the whole incident on his phone. However, sceptics claim that Nordkvist’s story was an advertising campaign for an insurance company to promote the benefits of pension plans.

#8 J. Bernard Hutton And Joachim Brandt Got Caught In The Middle Of A Raid In 1932, a newspaper reporter named J. Bernard Hutton and photographer Joachim Brandt were on an assignment to do a feature story on the Hamburg shipyard located in Germany. The pair drove down to the shipyard where they conducted a couple of interviews and snapped a few pictures. As they were about to leave, they heard the sound of aircraft engines. They looked up and were shocked to see the sky filled with warplanes which soon began bombing the place. Chaos ensued. Hutton and Brandt rushed to the gate of the complex and asked the security guy if they could help with anything. They were told to leave immediately. They did just that. But as they were driving back to Hamburg, they could not get rid of a strange sensation. During the attack in the shipyard, the sky was dark and now it was clear again. They stopped the car to glance back at the shipyard but were shocked to see no smoke or damaged buildings. Back in the office, they checked the film as Brandt had continued to shoot photographs even during the attack. But the pictures had no evidence of bombing. In 1943, Hutton moved to London. That same year he noticed a story in the paper detailing the successful raid carried out by a Royal Air Force squadron on the Hamburg shipyard.

#9 L.C. And Charlie And The Woman In The Vintage Car According to an article published in Strange magazine in 1988, a man who called himself L.C. and his business associate, Charlie, had just finished eating lunch in a small American town when they decided to hit the road. It was 1969. They were driving north along Highway 167. The highway was empty except for one car ahead of them, which was driving very slowly. As L.C. and Charlie caught up with the car, they noticed that it was an old-fashioned car that was nonetheless in mint condition. Its license plate said “1940” on it. The car was driven by a young woman dressed in vintage clothes and there was a child beside her. The woman was driving very slowly and seemed perturbed, looking back and forth of her in fear. L.C. and Charlie got her attention and asked if she needed help. She nodded yes, and they told her to pull over. The woman began to pull over and Charlie and L.C. began to pass her out so they could pull over in front of her. However, as they turned around, the old car had vanished. But the odd thing is, it couldn’t have gone down any side road because the car was on a highway.

#10 Sir Victor Goddard Flew His Plane Into The Future According to J. H. Brennan, author of the book Time Travel: A New Perspective in 1935 Air-Marshal Sir Victor Goddard accidentally flew into a parallel universe. At the time, he was still a Wing Commander and was tasked with inspecting an inactive airbase located in Drem, near Edinburgh. Sir Goddard found the airbase to be in poor condition with cattle grazing on the grass. On his way back home, the weather turned rough and he decided to fly back to the airbase and wait out the storm. On his way back to the airbase however, the weather suddenly turned good again. But that was not all. On approaching the airbase he noticed that it was in excellent condition and there were even mechanics wearing blue overalls working on the yellow planes that were parked on the runway. It was strange because the sudden renovation of the airbase was impossible. Furthermore, mechanics at the time wore khaki uniforms and Air Force planes were silver, not yellow. Years later, during WWII, Sir Victor Goddard was near Drem again. And he saw exactly what he had seen in 1935. It is believed that back in 1935 Sir Victor Goddard traveled to the future.

#11 Did Charlotte Anne Moberly And Eleanor Jourdain See Marie Antoinette? In 1901, Charlotte Anne Moberly and Eleanor Jourdain went to visit the Palace of Versailles in France. They didn’t find the palace to be that impressive and decided to end their tour by walking to the Petit Trianon through the gardens. They soon learned that the gardens were actually closed to the public and so Moberly and Jourdain decided to explore the grounds further. However, they got lost and began noticing strange things. For example, they spotted officials in cornered hats and an old plough and farmhouse. A man suffering from smallpox showed them the way to the Petit Trianon. Finally reaching the gardens in front of the palace, Moberly noticed a young, fair woman sketching on the grass. At first Moberly thought she was a tourist but her dress appeared old-fashioned and Moberly believed that she was in fact, Marie Antoinette. The two women soon went back to the palace and joined a group of visitors. The surroundings had changed completely and it is believed that the two women had entered a time slip.

#12 Father Pellegrino Ernetti Invented A Device To View Past Events Pellegrino Ernetti was an Italian Roman Catholic Benedictine monk who claimed that he invented the “Chronovisor”. A chronovisor is supposedly a time viewer that works like a TV and allows a person to view past events. Father Ernetti claimed that with the help of his chronovisor he visited Ancient Rome, viewed Ancient Greek theaters and even listened to a speech given by Napoleon. Father Ernetti also claimed that he saw Christ being crucified and even offered “proof” in the form of a photograph. It turned out that the photograph was of a famous woodcarving of Christ from a nearby museum. And on his deathbed, Father Ernetti confessed that he had made the whole thing up. However, some people believe that Ernetti’s confession was forced and that to this day the Vatican uses the chronovisor.

#13 The Green Children Of Woolpit The legend of the green children of Woolpit tells the story of two children who appeared in the village of Woolpit in Suffolk, England in the 12th century. The children, brother and sister, were almost completely normal. Almost. The weird thing about them was their green skin and their incomprehensible language. Also, they would eat only raw broad beans. With time, the two children learned how to eat other food and most importantly, lost their green pallor. Both the boy and the girl were baptized but the boy was of ill health and soon died. The girl adjusted to her surrounding although she was considered a bit loose in her moral conduct. When she learned how to speak English, the girl confessed that she and her brother came from Saint Martin’s Land, a secret world inhabited by green people.

#14 Jophar Vorin Came From A Parallel Universe? In 1851, a man named Jophar Vorin was found wandering aimlessly around the German village Frankfurt-an-der Oder. Vorin spoke broken German and claimed that he was from a place called “Laxaria”, located on the continent of“Sakria”. Vorin said that Sakria is separated from Europe by a vast ocean. Vorin claimed that he could speak “Laxarian” and “Abramian”. Of course, the officials were rather puzzled since no such place or languages exist. The man also claimed that he is a Christian by religion but that in his country it is called “Ispatian”. Vorin’s reason for leaving Laxaria was simple: he was on a journey to find his long lost brother. But on his voyage he suffered a shipwreck and somehow ended up in Germany. He could not trace his route on any map or globe and claimed that the earth was divided into 5 continents: Sakria, Aflar, Astar, Auslar and Euplar.

#15 Dr. EG Moon – Shot Into The 19th Century And Shot Back In Seconds In 1935, a physician named Dr. EG Moon was visiting his patient Lord Carson in Thanet. Dr. Moon talked to Lord Carson and gave the nurse clear instructions on the medicine that Lord Carson was to take. When Dr. Moon left the house, however, he noticed that his car was missing from the driveway. But it wasn’t only his car that was missing. He had parked the car beside a large yew hedge and now the hedge was missing too. Plus, a once paved driveway from the highway was now just a muddy track. Suddenly, Dr. Moon noticed that a man was approaching him. The man was dressed in old fashioned clothes – he wore a cape and a top hat and he looked like he would have been right at home in the 19th century. Surprisingly, Dr. Moon was not at all perturbed by what he was seeing or by his missing car. Still preoccupied with his patient, he turned back towards the house. He did glance back at the strange scene one more time however. But as if by magic, his car and the yew hedge was back, and the strange man was missing.

Source: TheRichest

[symbianosgames]

The following blog post, unless otherwise noted, was written by a member of Gamasutra’s community. The thoughts and opinions expressed are those of the writer and not Gamasutra or its parent company.

[Video Game Deep Cuts is a weekly newsletter from curator/video game industry veteran Simon Carless, rounding up the best longread & standout articles & videos about games, every weekend. This week's highlights include the history of Nolan Bushnell's Chuck E Cheese arcade restaurants, the backstory of Fallen London, and lots more.

Just a quick update this week, because I have to pop out of town for the weekend, but a small anecdote. I was consulting a very nice lawyer on something this week, and everything went great.

But on the way out - he knows I work around games - he said 'Just one thing - how do I get a NES Classic?'. Sigh - supply and demand fail on the highest scale, there. :P

- Simon, curator.]

-------------------

Game Freak Is More Than Just A Pokémon Developer (Brian Ashcraft / Kotaku) "Game Freak is best known for one thing: Pokémon. But while they created the iconic franchise, Game Freak isn’t afraid to let its developers get their sea legs making non-Pocket Monster games on non-Nintendo hardware. That’s why, in the past few years, Game Freak has released a number of totally original titles on platforms you might not expect."

Fostering VR teamwork in 4-player Star Trek Bridge Crew (Phil Hornshaw / Gamasutra) "As a Star Trek fan, it’s hard not to get excited about the chance to slip on a virtual reality headset and find yourself manning a station on the bridge of a starship. That’s what Star Trek Bridge Crew offers players, at least at first."

Clark Tank: Steam trading card changes, Steam Prophet, and Dead Cells! (Ryan Clark / YouTube) "Every second Friday at 1pm Pacific time we stay on top of the latest game industry trends by examining the Steam top 50, scrutinizing the latest Kickstarted games, and by playing the most prominent recent releases. Huge thanks to Ed Freitas taking the original stream and editing it down to create this video! [SIMON'S NOTE: thanks to Ed & Ryan for switching to the most recent streams for the Twitch to YouTube concatenated versions!]"

The Hunger Artists | Little Nightmares (Zach Budgor / Heterotopias) "Svankmajer was on my mind as I played Tarsier’s Little Nightmares, a macabre platformer about Six, a young girl making her way through the knotted bowels of a steamship called the Maw."

Failure to Fame: How Dishonored Saved Arkane Studios (GameSpot / YouTube) "In part 1 of a 3-part series, Arkane discusses their struggles to find success for 12 years, how Dishonored propelled them into the limelight, and helped revive immersive sim RPGs. [SIMON'S NOTE: Also see Part 2 & Part 3 of a v.neat series.]"

PlayStation U.S. boss reflects on birth and rebirth of PlayStation (Brian Crecente / Polygon) "In 2014, riding high on the successful launch of PlayStation 4 and a surprisingly positive, surprisingly unanimous reaction to its E3 showcase the year before, Sony made an unexpected announcement. Jack Tretton, the president and CEO of Sony Computer Entertainment of America and in many ways the face of that success, was stepping down."

Racing against collector creep (Jeremy Parish / Retronauts) "Contrary to many recent alarmist reports I’ve seen recently, Tokyo’s retro game stores aren’t completely a desolate wasteland of empty shelves. A few spots in nerd destination Akihabara definitely do have a sort of post-apocalyptic feel to them, but that really only holds true for the the heavily trafficked ones that everyone picks over… primarily Super Potato, and to a lesser degree the Mandarake Galaxy shop in Nakano."

The Casual (but Regal) Swipe: Creating Game Mechanics in Reigns (Francois Alliot / GDC / YouTube) "In this GDC 2017 session, Nerial developer Francois Alliot explains how the Reigns development team gave themselves a set of constraints defined by the swipe-based gameplay they were exploring to help create the tone they wanted to give to the game."

Robots, Pizza, And Sensory Overload: The Chuck E. Cheese Origin Story (Benj Edwards / Fast Company) "In May 1977, a new pizza place opened for business in San Jose, California. At the time, calling it “unique” might have been an understatement. The brainchild of Atari cofounder Nolan Bushnell - and, initially, an arm of that company - it featured entertainment provided by a cast of robotic characters led by a giant cigar-smoking rat with a bowler, buck teeth, and a Jersey accent."

The Complete, Untold History of Halo (Steve Haske / Waypoint) "Somewhat ironically, Halo began from a strategic position, rather than being mapped from the outset as a shooter. The project evolved spiritually as a kind of outcropping from the clotted battlefields of Bungie’s 1997 tactical game Myth, trading a Braveheart aesthetic for more of a Starship Troopers vibe, and then rendering everything in anthill 3D."

Design Q&A: Crafting the heroes of Blizzard's Heroes of the Storm (Bryant Francis / Gamasutra) "We wanted to learn a little more about how Heroes of the Storm tweaks and rebalances characters from other franchises and genres. Luckily, Kent-Erik Hagman, lead hero designer on the game, was willing to talk us through the process of conceptualizing, designing, and refining three heroes that show how Blizzard has put its own stamp on the MOBA genre."

Remodeling The Labyrinth (Jeremy Antley / First Person Scholar) "In October and November of 2010, thousands of copies of GMTs Labyrinth: The War on Terror, 2001-? made their way from warehouses in California to distributors and customers around the world. Focusing on the contemporary conflict known as the Global War on Terror, Labyrinth stood in contrast to standard historical fare offered to commercial wargame enthusiasts: conflicts in which dozens, if not hundreds, of years spanned the gulf between player and subject."

Finding Duskers: Innovation Through Better Design Pillars (Tim Keenan / GDC / YouTube) "In this 2017 GDC talk, Duskers creator Tim Keenan explains how his development process focused on building emotional states rather than features, refining the game's vision through experimentation, and building a clear player fantasy."

Internet Trends 2017 (Mary Meeker / Kleiner Perkins / CODE Conference) "[SIMON'S NOTE: this gigantic 355 page .PPT is awaited every year for the depth of its data analysis, and it's interesting this year that there's a big chunk about video games, starting at Slide 80. Some interesting data, some interesting - if perhaps debatable - comparisons of game features and tech innovations, and lots more!]

The Story of Runic Games | A Gameumentary Short Doc (Gameumentary / YouTube) "Gameumentary presents our debut short documentary, The Story of Runic Games. For the past few months, we've been working hard on this video, from our initial pre-production meetings last year, to our principal photography out in Seattle this past March, to the editing and tweaking that we've done just this past week--we've put everything we have into this short-doc."

Analysis: The Consequences of Reducing the Skill Gap (Core-A-Gaming / YouTube) "My best attempt at explaining what's going on with Street Fighter V's direction."

Breaking Out of Prey’s Glass Box (Chris Priestman / Bullet Points Monthly) "Break through the glass—this is Prey’s first lesson. To escape the counterfeit reproduction of Morgan Yu’s apartment you must introduce a wrench to the windows. The glass shatters on impact to leave an irregular shape, cut in jagged lines, tearing a hole into the otherwise convincing simulation of a city held within the windows."

Overwatch’s loot box system is Blizzard’s true masterpiece (Nick Statt / The Verge) "More than anything, the anniversary event illustrates why Blizzard’s business model for Overwatch is such a successful departure for multiplayer shooters — and how it could become the gold standard going forward."

The Killer Groove: The Shadow AI of Killer Instinct (AI & Games / YouTube) "In this video we take a look at the Shadow AI mode released in season 2 of the 2013 Killer Instinct reboot. The shadow system is capable of replicating a players performance in a non-player character after only three matches in the shadow dojo. We take a look at how this system records and acts upon data, but also the challenges faced in creating fighting game AI."

'Fallen London' and the secret to writing an infinite gothic game (Jessica Conditt / Engadget) "Writing a video game is nothing like penning a novel. But writing a never-ending, nonlinear, text-driven video game about a hellish alternate London stuffed with gothic intrigue and nearly a decade of backstory? That's a different beast altogether."

-------------------

[REMINDER: you can sign up to receive this newsletter every weekend at http://ift.tt/2dUXrva we crosspost to Gamasutra later on Sunday, but get it first via newsletter! Story tips and comments can be emailed to vgdeepcuts@simoncarless.com. MINI-DISCLOSURE: Simon is one of the organizers of GDC and Gamasutra, so you may sometimes see links from those entities in his picks. Or not!]

[deniscollins]

Loans ‘Designed to Fail’: States Say Navient Preyed on Students

What would you do if you were a Sallie Mae loan officer and your manager told you to make private loans to students with poor credit attending schools with high dropout rates because these loans would be used as a tool to build relationships with schools so that the company could make more federal loans to their students that come with a built-in safety net: If a borrower defaulted, the government would step in and reimburse the lender for most of its losses: (1) Issue the loans, (2) refuse to, and/or (3) inform federal authorities? Why? What are the ethics underlying your decision?

Ashley Hardin dreamed of being a professional photographer — glamorous shoots, perhaps some exotic travel. So in 2006, she enrolled in the Brooks Institute of Photography and borrowed more than $150,000 to pay for what the school described as a pathway into an industry clamoring for its graduates.

“Brooks was advertised as the most prestigious photography school on the West Coast,” Ms. Hardin said. “I wanted to learn from the best of the best.”

Ms. Hardin did not realize that she had taken out high-risk private loans in pursuit of a low-paying career. But her lender, SLM Corporation, better known as Sallie Mae, knew all of that, government lawyers say — and made the loans anyway.

In recent months, the student loan giant Navient, which was spun off from Sallie Mae in 2014 and retained nearly all of the company’s loan portfolio, has come under fire for aggressive and sloppy loan collection practices, which led to a set of government lawsuits filed in January. But those accusations have overshadowed broader claims, detailed in two state lawsuits filed by the attorneys general in Illinois and Washington, that Sallie Mae engaged in predatory lending, extending billions of dollars in private loans to students like Ms. Hardin that never should have been made in the first place.

“These loans were designed to fail,” said Shannon Smith, chief of the consumer protection division at the Washington State attorney general’s office.

New details unsealed last month in the state lawsuits against Navient shed light on how Sallie Mae used private subprime loans — some of which it expected to default at rates as high as 92 percent — as a tool to build its business relationships with colleges and universities across the country. From the outset, the lender knew that many borrowers would be unable to repay, government lawyers say, but it still made the loans, ensnaring students in debt traps that have dogged them for more than a decade.

While these risky loans were a bad deal for students, they were a boon for Sallie Mae. The private loans were — as Sallie Mae itself put it — a “baited hook” that the lender used to reel in more federally guaranteed loans, according to an internal strategy memo cited in the Illinois lawsuit.

The attorneys general in Illinois and Washington — backed by a coalition of those in 27 other states, who participated in a three-year investigation of student lending abuses — want those private loans forgiven.

In a pair of cases that could affect hundreds of thousands of borrowers, they have sued Navient. The lawsuits cover private subprime loans made from 2000 to 2009.

These cases have parallels to the mortgage crisis that helped drive the American economy into recession, both in scope — borrowers in the United States owe $1.4 trillion on student loans — and in the details of the misdeeds claimed. Working together, the lenders and colleges were preying on a vital part of the American dream, the government lawyers say: the belief that higher education can help lift people toward a prosperous future.

That was Ms. Hardin’s goal. Today, she is a 33-year-old waitress in Seattle who still owes $150,000 in student loans and pays $1,395 a month, more than her monthly rent, to Navient. If the attorneys general succeed, a chunk of her debt could be erased.

Navient, which is based in Wilmington, Del., has denied any wrongdoing and is fighting the lawsuits. It does not originate any loans itself, but when it split off from Sallie Mae, it kept most of Sallie Mae’s existing loans. It collects payments from some 12 million people — about one in four student loan borrowers.

“We have a proven track record of helping millions of Americans access and achieve the benefits of higher education,” said Patricia Nash Christel, a Navient spokeswoman.

Sallie Mae said in a statement that Navient “has accepted responsibility for all costs, expenses, losses and remediation arising from this matter.”

‘Lose a Little More’

Perhaps more than any other company, Sallie Mae is synonymous in America with student loans — and, in the years after the lending boom, crushing student debt.

It got its start more than 30 years ago as a government-sponsored enterprise, collecting payments on loans that were backed by a federal guarantee. By the mid-2000s, Sallie Mae had become a for-profit, publicly traded company no longer tied to the government, although it still made most of its money by originating federally guaranteed student loans.

But the company also had a sideline in private loans. Those came with higher interest rates and fewer protections for borrowers than the federal loans. And if the borrowers stopped paying, Sallie Mae was stuck with the loss.

Private loans were often profitable for the company, but a portion of them — the riskiest part of Sallie Mae’s portfolio — were not. The company made subprime loans to students who would not otherwise qualify, including borrowers with poor credit who took out loans to attend schools with high dropout rates.

Those subprime loans were a bargaining chip, the government lawyers said, a tool Sallie Mae used to build relationships with schools so that the company could make more federal loans to their students. The federal loans were the real prize, because they came with a built-in safety net: If a borrower defaulted, the government would step in and reimburse the lender for most of its losses.

Sallie Mae could afford to absorb the losses from its private loan business as, essentially, a marketing cost of snagging more lucrative loans. In a 2007 internal note, quoted in Illinois’s lawsuit, Sallie Mae described its strategy of using subprime loans to “win school deals and secure F.F.E.L.P. and standard private volume,” a reference to the Federal Family Education Loan program that generated most of the company’s profits.

Defaults on one set of subprime loan products were between 50 and 92 percent every year from 2000 to 2007, according to Illinois’s lawsuit. Students did not know about the risk, the state said in its lawsuit, but “this fact was no secret to Sallie Mae.”

Those defaults did not discourage Sallie Mae, the lawsuits show. From 2000 to 2006, Sallie Mae increased the number of borrowers with one kind of troubled loan to 43,000 from 165, an increase of some 26,000 percent.

Navient “systematically deterred” its customers from enrolling in income-based plans by instead steering them toward other options that were simpler for the company, according to the lawsuits.

From 2000 to 2009, Navient’s predecessor company, Sallie Mae, from which it split off in 2014, made private, subprime loans to borrowers it knew were likely to default, state attorneys general from Illinois and Washington said.

Sallie Mae was not the only one with an incentive. The schools themselves often had a reason to push private loans.

Under Education Department rules, no more than 90 percent of a school’s tuition payments can come from federal funding. That means at least 10 percent must come from private sources. At for-profit schools, which rely heavily on federal lending, private loans — even ones to borrowers likely to default — were crucial for staying under the threshold.

Some schools made deals with Sallie Mae to subsidize its losses, regulatory filings show. The owner of the Brooks Institute of Photography, Career Education Corporation, once one of the largest for-profit chains in the country, had a typical arrangement: From 2002 to 2006, it agreed to repay 20 percent of Sallie Mae’s losses. In 2007, it increased its subsidy to 25 percent.

Early on, Career Education treated loan losses as a routine business expense. On an earnings call in August 2006 — the same month that Ms. Hardin began her studies — an analyst suggested that the company should “be willing to lose a little more money on some of these students to get them in the door,” according to a transcript of the call.

The company’s chief financial officer replied, “That’s absolutely our intent.”

But the next year, the tide turned. Government investigations revealed that financial aid officers had been accepting kickbacks, junkets and even stock options in return for steering students to certain lenders. A regulatory crackdown followed, just as the economy plunged into recession.

As defaults piled up and heads rolled — Sallie Mae’s chief executive stepped down — Sallie Mae abandoned its riskiest practices. In early 2008, the company ended its subprime lending and told at least seven major operators of for-profit schools, including Career Education, that it would stop making private loans to many of their students.

In 2014, Sallie Mae and Navient broke apart, and Navient retained the troubled loans the company had originated years earlier.

But for the students, containing the damage was not so easy.

Lenders can hound students for payments on their debt, or sell it to a collection firm, long after they have written the loan off as soured debt. And because student loans cannot typically be wiped away through bankruptcy, many borrowers have no choice but to continue chipping away at their balance, no matter how dire their financial situation.

Ms. Christel, Navient’s spokeswoman, defended the company’s lending practices as typical for the time.

“Hindsight is always 20/20,” she said. “We have called for tools to improve upfront borrowing decisions, and we also support bankruptcy reform that would allow struggling borrowers the option to discharge federal and private student loans in bankruptcy after a good-faith effort to repay.”

Career Education did not respond to requests for comment.

Decades of Debt

The school that Tom Panzica, 42, attended shut down nine years ago, but he is still carrying $6,000 in debt for a degree that turned out to be useless. Every month, he sends $100 to Navient.

Mr. Panzica, a firefighter in Chicago, enrolled in Medical Careers Institute to learn sonography. But the school offered no clinical training — and it neglected to tell its students that without that training, they would not be allowed to take the industry’s licensing exam.

After Mr. Panzica graduated, he discovered that he had none of the qualifications needed to land a job.

Medical Careers closed in 2008, and a group of students sued, accusing it of making false claims. The case was settled. Mr. Panzica received around $3,000, less than half of what he had borrowed from Sallie Mae to pay his tuition.

Several students, including Mr. Panzica, then sued Sallie Mae, arguing that it was unfair to expect repayment on a loan made for fraudulent goods. The case went to arbitration, where the students lost.

Students in California also lost a lawsuit against Sallie Mae. They had sought the dismissal of loans they took out to attend California Culinary Academy, a Le Cordon Bleu affiliate also owned by Career Education, which paid $42 million to settle a class-action claim that it inflated graduation and job-placement rates. (When Career Education shut down its Le Cordon Bleu culinary schools in 2015, the food-world celebrity Alton Brown posted his approval on Twitter, calling the chain “a culinary puppy mill.”)

A judge tossed out the case, and an appeals court panel upheld the decision. One of the panel’s three judges dissented, writing that the complaint plausibly suggested that Sallie Mae “knew what C.C.A. was up to.”

For Adam Wolf, the lawyer who represented the students, the decision still rankles. “Sallie Mae facilitated the fraud,” Mr. Wolf said.

Arbitration clauses, buried in the fine print of loan contracts, have largely thwarted students’ legal challenges. But the attorneys general are not bound by those clauses. Their cases may be the only avenue left for borrowers to get relief, said Edward X. Clinton Jr., the lawyer who represented Mr. Panzica.

Borrowers who take out federal loans to attend schools that misled them can apply to have their loans forgiven, but private loans lack that protection.

To Ms. Hardin, that is deeply frustrating. After eight years of payments, her balance has dropped by only $1,000.

“I’ve cried on the phone several times,” Ms. Hardin said of her regular fights with Navient.

When her husband, a chef, saw that Washington’s attorney general had sued Navient, he asked Ms. Hardin what she would do if the case somehow led to her loans being wiped away.

Again, she teared up. Since graduating, she has never had any spare cash to travel, or save or plan any further than the next month’s loan bill.

“We want to open a sandwich shop,” Ms. Hardin said. “The money could be going toward that.”

[vincenzolandino]

167: Are Brands Allowed an Opinion?

Are brands allowed an opinion in the modern media landscape? In the news recently, Under Armour CEO has been in the crosshairs over his comments that alluded to President Trump being "good for business."

However, did the media tell the entire story? And more to the point, are brands allowed to have an opinion, or must they be responsible to their shareholders in a way that creates no waves?

Joining hosts Robert Hix and Vincenzo Landino are Savannah Peterson with Savvy Millennial and Antigone Peyton at Cloudigy Law.

About Savannah Peterson

Savannah Peterson is the Founder and Chief Unicorn of Savvy Millennial where she helps the people, products and brands she loves grow. Savannah was named to the 2016 Forbes 30 Under 30 list in Consumer Technology, and is a respected voice in innovation and community engagement.

Savannah works with authors, startups and companies, developing go-to-market strategies and building communities. She thrives on product development and launch journey and is a super-connector of people, resources and audiences. Prior to Savvy Millennial, Savannah was the Director of Innovation Strategy at Massive Labs & Speck Design where she helped create new consumer electronics. In her New York City life, Savannah was the Director of Global Community at Shapeways, the world's largest 3D Printing community, where she empowered and enabled over 25,000 3D Printing businesses.

A true hardware nerd, Savannah has helped friends, clients, and fellow creatives raise over $4.5M through crowdfunding. Before diving head first into design, Savannah worked at Fox Sports Northwest, the Center for Communication and Civic Engagement at the University of Washington, and founded her own Social Media Marketing Agency, Savvy Marketing Seattle. She travels the world as a public speaker, most recently featured at the Air New Zealand Inspiring Voices series, Kiwi Landing Pad Sales and Marketing Jam, South by Southwest, the Silicon Beached Festival, the Ford Research and Innovation Lab, Gasparilla Interactive, Social Fresh and more. An avid mentor for women and men in tech, she mentors and teaches at Stanford, NYU, and PACE University.

She has been featured in/on Forbes, the BBC, NBC, The Wall Street Journal, Gizmodo, CNET, The Verge, and others. When not geeking out, she’s tasting wine and romping through the wild blue yonder with her rescue mutt, Martini. Savannah thrives on empowering innovative minds. This takes shape in many forms; keynote speaking, panel moderating, teaching, mentoring, livestreaming, vlogging, podcasting, hosting and any other excuse to have fun in front of a creative audience.

About Antigone Peyton

Antigone focuses on intellectual property litigation and IP portfolio management and growth strategies involving patents, trademarks, trade secrets, and copyrights. Her litigation and counseling experiences also include unfair competition, DMCA violations, computer fraud, and social media issues. Antigone has acted as lead trial counsel and appellate counsel in federal civil lawsuits across the United States and has a significant litigation practice in the Eastern District of Virginia (the “Rocket Docket”). Additionally, Antigone has represented clients before the Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB), in the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO), and before the Trademark Trial and Appeal Board (TTAB).

Antigone has been recognized among Virginia Super Lawyers and Virginia Legal Elite for her work involving intellectual property law. She has also been honored with an Influential Women of Virginia award for outstanding efforts in law and her community contributions, which includes a STEM mentorship program for students interested in careers involving scientific research and innovation.

Antigone’s clients range from technology start-ups to international corporations. She has represented companies involved in high stakes intellectual property litigation over technologies that range from pharmaceuticals and medical devices to Internet, software, cyber security, telecommunication, and aerospace technologies. Antigone has significant experience involving e-discovery related technologies and practices. She has also helped consumer products companies manage and grow brand-related assets, including companies focused on fitness, food, cosmetics, and apparel products.

Having worked for both a trial judge at the U.S. International Trade Commission (ITC) and an appellate judge at the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (Federal Circuit), Antigone brings a practical perspective to her litigation and client counseling practice.

Before she founded Cloudigy Law, Antigone was a litigator at Finnegan, Henderson, Farabow, Garrett & Dunner LLP, in Washington, DC and managed the firm’s electronic litigation working group on e-discovery. Before law school, Antigone conducted scientific research involving clinical and pre-clinical biophysics and magnetic resonance studies at a large university medical center. This experience sharpened her focus on business needs and the practical aspects of innovation efforts when crafting legal solutions—a perspective often missing in the legal field.

She does much more than legal work, though. Antigone is an avid fruit and vegetable gardener and enjoys growing heirloom tomatoes in the summer.

About Rob Hix

Lifetime small business owner with a passion for live video production, commercial audiovisual systems, and broadcasting. I’m an employer, employee, executive and janitor all wrapped into one amazing career. Innovation and outside-of-the-box solutions are my “sweet spot”. I live my life in my own self-interest, to the benefit of my employees and clients. I work best with those who place a premium on their lives and exchange value-for-value to achieve their goals.

Enlightened Audiovisual is a comprehensive A/V design, installation and live video production firm serving the commercial and federal markets. We are a partner-based company that provides embedded expertise in the field of video conferencing, collaboration and livestreaming systems. We specialize in enterprise-level deployments throughout North America that are centrally-managed and maintained, with expertise in Cisco TelePresence, Polycom, Crestron, Skype for Business and many online livestreaming platforms.

About Vincenzo Landino

Vincenzo Landino is an entrepreneur, speaker and host of the Brand Boost Podcast. He is the the co-founder and Creative Director of Aftermarq, video content consultants, specializing in brand amplification and digital storytelling. With experience as a brand correspondent, Vincenzo’s portfolio includes a 1 billion impression campaign launch for Applebee’s as well as work for Mazda, Kia Motors, Paul Mitchell Schools, Barilla Pasta, DC United, Tinder, and Zoomph.

Check out this episode!

[symbianosgames]

The following blog post, unless otherwise noted, was written by a member of Gamasutra’s community. The thoughts and opinions expressed are those of the writer and not Gamasutra or its parent company.

[Video Game Deep Cuts is a weekly newsletter from curator/video game industry veteran Simon Carless, rounding up the best longread & standout articles & videos about games, every weekend. This week's highlights include the history of Nolan Bushnell's Chuck E Cheese arcade restaurants, the backstory of Fallen London, and lots more.

Just a quick update this week, because I have to pop out of town for the weekend, but a small anecdote. I was consulting a very nice lawyer on something this week, and everything went great.

But on the way out - he knows I work around games - he said 'Just one thing - how do I get a NES Classic?'. Sigh - supply and demand fail on the highest scale, there. :P

- Simon, curator.]

-------------------

Game Freak Is More Than Just A Pokémon Developer (Brian Ashcraft / Kotaku) "Game Freak is best known for one thing: Pokémon. But while they created the iconic franchise, Game Freak isn’t afraid to let its developers get their sea legs making non-Pocket Monster games on non-Nintendo hardware. That’s why, in the past few years, Game Freak has released a number of totally original titles on platforms you might not expect."

Fostering VR teamwork in 4-player Star Trek Bridge Crew (Phil Hornshaw / Gamasutra) "As a Star Trek fan, it’s hard not to get excited about the chance to slip on a virtual reality headset and find yourself manning a station on the bridge of a starship. That’s what Star Trek Bridge Crew offers players, at least at first."

Clark Tank: Steam trading card changes, Steam Prophet, and Dead Cells! (Ryan Clark / YouTube) "Every second Friday at 1pm Pacific time we stay on top of the latest game industry trends by examining the Steam top 50, scrutinizing the latest Kickstarted games, and by playing the most prominent recent releases. Huge thanks to Ed Freitas taking the original stream and editing it down to create this video! [SIMON'S NOTE: thanks to Ed & Ryan for switching to the most recent streams for the Twitch to YouTube concatenated versions!]"

The Hunger Artists | Little Nightmares (Zach Budgor / Heterotopias) "Svankmajer was on my mind as I played Tarsier’s Little Nightmares, a macabre platformer about Six, a young girl making her way through the knotted bowels of a steamship called the Maw."

Failure to Fame: How Dishonored Saved Arkane Studios (GameSpot / YouTube) "In part 1 of a 3-part series, Arkane discusses their struggles to find success for 12 years, how Dishonored propelled them into the limelight, and helped revive immersive sim RPGs. [SIMON'S NOTE: Also see Part 2 & Part 3 of a v.neat series.]"

PlayStation U.S. boss reflects on birth and rebirth of PlayStation (Brian Crecente / Polygon) "In 2014, riding high on the successful launch of PlayStation 4 and a surprisingly positive, surprisingly unanimous reaction to its E3 showcase the year before, Sony made an unexpected announcement. Jack Tretton, the president and CEO of Sony Computer Entertainment of America and in many ways the face of that success, was stepping down."

Racing against collector creep (Jeremy Parish / Retronauts) "Contrary to many recent alarmist reports I’ve seen recently, Tokyo’s retro game stores aren’t completely a desolate wasteland of empty shelves. A few spots in nerd destination Akihabara definitely do have a sort of post-apocalyptic feel to them, but that really only holds true for the the heavily trafficked ones that everyone picks over… primarily Super Potato, and to a lesser degree the Mandarake Galaxy shop in Nakano."

The Casual (but Regal) Swipe: Creating Game Mechanics in Reigns (Francois Alliot / GDC / YouTube) "In this GDC 2017 session, Nerial developer Francois Alliot explains how the Reigns development team gave themselves a set of constraints defined by the swipe-based gameplay they were exploring to help create the tone they wanted to give to the game."

Robots, Pizza, And Sensory Overload: The Chuck E. Cheese Origin Story (Benj Edwards / Fast Company) "In May 1977, a new pizza place opened for business in San Jose, California. At the time, calling it “unique” might have been an understatement. The brainchild of Atari cofounder Nolan Bushnell - and, initially, an arm of that company - it featured entertainment provided by a cast of robotic characters led by a giant cigar-smoking rat with a bowler, buck teeth, and a Jersey accent."

The Complete, Untold History of Halo (Steve Haske / Waypoint) "Somewhat ironically, Halo began from a strategic position, rather than being mapped from the outset as a shooter. The project evolved spiritually as a kind of outcropping from the clotted battlefields of Bungie’s 1997 tactical game Myth, trading a Braveheart aesthetic for more of a Starship Troopers vibe, and then rendering everything in anthill 3D."

Design Q&A: Crafting the heroes of Blizzard's Heroes of the Storm (Bryant Francis / Gamasutra) "We wanted to learn a little more about how Heroes of the Storm tweaks and rebalances characters from other franchises and genres. Luckily, Kent-Erik Hagman, lead hero designer on the game, was willing to talk us through the process of conceptualizing, designing, and refining three heroes that show how Blizzard has put its own stamp on the MOBA genre."

Remodeling The Labyrinth (Jeremy Antley / First Person Scholar) "In October and November of 2010, thousands of copies of GMTs Labyrinth: The War on Terror, 2001-? made their way from warehouses in California to distributors and customers around the world. Focusing on the contemporary conflict known as the Global War on Terror, Labyrinth stood in contrast to standard historical fare offered to commercial wargame enthusiasts: conflicts in which dozens, if not hundreds, of years spanned the gulf between player and subject."

Finding Duskers: Innovation Through Better Design Pillars (Tim Keenan / GDC / YouTube) "In this 2017 GDC talk, Duskers creator Tim Keenan explains how his development process focused on building emotional states rather than features, refining the game's vision through experimentation, and building a clear player fantasy."

Internet Trends 2017 (Mary Meeker / Kleiner Perkins / CODE Conference) "[SIMON'S NOTE: this gigantic 355 page .PPT is awaited every year for the depth of its data analysis, and it's interesting this year that there's a big chunk about video games, starting at Slide 80. Some interesting data, some interesting - if perhaps debatable - comparisons of game features and tech innovations, and lots more!]

The Story of Runic Games | A Gameumentary Short Doc (Gameumentary / YouTube) "Gameumentary presents our debut short documentary, The Story of Runic Games. For the past few months, we've been working hard on this video, from our initial pre-production meetings last year, to our principal photography out in Seattle this past March, to the editing and tweaking that we've done just this past week--we've put everything we have into this short-doc."

Analysis: The Consequences of Reducing the Skill Gap (Core-A-Gaming / YouTube) "My best attempt at explaining what's going on with Street Fighter V's direction."

Breaking Out of Prey’s Glass Box (Chris Priestman / Bullet Points Monthly) "Break through the glass—this is Prey’s first lesson. To escape the counterfeit reproduction of Morgan Yu’s apartment you must introduce a wrench to the windows. The glass shatters on impact to leave an irregular shape, cut in jagged lines, tearing a hole into the otherwise convincing simulation of a city held within the windows."

Overwatch’s loot box system is Blizzard’s true masterpiece (Nick Statt / The Verge) "More than anything, the anniversary event illustrates why Blizzard’s business model for Overwatch is such a successful departure for multiplayer shooters — and how it could become the gold standard going forward."

The Killer Groove: The Shadow AI of Killer Instinct (AI & Games / YouTube) "In this video we take a look at the Shadow AI mode released in season 2 of the 2013 Killer Instinct reboot. The shadow system is capable of replicating a players performance in a non-player character after only three matches in the shadow dojo. We take a look at how this system records and acts upon data, but also the challenges faced in creating fighting game AI."

'Fallen London' and the secret to writing an infinite gothic game (Jessica Conditt / Engadget) "Writing a video game is nothing like penning a novel. But writing a never-ending, nonlinear, text-driven video game about a hellish alternate London stuffed with gothic intrigue and nearly a decade of backstory? That's a different beast altogether."

-------------------

[REMINDER: you can sign up to receive this newsletter every weekend at http://ift.tt/2dUXrva we crosspost to Gamasutra later on Sunday, but get it first via newsletter! Story tips and comments can be emailed to vgdeepcuts@simoncarless.com. MINI-DISCLOSURE: Simon is one of the organizers of GDC and Gamasutra, so you may sometimes see links from those entities in his picks. Or not!]

[symbianosgames]

The following blog post, unless otherwise noted, was written by a member of Gamasutra’s community. The thoughts and opinions expressed are those of the writer and not Gamasutra or its parent company.

[Video Game Deep Cuts is a weekly newsletter from curator/video game industry veteran Simon Carless, rounding up the best longread & standout articles & videos about games, every weekend. This week's highlights include the history of Nolan Bushnell's Chuck E Cheese arcade restaurants, the backstory of Fallen London, and lots more.

Just a quick update this week, because I have to pop out of town for the weekend, but a small anecdote. I was consulting a very nice lawyer on something this week, and everything went great.

But on the way out - he knows I work around games - he said 'Just one thing - how do I get a NES Classic?'. Sigh - supply and demand fail on the highest scale, there. :P

- Simon, curator.]

-------------------

Game Freak Is More Than Just A Pokémon Developer (Brian Ashcraft / Kotaku) "Game Freak is best known for one thing: Pokémon. But while they created the iconic franchise, Game Freak isn’t afraid to let its developers get their sea legs making non-Pocket Monster games on non-Nintendo hardware. That’s why, in the past few years, Game Freak has released a number of totally original titles on platforms you might not expect."

Fostering VR teamwork in 4-player Star Trek Bridge Crew (Phil Hornshaw / Gamasutra) "As a Star Trek fan, it’s hard not to get excited about the chance to slip on a virtual reality headset and find yourself manning a station on the bridge of a starship. That’s what Star Trek Bridge Crew offers players, at least at first."

Clark Tank: Steam trading card changes, Steam Prophet, and Dead Cells! (Ryan Clark / YouTube) "Every second Friday at 1pm Pacific time we stay on top of the latest game industry trends by examining the Steam top 50, scrutinizing the latest Kickstarted games, and by playing the most prominent recent releases. Huge thanks to Ed Freitas taking the original stream and editing it down to create this video! [SIMON'S NOTE: thanks to Ed & Ryan for switching to the most recent streams for the Twitch to YouTube concatenated versions!]"

The Hunger Artists | Little Nightmares (Zach Budgor / Heterotopias) "Svankmajer was on my mind as I played Tarsier’s Little Nightmares, a macabre platformer about Six, a young girl making her way through the knotted bowels of a steamship called the Maw."

Failure to Fame: How Dishonored Saved Arkane Studios (GameSpot / YouTube) "In part 1 of a 3-part series, Arkane discusses their struggles to find success for 12 years, how Dishonored propelled them into the limelight, and helped revive immersive sim RPGs. [SIMON'S NOTE: Also see Part 2 & Part 3 of a v.neat series.]"

PlayStation U.S. boss reflects on birth and rebirth of PlayStation (Brian Crecente / Polygon) "In 2014, riding high on the successful launch of PlayStation 4 and a surprisingly positive, surprisingly unanimous reaction to its E3 showcase the year before, Sony made an unexpected announcement. Jack Tretton, the president and CEO of Sony Computer Entertainment of America and in many ways the face of that success, was stepping down."

Racing against collector creep (Jeremy Parish / Retronauts) "Contrary to many recent alarmist reports I’ve seen recently, Tokyo’s retro game stores aren’t completely a desolate wasteland of empty shelves. A few spots in nerd destination Akihabara definitely do have a sort of post-apocalyptic feel to them, but that really only holds true for the the heavily trafficked ones that everyone picks over… primarily Super Potato, and to a lesser degree the Mandarake Galaxy shop in Nakano."

The Casual (but Regal) Swipe: Creating Game Mechanics in Reigns (Francois Alliot / GDC / YouTube) "In this GDC 2017 session, Nerial developer Francois Alliot explains how the Reigns development team gave themselves a set of constraints defined by the swipe-based gameplay they were exploring to help create the tone they wanted to give to the game."

Robots, Pizza, And Sensory Overload: The Chuck E. Cheese Origin Story (Benj Edwards / Fast Company) "In May 1977, a new pizza place opened for business in San Jose, California. At the time, calling it “unique” might have been an understatement. The brainchild of Atari cofounder Nolan Bushnell - and, initially, an arm of that company - it featured entertainment provided by a cast of robotic characters led by a giant cigar-smoking rat with a bowler, buck teeth, and a Jersey accent."

The Complete, Untold History of Halo (Steve Haske / Waypoint) "Somewhat ironically, Halo began from a strategic position, rather than being mapped from the outset as a shooter. The project evolved spiritually as a kind of outcropping from the clotted battlefields of Bungie’s 1997 tactical game Myth, trading a Braveheart aesthetic for more of a Starship Troopers vibe, and then rendering everything in anthill 3D."

Design Q&A: Crafting the heroes of Blizzard's Heroes of the Storm (Bryant Francis / Gamasutra) "We wanted to learn a little more about how Heroes of the Storm tweaks and rebalances characters from other franchises and genres. Luckily, Kent-Erik Hagman, lead hero designer on the game, was willing to talk us through the process of conceptualizing, designing, and refining three heroes that show how Blizzard has put its own stamp on the MOBA genre."

Remodeling The Labyrinth (Jeremy Antley / First Person Scholar) "In October and November of 2010, thousands of copies of GMTs Labyrinth: The War on Terror, 2001-? made their way from warehouses in California to distributors and customers around the world. Focusing on the contemporary conflict known as the Global War on Terror, Labyrinth stood in contrast to standard historical fare offered to commercial wargame enthusiasts: conflicts in which dozens, if not hundreds, of years spanned the gulf between player and subject."

Finding Duskers: Innovation Through Better Design Pillars (Tim Keenan / GDC / YouTube) "In this 2017 GDC talk, Duskers creator Tim Keenan explains how his development process focused on building emotional states rather than features, refining the game's vision through experimentation, and building a clear player fantasy."

Internet Trends 2017 (Mary Meeker / Kleiner Perkins / CODE Conference) "[SIMON'S NOTE: this gigantic 355 page .PPT is awaited every year for the depth of its data analysis, and it's interesting this year that there's a big chunk about video games, starting at Slide 80. Some interesting data, some interesting - if perhaps debatable - comparisons of game features and tech innovations, and lots more!]

The Story of Runic Games | A Gameumentary Short Doc (Gameumentary / YouTube) "Gameumentary presents our debut short documentary, The Story of Runic Games. For the past few months, we've been working hard on this video, from our initial pre-production meetings last year, to our principal photography out in Seattle this past March, to the editing and tweaking that we've done just this past week--we've put everything we have into this short-doc."

Analysis: The Consequences of Reducing the Skill Gap (Core-A-Gaming / YouTube) "My best attempt at explaining what's going on with Street Fighter V's direction."

Breaking Out of Prey’s Glass Box (Chris Priestman / Bullet Points Monthly) "Break through the glass—this is Prey’s first lesson. To escape the counterfeit reproduction of Morgan Yu’s apartment you must introduce a wrench to the windows. The glass shatters on impact to leave an irregular shape, cut in jagged lines, tearing a hole into the otherwise convincing simulation of a city held within the windows."

Overwatch’s loot box system is Blizzard’s true masterpiece (Nick Statt / The Verge) "More than anything, the anniversary event illustrates why Blizzard’s business model for Overwatch is such a successful departure for multiplayer shooters — and how it could become the gold standard going forward."

The Killer Groove: The Shadow AI of Killer Instinct (AI & Games / YouTube) "In this video we take a look at the Shadow AI mode released in season 2 of the 2013 Killer Instinct reboot. The shadow system is capable of replicating a players performance in a non-player character after only three matches in the shadow dojo. We take a look at how this system records and acts upon data, but also the challenges faced in creating fighting game AI."

'Fallen London' and the secret to writing an infinite gothic game (Jessica Conditt / Engadget) "Writing a video game is nothing like penning a novel. But writing a never-ending, nonlinear, text-driven video game about a hellish alternate London stuffed with gothic intrigue and nearly a decade of backstory? That's a different beast altogether."

-------------------

[REMINDER: you can sign up to receive this newsletter every weekend at http://ift.tt/2dUXrva we crosspost to Gamasutra later on Sunday, but get it first via newsletter! Story tips and comments can be emailed to vgdeepcuts@simoncarless.com. MINI-DISCLOSURE: Simon is one of the organizers of GDC and Gamasutra, so you may sometimes see links from those entities in his picks. Or not!]

[symbianosgames]

The following blog post, unless otherwise noted, was written by a member of Gamasutra’s community. The thoughts and opinions expressed are those of the writer and not Gamasutra or its parent company.

[Video Game Deep Cuts is a weekly newsletter from curator/video game industry veteran Simon Carless, rounding up the best longread & standout articles & videos about games, every weekend. This week's highlights include the history of Nolan Bushnell's Chuck E Cheese arcade restaurants, the backstory of Fallen London, and lots more.

Just a quick update this week, because I have to pop out of town for the weekend, but a small anecdote. I was consulting a very nice lawyer on something this week, and everything went great.

But on the way out - he knows I work around games - he said 'Just one thing - how do I get a NES Classic?'. Sigh - supply and demand fail on the highest scale, there. :P

- Simon, curator.]

-------------------

Game Freak Is More Than Just A Pokémon Developer (Brian Ashcraft / Kotaku) "Game Freak is best known for one thing: Pokémon. But while they created the iconic franchise, Game Freak isn’t afraid to let its developers get their sea legs making non-Pocket Monster games on non-Nintendo hardware. That’s why, in the past few years, Game Freak has released a number of totally original titles on platforms you might not expect."

Fostering VR teamwork in 4-player Star Trek Bridge Crew (Phil Hornshaw / Gamasutra) "As a Star Trek fan, it’s hard not to get excited about the chance to slip on a virtual reality headset and find yourself manning a station on the bridge of a starship. That’s what Star Trek Bridge Crew offers players, at least at first."

Clark Tank: Steam trading card changes, Steam Prophet, and Dead Cells! (Ryan Clark / YouTube) "Every second Friday at 1pm Pacific time we stay on top of the latest game industry trends by examining the Steam top 50, scrutinizing the latest Kickstarted games, and by playing the most prominent recent releases. Huge thanks to Ed Freitas taking the original stream and editing it down to create this video! [SIMON'S NOTE: thanks to Ed & Ryan for switching to the most recent streams for the Twitch to YouTube concatenated versions!]"

The Hunger Artists | Little Nightmares (Zach Budgor / Heterotopias) "Svankmajer was on my mind as I played Tarsier’s Little Nightmares, a macabre platformer about Six, a young girl making her way through the knotted bowels of a steamship called the Maw."

Failure to Fame: How Dishonored Saved Arkane Studios (GameSpot / YouTube) "In part 1 of a 3-part series, Arkane discusses their struggles to find success for 12 years, how Dishonored propelled them into the limelight, and helped revive immersive sim RPGs. [SIMON'S NOTE: Also see Part 2 & Part 3 of a v.neat series.]"

PlayStation U.S. boss reflects on birth and rebirth of PlayStation (Brian Crecente / Polygon) "In 2014, riding high on the successful launch of PlayStation 4 and a surprisingly positive, surprisingly unanimous reaction to its E3 showcase the year before, Sony made an unexpected announcement. Jack Tretton, the president and CEO of Sony Computer Entertainment of America and in many ways the face of that success, was stepping down."

Racing against collector creep (Jeremy Parish / Retronauts) "Contrary to many recent alarmist reports I’ve seen recently, Tokyo’s retro game stores aren’t completely a desolate wasteland of empty shelves. A few spots in nerd destination Akihabara definitely do have a sort of post-apocalyptic feel to them, but that really only holds true for the the heavily trafficked ones that everyone picks over… primarily Super Potato, and to a lesser degree the Mandarake Galaxy shop in Nakano."

The Casual (but Regal) Swipe: Creating Game Mechanics in Reigns (Francois Alliot / GDC / YouTube) "In this GDC 2017 session, Nerial developer Francois Alliot explains how the Reigns development team gave themselves a set of constraints defined by the swipe-based gameplay they were exploring to help create the tone they wanted to give to the game."

Robots, Pizza, And Sensory Overload: The Chuck E. Cheese Origin Story (Benj Edwards / Fast Company) "In May 1977, a new pizza place opened for business in San Jose, California. At the time, calling it “unique” might have been an understatement. The brainchild of Atari cofounder Nolan Bushnell - and, initially, an arm of that company - it featured entertainment provided by a cast of robotic characters led by a giant cigar-smoking rat with a bowler, buck teeth, and a Jersey accent."

The Complete, Untold History of Halo (Steve Haske / Waypoint) "Somewhat ironically, Halo began from a strategic position, rather than being mapped from the outset as a shooter. The project evolved spiritually as a kind of outcropping from the clotted battlefields of Bungie’s 1997 tactical game Myth, trading a Braveheart aesthetic for more of a Starship Troopers vibe, and then rendering everything in anthill 3D."

Design Q&A: Crafting the heroes of Blizzard's Heroes of the Storm (Bryant Francis / Gamasutra) "We wanted to learn a little more about how Heroes of the Storm tweaks and rebalances characters from other franchises and genres. Luckily, Kent-Erik Hagman, lead hero designer on the game, was willing to talk us through the process of conceptualizing, designing, and refining three heroes that show how Blizzard has put its own stamp on the MOBA genre."

Remodeling The Labyrinth (Jeremy Antley / First Person Scholar) "In October and November of 2010, thousands of copies of GMTs Labyrinth: The War on Terror, 2001-? made their way from warehouses in California to distributors and customers around the world. Focusing on the contemporary conflict known as the Global War on Terror, Labyrinth stood in contrast to standard historical fare offered to commercial wargame enthusiasts: conflicts in which dozens, if not hundreds, of years spanned the gulf between player and subject."

Finding Duskers: Innovation Through Better Design Pillars (Tim Keenan / GDC / YouTube) "In this 2017 GDC talk, Duskers creator Tim Keenan explains how his development process focused on building emotional states rather than features, refining the game's vision through experimentation, and building a clear player fantasy."

Internet Trends 2017 (Mary Meeker / Kleiner Perkins / CODE Conference) "[SIMON'S NOTE: this gigantic 355 page .PPT is awaited every year for the depth of its data analysis, and it's interesting this year that there's a big chunk about video games, starting at Slide 80. Some interesting data, some interesting - if perhaps debatable - comparisons of game features and tech innovations, and lots more!]

The Story of Runic Games | A Gameumentary Short Doc (Gameumentary / YouTube) "Gameumentary presents our debut short documentary, The Story of Runic Games. For the past few months, we've been working hard on this video, from our initial pre-production meetings last year, to our principal photography out in Seattle this past March, to the editing and tweaking that we've done just this past week--we've put everything we have into this short-doc."

Analysis: The Consequences of Reducing the Skill Gap (Core-A-Gaming / YouTube) "My best attempt at explaining what's going on with Street Fighter V's direction."

Breaking Out of Prey’s Glass Box (Chris Priestman / Bullet Points Monthly) "Break through the glass—this is Prey’s first lesson. To escape the counterfeit reproduction of Morgan Yu’s apartment you must introduce a wrench to the windows. The glass shatters on impact to leave an irregular shape, cut in jagged lines, tearing a hole into the otherwise convincing simulation of a city held within the windows."

Overwatch’s loot box system is Blizzard’s true masterpiece (Nick Statt / The Verge) "More than anything, the anniversary event illustrates why Blizzard’s business model for Overwatch is such a successful departure for multiplayer shooters — and how it could become the gold standard going forward."

The Killer Groove: The Shadow AI of Killer Instinct (AI & Games / YouTube) "In this video we take a look at the Shadow AI mode released in season 2 of the 2013 Killer Instinct reboot. The shadow system is capable of replicating a players performance in a non-player character after only three matches in the shadow dojo. We take a look at how this system records and acts upon data, but also the challenges faced in creating fighting game AI."

'Fallen London' and the secret to writing an infinite gothic game (Jessica Conditt / Engadget) "Writing a video game is nothing like penning a novel. But writing a never-ending, nonlinear, text-driven video game about a hellish alternate London stuffed with gothic intrigue and nearly a decade of backstory? That's a different beast altogether."

-------------------

[REMINDER: you can sign up to receive this newsletter every weekend at http://ift.tt/2dUXrva we crosspost to Gamasutra later on Sunday, but get it first via newsletter! Story tips and comments can be emailed to vgdeepcuts@simoncarless.com. MINI-DISCLOSURE: Simon is one of the organizers of GDC and Gamasutra, so you may sometimes see links from those entities in his picks. Or not!]

[symbianosgames]

The following blog post, unless otherwise noted, was written by a member of Gamasutra’s community. The thoughts and opinions expressed are those of the writer and not Gamasutra or its parent company.

[Video Game Deep Cuts is a weekly newsletter from curator/video game industry veteran Simon Carless, rounding up the best longread & standout articles & videos about games, every weekend. This week's highlights include the history of Nolan Bushnell's Chuck E Cheese arcade restaurants, the backstory of Fallen London, and lots more.

Just a quick update this week, because I have to pop out of town for the weekend, but a small anecdote. I was consulting a very nice lawyer on something this week, and everything went great.

But on the way out - he knows I work around games - he said 'Just one thing - how do I get a NES Classic?'. Sigh - supply and demand fail on the highest scale, there. :P

- Simon, curator.]

-------------------

Game Freak Is More Than Just A Pokémon Developer (Brian Ashcraft / Kotaku) "Game Freak is best known for one thing: Pokémon. But while they created the iconic franchise, Game Freak isn’t afraid to let its developers get their sea legs making non-Pocket Monster games on non-Nintendo hardware. That’s why, in the past few years, Game Freak has released a number of totally original titles on platforms you might not expect."

Fostering VR teamwork in 4-player Star Trek Bridge Crew (Phil Hornshaw / Gamasutra) "As a Star Trek fan, it’s hard not to get excited about the chance to slip on a virtual reality headset and find yourself manning a station on the bridge of a starship. That’s what Star Trek Bridge Crew offers players, at least at first."

Clark Tank: Steam trading card changes, Steam Prophet, and Dead Cells! (Ryan Clark / YouTube) "Every second Friday at 1pm Pacific time we stay on top of the latest game industry trends by examining the Steam top 50, scrutinizing the latest Kickstarted games, and by playing the most prominent recent releases. Huge thanks to Ed Freitas taking the original stream and editing it down to create this video! [SIMON'S NOTE: thanks to Ed & Ryan for switching to the most recent streams for the Twitch to YouTube concatenated versions!]"

The Hunger Artists | Little Nightmares (Zach Budgor / Heterotopias) "Svankmajer was on my mind as I played Tarsier’s Little Nightmares, a macabre platformer about Six, a young girl making her way through the knotted bowels of a steamship called the Maw."

Failure to Fame: How Dishonored Saved Arkane Studios (GameSpot / YouTube) "In part 1 of a 3-part series, Arkane discusses their struggles to find success for 12 years, how Dishonored propelled them into the limelight, and helped revive immersive sim RPGs. [SIMON'S NOTE: Also see Part 2 & Part 3 of a v.neat series.]"

PlayStation U.S. boss reflects on birth and rebirth of PlayStation (Brian Crecente / Polygon) "In 2014, riding high on the successful launch of PlayStation 4 and a surprisingly positive, surprisingly unanimous reaction to its E3 showcase the year before, Sony made an unexpected announcement. Jack Tretton, the president and CEO of Sony Computer Entertainment of America and in many ways the face of that success, was stepping down."

Racing against collector creep (Jeremy Parish / Retronauts) "Contrary to many recent alarmist reports I’ve seen recently, Tokyo’s retro game stores aren’t completely a desolate wasteland of empty shelves. A few spots in nerd destination Akihabara definitely do have a sort of post-apocalyptic feel to them, but that really only holds true for the the heavily trafficked ones that everyone picks over… primarily Super Potato, and to a lesser degree the Mandarake Galaxy shop in Nakano."

The Casual (but Regal) Swipe: Creating Game Mechanics in Reigns (Francois Alliot / GDC / YouTube) "In this GDC 2017 session, Nerial developer Francois Alliot explains how the Reigns development team gave themselves a set of constraints defined by the swipe-based gameplay they were exploring to help create the tone they wanted to give to the game."

Robots, Pizza, And Sensory Overload: The Chuck E. Cheese Origin Story (Benj Edwards / Fast Company) "In May 1977, a new pizza place opened for business in San Jose, California. At the time, calling it “unique” might have been an understatement. The brainchild of Atari cofounder Nolan Bushnell - and, initially, an arm of that company - it featured entertainment provided by a cast of robotic characters led by a giant cigar-smoking rat with a bowler, buck teeth, and a Jersey accent."

The Complete, Untold History of Halo (Steve Haske / Waypoint) "Somewhat ironically, Halo began from a strategic position, rather than being mapped from the outset as a shooter. The project evolved spiritually as a kind of outcropping from the clotted battlefields of Bungie’s 1997 tactical game Myth, trading a Braveheart aesthetic for more of a Starship Troopers vibe, and then rendering everything in anthill 3D."

Design Q&A: Crafting the heroes of Blizzard's Heroes of the Storm (Bryant Francis / Gamasutra) "We wanted to learn a little more about how Heroes of the Storm tweaks and rebalances characters from other franchises and genres. Luckily, Kent-Erik Hagman, lead hero designer on the game, was willing to talk us through the process of conceptualizing, designing, and refining three heroes that show how Blizzard has put its own stamp on the MOBA genre."

Remodeling The Labyrinth (Jeremy Antley / First Person Scholar) "In October and November of 2010, thousands of copies of GMTs Labyrinth: The War on Terror, 2001-? made their way from warehouses in California to distributors and customers around the world. Focusing on the contemporary conflict known as the Global War on Terror, Labyrinth stood in contrast to standard historical fare offered to commercial wargame enthusiasts: conflicts in which dozens, if not hundreds, of years spanned the gulf between player and subject."

Finding Duskers: Innovation Through Better Design Pillars (Tim Keenan / GDC / YouTube) "In this 2017 GDC talk, Duskers creator Tim Keenan explains how his development process focused on building emotional states rather than features, refining the game's vision through experimentation, and building a clear player fantasy."

Internet Trends 2017 (Mary Meeker / Kleiner Perkins / CODE Conference) "[SIMON'S NOTE: this gigantic 355 page .PPT is awaited every year for the depth of its data analysis, and it's interesting this year that there's a big chunk about video games, starting at Slide 80. Some interesting data, some interesting - if perhaps debatable - comparisons of game features and tech innovations, and lots more!]

The Story of Runic Games | A Gameumentary Short Doc (Gameumentary / YouTube) "Gameumentary presents our debut short documentary, The Story of Runic Games. For the past few months, we've been working hard on this video, from our initial pre-production meetings last year, to our principal photography out in Seattle this past March, to the editing and tweaking that we've done just this past week--we've put everything we have into this short-doc."

Analysis: The Consequences of Reducing the Skill Gap (Core-A-Gaming / YouTube) "My best attempt at explaining what's going on with Street Fighter V's direction."

Breaking Out of Prey’s Glass Box (Chris Priestman / Bullet Points Monthly) "Break through the glass—this is Prey’s first lesson. To escape the counterfeit reproduction of Morgan Yu’s apartment you must introduce a wrench to the windows. The glass shatters on impact to leave an irregular shape, cut in jagged lines, tearing a hole into the otherwise convincing simulation of a city held within the windows."

Overwatch’s loot box system is Blizzard’s true masterpiece (Nick Statt / The Verge) "More than anything, the anniversary event illustrates why Blizzard’s business model for Overwatch is such a successful departure for multiplayer shooters — and how it could become the gold standard going forward."

The Killer Groove: The Shadow AI of Killer Instinct (AI & Games / YouTube) "In this video we take a look at the Shadow AI mode released in season 2 of the 2013 Killer Instinct reboot. The shadow system is capable of replicating a players performance in a non-player character after only three matches in the shadow dojo. We take a look at how this system records and acts upon data, but also the challenges faced in creating fighting game AI."

'Fallen London' and the secret to writing an infinite gothic game (Jessica Conditt / Engadget) "Writing a video game is nothing like penning a novel. But writing a never-ending, nonlinear, text-driven video game about a hellish alternate London stuffed with gothic intrigue and nearly a decade of backstory? That's a different beast altogether."

-------------------

[REMINDER: you can sign up to receive this newsletter every weekend at http://ift.tt/2dUXrva we crosspost to Gamasutra later on Sunday, but get it first via newsletter! Story tips and comments can be emailed to vgdeepcuts@simoncarless.com. MINI-DISCLOSURE: Simon is one of the organizers of GDC and Gamasutra, so you may sometimes see links from those entities in his picks. Or not!]