Artful depictions of sex have a crucial place in video games because of how they allow people to examine their ideas of romance and relationships, according to one developer, Megan writes.

Driving the news: Designer and writer Sharang Biswas gave a GDC talk exploring how sex is, and can be, depicted in games.

• From the beginning, video games have often problematically incorporated sex, with rampant sexism, glorified assault and transactional approaches to pursuing romance.
• Many tend to be goal-oriented, where the objective is to build a romance with a character just to sleep with them.

The big picture: Games depicting sexual behaviors are often a way to discuss broader societal issues.

• “Expanding the conversation about sex through our various artforms, including games and playful experiences, is important,” Biswas said.
• Just as important, he said, is to ask: “Why shouldn't we include sex in games if sex is a facet of human experience? If it's a thing that many people derive pleasure from, we can also put it into games, which is another thing many people derive pleasure from.“

The very act of sex, Biswas said, whether it’s who we have it with or when, “has been a reason that people have been persecuted” since the beginning of time.

• “Sex can help build queer communities, because sex and queerness has a lot of links,” he said.
• Furthermore, “some people argue that queer sex is in itself a revolutionary act of resistance.”

What's happening: Gamemakers in the indie scene are leading the charge when it comes to games that explore sex and sexuality, without actually having to have sex.

• Robert Yang is one of the best-known developers tackling sexuality through games like Hurt Me Plenty that explores consent and care.

Naomi Clark’s two-player card game Consentacle is about navigating boundaries and figuring out how to please a sex partner.

• “The game is all about when you have a body that's not considered normative, how do you have sex?” Biswas said.
• “There is no one way that people have sex,” he says, nor is there one specific body type that should be allowed to.

Biswas advises developers to think about getting weird, and consider “mechanics that aren't directly about sexual acts.”

• “We all have normative notions about what sex looks like,” Biswas said, pointing to questions like what kind of bodies are permitted to have sex or what objects people are allowed to use.
• “These ideas are ingrained in society,” he added, and the best way to question them is to use speculative fiction.

There are four major reasons why people cheat in online video games and even more ways to stop them, according to Clint Sereday and Nemanja Mulasmajic, leaders of an anti-cheat gaming company called Byfron, who gave a talk at GDC, Stephen writes.

Why it matters: Game studios are in a perpetual conflict with cheaters, with the biggest games regularly banning thousands of accounts in an effort to stop cheating from scaring off the rest of the player base.

According to Sereday and Mulasmajic: Content cheaters want a shortcut to obtaining a game’s newest unlockable content.

• A good counter: Make unlock conditions for content reasonable and achievable.

Money cheaters are people who profit from making and selling cheats that exploit technical loopholes.

• A good counter: Send lawyers after them.
• “They care about the money. So if you go after them with legal experts, they tend to fold quick,” says Byfron's CTO Mulasmajic.

Another “most important thing you can do,” according to Mulasmajic: Design the game to resist cheating.

• Games that limit the information sent to the server about what a competing player is up to far away on the map in a competitive strategy game, for example, stymies the development of cheats that would otherwise reveal that info to a cheater.

Glory cheaters are people who think they need to cheat to get ahead in a competitive game.

• “They’re more reformable,” Byfron founder Sereday said, and cheating if they think they can get away with it.
• A good counter: He advises closing off the exploits and fixing game balance, whenever possible, blunting the feeling cheating is essential to keep enjoying the game.
• Another counter is punishing high-profile cheaters (pros, influencers) to send a message that cheating isn’t OK.

Power cheaters are trolls, people for whom cheating is the game and see bans as a badge of honor.

• A good counter: Ban at the hardware level and require extra factors for creating new accounts — inputting a phone number, for example — that can be banned too.
• Another counter could be to turn some of them.
• Extending an olive branch to some League of Legends power cheaters didn’t eliminate repeat offenders (80% were banned again), but some reformed and provided inside info about previously unknown cheats and communities.

⚖️ A federal judge says she is "prepared to approve" Activision's misconduct settlement with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, pending a hearing next week. It calls for an $18 million victims fund and three years of oversight.

👩🏽‍🦲Modders are finding an unusual strategy to get a steady frame rate in Stranger of Paradise: Final Fantasy Origin: Make everyone in the game bald.

🎻 Ubisoft is dropping its lawsuit against MGP Live, resolving a dispute over rights to Assassin's Creed concerts. In a glowing statement, Ubisoft thanked MGP and said it would move on without them.

🦈 Rocksteady Games' co-founder and creative director Sefton Hill confirmed on Twitter that the studio will delay the release of Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League to spring 2023.

🇺🇦 Ukraine updates:

• Epic Games says it has now raised over $50 million for Ukraine humanitarian relief. On Tuesday, Ukraine vice prime minister Mykhailo Fedorov thanked Epic on Twitter for the "crucially important" support.
• After indefinitely pausing development on the upcoming S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2: Heart of Chornobyl, Ukraine-based studio GSC Game World is reportedly exploring moving its staff to Prague to finish the game.

Microsoft and Ubisoft are pushing the idea that cloud tech can transform how games are made, Stephen writes.

Driving the news: Both companies announced new cloud-based development initiatives tied to this week’s Game Developers Conference.

The details: Microsoft is launching its ID@Azure program, which will offer more external developers, including indies, access to the company’s cloud tech for cross-platform play, collecting player analytics and more.

• The program is platform-agnostic, so it could be used by a studio making a game for Switch or PlayStation.
• Microsoft is also offering an "Azure Virtual Game Development Machine," essentially a cloud-based gaming workstation pre-loaded with programs such as Unreal Engine and Perforce, that are commonly used for making games. One part of the pitch: making remote development easier.
• Ubisoft is promoting an internal cloud-based production technology called Scalar, which one of its Swedish development teams is using to build a game that exists in the cloud. Theoretically, this leads to work that is less dependent on the power of the computers in the office (or the players’ home). Ubisoft says it’ll result in more nimble development and the creation of bigger and more malleable worlds.

The big picture: The pandemic has pushed even the biggest studios to rethink how their games are made, creating an opening for the cloud to have a meaningful impact on game creation — if not yet a clear idea on what people will play.

An homage to Nintendo's classic gaming magazine, handed out at the pro-unionization booth at GDC.

• The booth, organized by the CODE-Communications Workers of America union, also includes arcade cabinets that are set to run an anti-union-busting game.