Sarah Jeong of The Guardian on the anonymous nature if Uber:

It’s doubtful that Uber specifically set out to improve the lives of African-Americans. But the company accidentally did something that anti-discrimination statutes and awareness-raising campaigns were unlikely to ever achieve. It’s not exactly a huge blow to racism, but still: technology is changing how people of color experience and are represented in the world, and it’s all the more remarkable that much of this was never intended in the first place.

A very interesting read on technology’s inadvertent effects on racial and gender discrimination.

An internet radio show about videogames and the people who love them.

I am revisiting Robert Ashley’s A Life Well Wasted. If you’re a fan of Radiolab, the music of I Come To Shanghai or Jim Guthrie, and culture and history, you should be listening too.

Polygon:

Jam entries will focus on teen emotional wellness and deal with issues including physical and online bullying, dating violence, suicide prevention and depression.

Phil Harrison, Microsoft Studios Europe, in an interview with Eurogamer:

We are very fortunate in having Rare and Lionhead in the UK as crown jewels of Microsoft Studios.

Rare is working on a couple of things at the moment, which we will announce at the right time. But I’m really excited by the things they’re doing and I believe you will be as well when you hear about them.

At E3 2014, Nintendo won over the hearts and respect of longtime fans by investing in first-party favorites, doubling-down on the Mushroom Kingdom, and acknowledging classic IP. Microsoft is not blind to the effectiveness of this move.

Killer Instinct was rebooted last year and Conker is making his way into Project Spark. My suspicions still lie here.

Chris Grant, Polygon’s editor-in-chief:

This month, we lost some of our team. This includes Russ Pitts, one of the founding editors of the site, along with Tom Connors and Adam Barenblat, two of the most talented and hardest-working people we had. These decisions are never easy, and Russ, Tom and Adam are people I have considered, and will still consider, friends.

We never thought starting a video game outlet in 2012 (has it been that long already?) was going to be easy and we’ve learned a lot in the last two years. We learned that there’s an incredible opportunity to tell in-depth stories about the people — both fans and creators — that make video games what they are. But we’ve also learned exactly how hard it is to do that with consistency and how much appetite there is for that kind of coverage.

We’re very proud of the feature writing and video work we’ve done, but producing that content is expensive and requires that all (or at least nearly all) of those pieces are smash hits. When you’re publishing two to three pieces like that a week, bringing in the audiences day in and day out is tougher than we’d imagined it would be way back in 2012. Lesson learned.

Will Polygon still make incredible features? We absolutely will. What will change is the frequency.

As previously stated, Pitts is a hell of a writer. As for Connors and Barenblat, their work inspired me to revisit my dreams of working in film and became the hook for my fondness of Polygon. I’d have happily paid for any of their features.