Somewhere in Warsaw, Poland, two actors are pretending to have sex. It’s not the most intimate of environments. The mood lighting, if you can call it that, is fluorescent bulbs burning overhead, making the sterile, white walls look even brighter than they actually are. In lieu of a bed or couch, the actors fit tightly into a makeshift tank—a technical mockup that's more pipes and bars than any sort of vehicle—to capture an intimate scene between Cyberpunk 2077 mercenaries V and Panam Palmer.

Girls don’t play video games, or so it was said. Video game software didn’t fit in with the pink-and-purple glow of the girls’ toy aisle in the 1990s, and so software was for boys. Of course, that’s never been true: Girls have always played video games and used computers. Video games, though, were marketed to boys, creating a sort of self-fulfilling prophecy and reinforcing the stereotypes that very marketing created.

Investors and publishers spend billions of dollars on the video game industry each year, but just a small fraction of that money goes toward funding game companies led by women and those from other marginalized groups.

Grow a Garden is a simple video game and one of the most popular ones on the planet right now. Even if you’ve never heard of it.This morning, the game’s official page on Roblox, the platform from which it is launched, stated that there were 2,044,359 people playing it. Right at that moment. That’s higher than the current top game on Valve’s PC platform Steam, Counter-Strike 2, which peaked today at just under 1.7 million.It’s also higher than any Roblox game before it.

The Rise of the Video Game Union is an all-in-one explainer on why game workers are unionizing and the specific steps that future organizers may take.

Kim Kardashian was already more than a household name in 2013. The Kardashian name (hers, specifically) was equivalent with “celebrity” — or “notoriety,” depending on who was saying it. But there was one more step toward international fame that she wasn’t so sure about: whether she wanted to become a video game character.