Welcome to Video Games Weekly on Engadget. Expect a new story every Monday, broken into two parts. The first is a space for short essays and ramblings about video game trends and related topics from me, Jess Conditt, a reporter who’s covered the industry for more than 13 years. The second contains the video game stories from the past week that you need to know about, including some headlines from outside of Engadget.

Please enjoy — and I’ll see you next week.

Summer Game Fest 2025 will be remembered as the one that happened while the Waymos burned.

The SGF Play Days event space, where games media and influencers meet up with developers over a long weekend, is in the fashion district in Los Angeles, and this year it was a few miles from the heart of sprawling protests against ICE. After months of inhumane and legally dubious deportations of LA residents by masked federal agents — emboldened by President Donald Trump’s far-right extremism and equipped with weapons built for war — the bubble of resistance popped. Protestors hit the streets after ICE officers swept up dozens of people across LA in another round of coordinated raids on Friday, June 6. The protests grew over the weekend and Trump called in the National Guard, followed by the Marines. Militarized LAPD officers attacked people with horses and batons, and they fired rubber bullets into crowds and directly at one journalist. On Sunday evening, protestors lit a line of unoccupied Waymos on fire.

The thick, black smoke was visible from the Play Days lot. I saw it as I was leaving the media lounge, heading toward the food trucks, and it stopped me in my tracks just in front of the Capcom booth. The low buzz of helicopters and the cries of police sirens had been a constant companion that weekend, but the smoke was new. I stopped and took a photo as upbeat reggae music pumped out of the speaker beside me. Around the corner, an actor dressed as a Fortnite banana in a suit was enticing passersby to play Ddakji as part of a cross-promotional effort with Squid Game. The dissonance made my head spin.

The sickly pallor of encroaching authoritarianism has hung over every video game convention in the past six months — because it’s shadowed literally everything in the United States this year. I’ve spent a significant amount of this time actively shutting down thoughts about Project 2025, government-sponsored human trafficking, neo-Nazis and all manner of hateful, bigoted policies targeting the United States’ most vulnerable people, because if I didn’t, the stress of these realities would consume me. I think most of us are doing something similar nowadays. We have to deprioritize specific thoughts at certain times, in order to get work done, maintain relationships and make it through the day. Having to ignore these monumental things in favor of, at least in my case, video games is a mindfuck.

The smoke from the burning Waymos, visible from the main alleyway at SGF, felt like a physical manifestation of this constant internal tension. Video games are a vehicle for connection and expression, and they’re deeply valuable to society — but, as with anything else, their importance is a matter of perspective.