This week on Uncanny Valley, hosts Brian Barrett and Zoë Schiffer discuss the highlights from Nvidia’s annual developer conference, and why Tesla recently got in trouble with some of its most loyal fans online. Plus, Meta’s initial decision to shut down Horizon Worlds VR on the Quest headset signals the end of the metaverse dream. (Meta has since reversed course, saying it will keep the platform on limited support for the “foreseeable future.”)

A senior Federal Communications Commission official overseeing ABC-owned California stations privately offered to assist FCC Chairman Brendan Carr’s campaign last year against the Walt Disney Co. and Jimmy Kimmel Live!, according to internal emails obtained by WIRED.

On September 17, Carr threatened Disney with regulatory action regarding the Jimmy Kimmel monologue about the assassination of Charlie Kirk, prompting major station affiliates to drop the broadcast and forcing ABC to temporarily suspend the show.

Later that day, Lark Hadley, the FCC West Coast enforcement director, emailed Carr and FCC chief of staff Scott Delacourt. The email, obtained via the Freedom of Information Act, was titled “personal note of support re Charlie Kirk ABC/Disney issue” and quoted Carr’s remarks from an interview with conservative podcaster Benny Johnson: “This is a very, very serious issue right now for Disney. We can do this the easy way or the hard way,” Carr said during the interview.

Noting that he had been a broadcaster himself, Hadley wrote that the “absolute lack of accountability has always confused (and sickened) me,” telling Carr and Delacourt: “Please, do not let up, and let me know if I can help in any way.”

It is highly irregular for a career civil servant and enforcement chief to express support for a politically motivated pressure campaign, or pledge services to a targeted retaliation effort against a broadcaster in their own jurisdiction.

Federal ethics rules prohibit government employees from participating in matters where their impartiality could reasonably be questioned.

Carr’s office did not respond to a request for comment.

While FCC headquarters typically handles television content complaints, Hadley’s office holds direct enforcement authority over physical ABC-owned stations in its jurisdiction, including KABC-TV in Glendale, the broadcast origin for Jimmy Kimmel Live!

The brief suspension of Jimmy Kimmel Live! became a defining test of Carr’s ability to leverage the FCC’s regulatory apparatus against political critics. Following Carr’s public threats, major affiliate networks Nexstar and Sinclair—both of which had multibillion-dollar mergers pending before the commission—refused to air the program, forcing Disney to temporarily pull the show.

An ABC spokesperson did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Will Creeley, legal director at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, tells WIRED that regional directors like Hadley have no business cheering on the FCC chairman’s regulatory threats against broadcasters that air views the president doesn’t like.

“Just like Brendan Carr, they swore an oath to uphold the Constitution—and that includes the First Amendment, which bars the government from coercing private broadcasters into censoring dissent,” Creeley says. “This is a public servant paid by our taxpayer dollars. Is it too much to ask for him not to sound so excited about the chairman abusing the power of his office?”

More than half of the nine developers who worked on the game have either obtained a US visa or tried and failed to do so. Most of them are from China, but the team also intentionally recruited talent from other countries in the hopes of incorporating more diverse immigrant perspectives.

“Everybody knows somebody that’s on a visa, but not all of them are vocal about that part of their identity,” says Andrea Saravia Pérez, an immigrant from Colombia who joined the team in February as a narrative designer. “How can we develop a project that’s interactive and shows people this immigration system that a lot of Americans are not familiar with?”

There’s growing interest across the gaming industry in making political games, says Yang. When her team brought H1B.Life to the annual Game Developers Conference in San Francisco last week, she says they received a tremendous amount of interest and support because they are tackling an important societal issue without expecting to make much profit. (The game was supported by a philanthropic organization and the developers also plan to raise additional funding from a future Kickstarter campaign.)

Yang says she has also heard from people in Germany and Australia interested in licensing or adapting the game for different countries. “The whole world is turning right, and life is getting more difficult for all immigrants,” she says.

“If we can just put people in our shoes, I think it can create a very positive impact,” says Saravia Pérez. “As long as players come to have fun and are able to sympathize and understand it a little bit more, I think that we’ve done our job as a team.”

Technicalities Versus Emotions

The H-1B visa program, created in 1990, is one of the most reliable US immigration pathways for white collar workers with college degrees. In recent years, the program issued about 85,000 visas annually, but since there are often more applicants than slots, a lottery system determines who ultimately is chosen. And if you don’t get it, you have to wait an entire year before you try again. Every person who has gone through the process has their own success or failure story to tell, me included.

The team behind H1B.Life started developing the game by interviewing immigrants. So far, Yang says they have talked to over two dozen people about their H-1B journeys and used those interviews to make the game more realistic and accurate. The biggest challenge now is to figure out how to balance explaining complicated immigration rules accurately and ensuring the game is still entertaining.