It's 2024 and we're all used to constantly being cheated, manipulated, scammed, and nickeled and dimed in our real lives. It's just part of living in modern society, especially in the U.S. Whether it's grocery store shrinkage labeled as "new and improved," printers that have chips to avoid you using after market ink replacements AND that refuse to print in black and white after emptying their own magenta cartridges while "cleaning" themselves, or the constant barrage of robocalls for various scams even on cellphones, modern life just involves a bunch of predatory companies and people trying to take advantage of us.

It was always this way to some extent but the Internet has made it worse, as has consolidation of companies. When Amazon has driven most of its competitors out of business and damaged local retail in a lot of places it can afford to ship you the wrong products (or clearly used products sold as 'new' for 'new' prices) and what are you going to do about it? Go to the local department store that closed in 2012? Get mad about the cheap print on demand books and order your books from ebay, only to end up with a print on demand cheap copy?

When you can set up a new company with a few clicks of a mouse and be exposed to tens of millions of new suckers customers there's just no reason not to cheat people, besides morality and scruples but who cares about those? And conversely when you're a huge monolith and the only game in town there's also no reason not to cheat and steal. What are your customers going to do? Go to a fly by night Internet only operation that will cheat them even worse?

Health insurance denies valid claims. Telecomm companies tack on hidden fees. Online ticket sellers charge more than the cost of the ticket for "convenience" fees. It's a non-stop barrage of bullshit that insults your intelligence and plunders your wallets.

And it's in games too and only getting worse.

I think that this is behind a lot of the outrage over seemingly smaller issues when it comes to live service games. People play games to escape the bullshit of life. They play games to go into a fantasy world where they're a wizard or the First Baseman for the Yankees or a Race Car Driver or a college senior with a bunch of hot suitors or whatever fantasy a particular game is selling. It's escapism because we all need to escape sometimes.

But now when you escape to a fantasy world the bullshit follows you. When you bought a copy of Final Fantasy VII in 1997 you got to go to Midgar and be ex-SOLDIER Cloud fighting to free the people and the planet. And for some games, including the FF VII Remake games, this is still mostly true (though those games do have DLC.) But when you buy a copy of Suicide Squad you do not get to be King Shark bounding over the rooftops of Metropolis fighting Superman with a gun (for some reason.) I mean you do, but you also get a virtual used car salesman trying to get you to buy cosmetics that 25 years ago would have been unlocked through in game achievements or cheat codes. And when you buy a copy of The Crew Motorfest you get a virtual used car salesman trying to sell you virtual cars for real money.

And it sucks. It's one of the worst things about modern life transported into games in a REAL WAY. It's as if Gran Turismo found a way to really injure you when you crashed your car. Or if Spider-Man's subway based fast travel system forced you into 30 minute delays like the real subway does. Or if you could marry a girl in Fable only to have her cheat on you with the milkman and take your house in the divorce.

We don't play games to experience the shitty parts of life unless they're very specific games and those shitty parts are presented in very specific, generally, cathartic, ways. We play games to experience some kind of curated, enjoyable, experience. If I wanted to experience sunburn from going outside I could just go outside without sunscreen. Games don't make you worry about high UV index days because that stuff' not fun.

And neither is the hard sell. But games DO make you experience that. And they reshape their worlds to make it more appealing. Whether it's lowering XP curves to make the booster more appealing or making the free costumes boring to inspire you to spend real cash on the "premium" ones, games make your fantasy worse so they can upcharge you. Like a car company intentionally nerfing its software so you'll buy a more expensive package. More nickel and diming, more manipulation, and even more scams.

Helldivers II recently added a PSN login requirement for PC players. And people will say it's free, it's just to get you into the PSN eco system and to be able to spy on you a little. It's just to sell your information to data brokers and track you and that kind of thing. No biggie. We all deal with it constantly. But that's for now. Who's to say what the future will hold. And this is a game people already bought and paid for and were playing. They were already in the fantasy world of Super Earth spreading Managed Democracy and here comes real world Sony wanting to pry into their data and maybe their wallets in the future having already gotten $40 plus microtransactions for their game. Here comes the greedy real world business guy sneering with his hand out wanting more and more and more.

It's not fun. And it ruins a lot of what IS fun in games. Because it adds predatory bullshit to a fantasy world that you already paid for.

This is one of the big reasons modern gaming feels less fun. It isn't every game, of course. If you buy Penny's Big Breakaway you just get a fun little platformer adventure. And Tears of the Kingdom just sent you off to save Hyrule the same way the original game did, just with more bells and whistles. Super Mario Bros. Wonder partially helped keep its wonder by NOT turning the Mushroom Kingdom into a big scammy mess where you log in to see advertising and a bunch of bullshit currencies with "best value" plastered all over. It's not every game.

But it's more and more games, and it goes against what makes gaming valuable and fun. It goes against the spirit of escapism. It's like a reverse version of The Ring, where the horrors of the real world crawl through the TV into the virtual world to stalk you and take your money. And it sucks.