From fun to profit
Games used to be a place for imagination — a way to dream, to explore, to escape. You’d sit down, start playing, and forget the world outside. But today, that world has moved inside the screen. The gaming industry, now worth billions, has turned play into a business. Every button we press, every level we finish, feeds the same machine: profit.
At first, it doesn’t look like that. Games still tell stories, still look fun. But behind them are strategies built to keep us hooked. Loot boxes, “pay-to-win” systems, and in-game ads aren’t just design choices — they’re ways to turn attention into money. What used to be joy is now a product. We’re not just players anymore; we’re consumers being studied, tracked, and shaped by the games we love.
The myth of choice
Modern games often tell us we’re free — free to choose our path, our weapons, our destiny. But that freedom is an illusion. Every choice is built within a system designed to guide us toward spending more time, and more money. Progress often depends on how much we can afford to buy, not how well we play.
The game world starts to mirror the real one: those who pay more rise faster. Success becomes a transaction, not a challenge. Even in virtual spaces meant to offer escape, the same inequalities follow us. And the companies behind these games call it “engagement.”
The business of attention
The biggest currency online isn’t gold or coins — it’s attention. Esports players, streamers, and influencers know this better than anyone. To stay visible, they must always be online, always producing, always performing. It looks glamorous, but it’s exhausting. Behind the screens are real people under constant pressure from algorithms that reward only visibility.
Meanwhile, game companies use every click and second of play as data. They know what we like, when we’ll stop, when we’ll pay. We are the product — and the more we play, the more valuable we become.
The same logic appears in digital gambling and hybrid platforms, where play and profit merge completely. Platforms that host live dealer games, for instance, turn entertainment into a seamless money machine. The excitement feels real, but everything is designed to keep us betting, watching, spending. What used to be a moment of joy now runs like a perfectly oiled casino — 24 hours a day.
Creativity under control
Beneath the surface chatter about broken launches, buggy patches, and “toxic” communities, there runs a quieter and far more corrosive current: control. Not the overt kind, but the kind that seeps through aesthetics, structure, and repetition. The major studios — those monolithic engines of capital — no longer merely produce games; they manufacture the very conditions of imagination itself. What counts as “creative,” “immersive,” or “fun” is already pre-scripted, rendered safe by marketing committees and shareholder expectations.
The endless cycle of sequels and reboots, recycled heroes in familiar dystopias, is not artistic stagnation by accident — it is by design. Predictability guarantees profitability. Risk, the raw oxygen of creation, is treated as contagion. Innovation survives only in the margins, in small independent teams that claw for visibility beneath the algorithmic noise of corporate promotion. Their existence resembles guerilla resistance more than artistic enterprise — fragile, brilliant, perpetually threatened by absorption or imitation.
Taking play back
If gaming mirrors the world that builds it, then reshaping how we play means reshaping how we live. Every mechanic carries an ethic; every system, a worldview. What would it mean if games were designed to cultivate cooperation rather than conquest, mutuality rather than mastery? If progress in a virtual world didn’t depend on accumulation, but on collective flourishing?
There are, here and there, glimpses of another future — modest, decentralized, luminous. Community-driven projects, open-source worlds maintained by volunteers, studios structured as cooperatives where revenue circulates instead of concentrates. In these spaces, play reclaims its original essence: an act of creation unshackled from the calculus of profit.
