Late Night Rambles

In Fontaine It's:

Accusation: This performer is guilty of murder because someone died during the middle of his performance, and my proof is the timing and the fact that he's an orphan who was adopted by the Russians that we allow to adopt children from our nation because we don't have our own orphanage for some reason.

Defense: Goes down to the basement to check the area of where the murder potentially happened. Does not actually check any of the boxes in the area which were hiding the real killer the whole time. Halfway through the trial, randomly is like, 'Hey, can we go through the dead guy's belongings real quick?' Uses scary myth no one believes to try and win over the court's favor.

In Mondstadt It's:

Accusation: This scientist is guilty of murder and the unlawful disposal of human remains because several people saw him disposing of human remains at the dead of night. There were suspicious notes found on his person. His most recent experimental research had to deal with human transmutation and what happens to human bodies under specific reactions. He practices a rare and dangerous art form that is known to do fantastical and dangerous things. He could not be accounted for during any of the times he disposed of the bodies. Any potential alibi is unreliable as the person he was with fell asleep and therefore didn't have sight of him all night.

Defense: While what little remains of the bodies is left behind, you cannot find a legitimate match to anybody in the city. Therefore, you cannot prove that these remains are actually human remains, or that they're from any of the citizens of the nation. No one actually witnessed a murder; they simply claim to have seen the accused burying something. Despite attempting to use his profession against him, there is no motive to be found. His temperament hasn't changed, and he isn't exhibiting any signs of madness. On the night of a supposed murder, he was in his office doing paperwork. There would be no time to commit a murder, bury a body far away from the city, and then get back to all of his work done to turn it in immediately in the early morning.

THE HUNGARIAN FLAG???

I want to celebrate transmasculine art this pride month.

here's my face and some of my tattoos that i'm really proud of!

If I go spend 20 dollars at a restaurant we wouldn’t call it a micro-transaction, but if I spent the same amount of money in a video game then it is a micro-transaction?

Then they made their way to video games. And it used to be that they presented a reasonably comprehensible bargain:

You get to play a full-featured videogame for free, in return for which the game will occasionally advertise a premium cosmetic or unlock of some kind, for prices like $.99 or a couple of dollars. This was considered slightly annoying, especially in the mobile gaming space, but the trade-off was clear. Free game, paid optional content for less than the price of a cup of coffee.

The absolute maximal price you'd pay for a League of Legends skin was about $30, and those skins were considered an absolutely outrageous expense for totally dedicated League of Legends lifers, and were expected to be the absolute peak of technical possible quality. And those were still mocked as ridiculous expenses for weirdos, the sort of thing that no normal or average player should ever be expected to blow money on.

Bethesda was mocked for MONTHS for trying to sell $2.50 horse armor cosmetics in Oblivion. Microtransactions? In a premium product? In a sixty dollar game? Absolutely unacceptable! That was a breaking of the bargain!

But Bethesda's transgression was the thin end of a wedge. More and more of those post-launch monetizations started creeping into premium products, and by sheer erosion, by sheer slow grinding normalization, they started to multiply and the prices started to creep up and up and up, and day 1 DLC became normal, and ultimate and premium editions and super ultimate exclusive digital deluxe collector's editions and battle passes and lootboxes and... yeah.

It used to be a... not amazing, but at least a reasonably fair bargain. A transparent bargain. You get to play a game for free, and the price you pay instead is the soft pressure of microtransactions—actually micro transactions—being advertised to you.