Let me put myself back in the shoes of one of the worst weeks of my life: the week I collectively spent 250$ USD on the hottest thing in town. Now, it wasn’t a drug (those would come later, and cheaper) and it wasn’t gambling. I’m from a background that benefits either a neighborhood kid having a gambling patriarch who’d wind up missing, or had parents from dirty and dusty enough of a town that everyone knew when you made a little over a fiver and fifty cents an hour you didn’t go pissing it away in a casino: there were broker and dumber people than you willing to do it anyway, and it’s not like a Casino ever hurts for people wanting to sit in the stool for a few hours.

The hottest thing in town wasn’t an experience, it was an advertisement. I hope I don’t have to tell you by this point that if you don’t think advertising works on you, it already has. It was an advertisment for what I already had bookshelves full of and a candy-coated desire hungry for a shitload more sugar. At first it was pretty simple: what’s two-fifty for a Spider-Man or Thor? I’ll be responsible and do like I always do with these cell phone games: resist the lure of horny voice acting and cleavage and quit playing Fire Emblem Heroes before I spend any money at it, always sticking with these games until the reward center fries and a hand stretches out of the screen, flicking fingers my way and telling me whatever I’ve got in my pocket will get me through the door.

I remember plainly that it was a mixed bout of depression, Pabst Blue Ribbon and a desire for activities I could mostly square away with never getting out of bed.

This is a story that could only happen if the mattress is on the floor. It was an earned depression though: I was so fucking sad because nobody wanted to be around, everyone was broke and we were all off doing our own thing. When you’ve got not much going on but drinking and stinking, well, who the hell wants to lay down the groundwork for friendship with that? No amount of studded jackets and fashion can cover you up long enough people don’t see right through you.

So in bed I stayed, plugging away hours and hours of my life at Marvel Future Fight. A cell-phone RPG good enough I told friends it was squarely and supremely “a real videogame.” it’s like “playing a game of Diablo in five minutes.” My phone was in my hand on lunch breaks, during conversations that could have been intimate and it became part of a morning ritual that involved neither breakfast nor brushing my teeth.

It was not, for its part, a supremely addicting videogame. Like all of these Gacha games on the phone it’s just put *together* in a way that feels like successs is a rollercoaster that is Always Ascending. the drop never comes, it gets higher and higher. So I bought Moon Knight and She Hulk and I don’t for the life of me remember if I need to italicize these names but fuck, they’re all just properties now, right? Spend five bucks here, twenty bucks there. Fuck it, let’s go all in: if I spend 100$ from a big pay check on everything I need surely I can coast on the game for six months or so.

After all, I’m good at videogames, right? I’m good at videogames.

The trick to dealing with any gambler, for future reference, is no matter what you tell them they’re sure that they know better than you do. After all, the trick to all of the classic gambling methods is it just takes *one* stroke of luck to pay out and break even. And if you break even, why the hell not keep going for one more round?

I spent more time playing Marvel Future Fight that year than I did anything else besides Call of Duty: Black Ops III. Shunted out of my little comfortable apartment, I broke my phone and when I ended up on couches the first thing I did was load up Marvel Future Fight. Only to find out the 250+ dollar tab I had ran up over the year no longer mattered: I forgot to save the login data to a google account and it was all lost to the ether. If people tell you videogames don’t matter to us emotionally, well, I know I’ve got one story where they the pleasure center of my brain come to such a colossal halt of guilt and anxiety over paychecks carved out in the name of Spider-Man that I know if nothing else: videogames can make us feel stupid.

Diablo Immortal is out, it’s “free-to-play” and an entry into the series meant to get the most coveted of all audiences: the mobile gaming market, into a beloved franchise 25 years late. Those aren’t my words though: they are the words of a writer for a massive Gaming Publication home to articles about how the game may be predatory, or may not be: it may only be predatory to certain overly wealthy players who’re willing to cash out and test the strength of Blizzard’s RNG (the title of the next diablo).

We are, of course, still mired in a deeply public well of the numerous sexual abuse and predatory assault allegations against Activision and Blizzard staff (activision-blizzard staff) that is a few more “we’re deeply sorry there was a room to sexually assault people in” apologies from being neatly wrapped up. Through the outside, we can certainly get a lens into the heart: if Diablo Immortal is Activision-Blizzard baring all, then who’s changed at all?

The Kotaku . Com article has a title that implies Diablo Immortal means something for the future of gaming, to be sure but it’s more along the lines of the messy little tag-line that fucks me up. A bumper sticker of a take so well crafted that I can’t help but appreciate how well it crafts a sentence, a world view and I hate to raise conjecture, but fuck with how these things go: maybe where the writer wants to work in the future, too.

“Many Diablo fans think that Blizzard’s mobile adaptation isn’t for them. They’re right”

Who is it for, then? You can drink all night in a Casino, but the moment you tell me with a smug grin that you didn’t even gamble a sane person might ask you why the fuck you didn’t just go to a regular bar: it’s likely you’re not there for the ambience. You just love drinking in Casinos. It’s not the lure, it’s the satisfaction in tempation. Sure, you never pulled the handle of the slot machine, but you’re still giving them money.

If it’s not for you, but all of the bad parts of predatory gambling are still there, is hanging out in the casino just a way to give distanced approval of the practice? I’m not gambling, but you can.

Blizzard, Activision has been at this for awhile: experiments with Real Money Auction Houses always have gotten the better side of the gaming public: god, look at these benevolent companies. If they aren’t releasing the game for free, they’re giving us the opportunity to earn our hard earned money back with a little fun work. Who’s that for, too?

There’s always an article somewhere, going back at least to 2009 that videogames are the ultimate recession proof art: willing to sell themselves to anyone and everyone to make a quick buck. Consoles are getting more expensive, wages are staying the same and collectively the gamer-public seethes at the idea of paying 40, 50, 60, 70$+ for a videogame of any kind that does not meet every possible critical and aesthetic bar they have, and yet: our benevolent Activision Blizzard is willing to just give away games for free. I mean for me – not for whatever sad loser is going through it hard enough to spend money on Diablo Immortal.

consider buying the Queer Games Bundle instead.

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