Our gaming lives are not our own.

We’re bound by rules made by others.

We are told there is a natural order to virtual worlds, and that those who try to upend it do not fare well.

We’re told that corporate and individual greed is the way things are, and will remain until the end of times.

We are told that no matter what we do, it will never amount to more than a single drop in a limitless ocean.

What is an ocean, but a multitude of drops?

The gaming industry has been corrupted by both malicious players and profit-hungry corporations.

Gaming franchises that used to seize our imaginations have been ruined by the endless stream of poor game design choices fueled by shareholder’s greed.

What used to be an immersive artform is slowly devolving into an endless sequence of limited-time offers, rotten loot boxes, and worthless microtransactions designed to squeeze every last drop out of our wallets, making us pay for things we do not own.

Games we play have become plagued by the scourge of scammers and hackers that do not care about experiencing imaginary universes, making friends or having fun — their only goal is to make a buck by stealing what was never really ours.

Our gaming lives are not our own — they are chained to centralized, cloud-powered servers, where all the things we worked so hard to build can disappear in an instant of someone else’s selfishness or incompetence.