Between all the scheduled panels, meetings, and game demonstrations, covering a gathering like the Game Developers Conference can sometimes feel a bit too predictable. Thank God, then, for scenes like the one above, in which two "protesters" threw a bit of unpredictability into the proceedings by noisily decrying a focus on marketing and monetization that they say is holding the game industry back.

Johannes Grenzfurther, the guy holding the "God Hates Game Designers" sign seen above, is no stranger to "autonomous actions" like the impromptu protest he held in front of San Francisco's Moscone Center this week. As the founder of international art group monochrom, he's helped organize "context hacking" happenings that have involved everything from building cocktail robots to sending scanned scrotum pictures to various politicians (no, it's not safe for work).

Fellow protestor Adam Flynn said he's worked on noncommercial games in the past and follows the industry closely. He wanted to take advantage of the conference "opportunistically" to promote the idea that gamers should be seen as the audience for artistic works, rather than as monetizable customers to exploit.

"When you start to treat someone like a bundle of revenue rather than as a humane and natural and vital end unto themselves, it leads to a sort of cheapening of human relations," Flynn told Ars Technica. While commerce has always been a part of video games, Flynn says the free-to-play model is especially harmful to the idea of games as meaningful experiences.

"At least when there was an initial transaction, the relationship afterwards was to provide fun," he said. "Now, the notion of games as a service leads to an ongoing sales pitch. Anyone who's ever dealt with a door-to-door salesman has realized that relating with that person in a deep or human manner is relatively hard to come by, and there is a certain feeling of the relations with the other person being reduced to a mechanistic sense."

Flynn was unsympathetic to the suggestion that providing games as an ongoing service means that developers need to make sure the player continues to have fun well after the initial purchase.

"If you reduce fun to a set of mechanisms reminiscent of a rat in a cage hitting a lever to get a pellet, I think that reduces something rich and vital about the human experience," he said. Now is the time to discuss these issues, he added, as the first few decades of a medium's development can affect the way it progresses well into the future.

Grenzfurther insisted that the pair's protest wasn't subtle viral marketing for some product or another—an important point to clarify on a street corner where paid spokespeople were handing out samples for everything from Magicka to Nos energy drink. Not that loud cries calling the conference a "temple of sin" and demanding that attendees kneel on the ground seeking repentance could be easily mistaken for marketing message in the first place.

"Look at all those sad faces, coming from your sad game challenges," Grenzfurther cried to a bemused crowd that stopped to take pictures. "There is time to turn around. There is time to stop that way of living. ... You don't want to be John Romero! Take your badges and throw them on the ground!"