Game Not Over for Gamergate

In video games, the “live service game” is ascendant. That’s a clumsy industry term classifying games with no proper ending. Programmers keep updating titles like Fortnite, Call of Duty, and League of Legends in perpetuity to addict their players—extracting their money and data along the way. Indeed, the internet-at-large’s attention economy operates in the same fashion, but games manage to hook their users with ruthless efficiency. Half of millennials and Gen-Zers are glued to them for at least eight hours a week, and predatory “microtransactions” in popular live service games are now a $67 billion industry.