From https://blacktabbygames.medium.com/on-writing-scarlet-hollow-episodes-4-and-5-edition-and-maybe-the-roads-untraveled-too-490a012808ca 

A tiny handful of people have reacted very strongly to this ending, going as far as to send hate mail or otherwise harass us online, arguing that by purchasing the game, they should be free to do whatever they want with it, and that it’s unethical of us to impede their actions.

[...] 

I can think of no other medium where I’ve seen audience members assert a moral right to edit a creator’s work and to not only personally declare those edits as valid, canonical alterations, but to expect and demand that a work’s authors publicly condone these actions.

Though often couched in arguments favoring collective ownership, this stance, to me, is rooted in consumerism taken to an extreme: a personal desire to so wholly have ownership over another person’s work that one is willing to strip away anything that causes discomfort, choosing only to engage with a sanded down idea of what a text could have been rather than engaging with the text itself.

If you do hold this mindset and you found this short section of a very long essay upsetting, then I ask you to take a step back and ask yourself why that is.

Again, is this who you want to be?

=====

I found this passage referenced online and while it's nothing new, the "I can think of no other medium" part of it stirring some thoughts in me.  I think it is easy to just point at "toxic gamer culture" and call it a day, but as I was thinking about it more I came to the conclusion (well, not a new one for me necessarily) that people who play games are pushed toward feeling more entitled because they have invested more active effort into their experience.  It's not a phenomenon unique to video games either; I think it's easy to see that when people are more invested in a given thing they are more prone to anger, frustration, etc when that thing falls short of their expectations.  Frustration is also really common when a thing is "blocking" someone from doing something they want to do.  This could be red tape, doctors having to file insurance claims, or it could be something like a tool that doesn't work (dull scissors, shoddy wi-fi, a printer that constantly jams).

This is also why you might get surprisingly extremist views from fandoms and communities that are super invested in works of fiction.  To these people, the characters in these creative works are an essential part of their lives that has had real-world consequences on them.  Maybe it brought them a sense of community, maybe they spent a lot of their own time making fan works, heck, maybe it made them feel like they were in love.  It's not just a movie that they sat there and passively watched; it's something they really put a lot into.

None of these were really new thoughts in my head, but when I started putting it all together I realized something really troubling, which is that the way that (many) games are made and the business model around their success necessarily pushes players toward this level of investment.  "Live service games" are the new model of success, and games have gone beyond simple aspects of "addictiveness" or even "FOMO" and into making you feel like you are an active part of driving the game experience as a whole.  Twitch streamers understand that parasocial relationships come with numerous problems but also understand that someone who "thinks of the streamer as their best friend" is more likely to tune in every day, to gift an extra sub when asked.

And so the frightening conclusion is that, as far as the studios and publishers are concerned, people are =supposed= to be feeling more entitled to their experiences.  The more they can cultivate this sense of "personal ownership and investment", the more successfully they have done their job.

It is cool, I guess, when creative works can help inspire people to feel bigger feelings like community, meaning, purpose, investment.  Something on a higher level than just entertainment.  It's a struggle to see that it also comes with so many problems, but I guess if I step back and think about it holistically, that's just always the case with many thing in life, isn't it?  You gain something, but also open yourself up to more risk.  The question is, what will you decide to do about it?  Will you accept the bad along with the good, or will you reject it entirely?