Cancelling Game Pass, and My Uneasy Relationship with Activist Action
Last week I learned that Microsoft was included in the BDS (Boycott, Divest, and Sanction) movement's list of proscribed companies.
Today I cancelled my Game Pass subscription.
These two facts are less related than I'd like to claim.
I want to say that when I learned about their involvement in Israel's atrocities in Gaza I took it to heart immediately and took steps to stop giving them my money, and indeed since that day I haven't given them a penny - it's an easy claim.
But the truth is, when I saw it I thought "Man I'm halfway through Clair Obscur and don't want to risk losing my savefile and achievement progress in a savefile transfer." Pathetic shit tbh, but true.
BDS isn't even the #1 reason I'm unsubscribing!
I've long held that Game Pass (and Sony's PS+ equivalent) foster a really pernicious relationship with games, moving them from products to services and increasing their disposability in my life. I'm already paying for it so I might as well just download and try it, but quit at the first moment of friction. I think this worsens existing trends in game design, where we seek to remove any chance that a player might quit, even if it means they never experience joy.
I've been commenting to friends recently how getting the Oblivion Remaster on Game Pass made me less likely to struggle through technical issues and find solutions. That, if I'd actually paid for it, I might have done some tweaking as I did with the same game in 2006, or even refunded it if I found it truly unacceptable. Instead I just put it down and thought "maybe they'll fix it" - utter passivity. I feel so so little about a rerelease of a game that defined my teenage years and friendships, that introduced me to modding and SDKs and player-created experiences and... yeah I'll get to it later I guess.
So I was already, spiritually, about 80% of the way to cancelling my subscription due to the oppressive sense of ennui it gave me whenever I opened the Xbox app, and BDS just tipped me over the edge - but not before I'd finished my game. I can't be truly inconvenienced by my action.
I mean can I even truly boycott Microsoft? It would involve at the very least a lot of research on gaming on alternate operating systems, nevermind the cost of physically removing it from my PC - safely backing things up would require a fair amount of hardware that I don't really have to hand or within budget.
I should at least research it.
I've spent much of the last year celebrating getting my brain about 50% removed from the cultural morass of social media and the corporate internet, and this would be a natural extension of it - but the changes I've already made have improved my life whereas this would be a legitimate difficulty in my day-to-day.
Maybe it would result in a better day-to-day? But that's not why we do activism. And it's generally why I don't do it, which does feel shitty.
Multitudes to ponder.