For many companies, profits have soared during the past decade as they found novel, compulsively designed ways of monetizing ardent fans in games like Candy Crush Saga and Genshin Impact, actively encouraging them to spend their money on in-game perks.

What a flowery description of greedy manipulation.

In the 2000s, an ideological battle played out across the fictional cosmos of EVE Online.

I was playing EVE around that time and it’s a little strange to see Goonswarm valorized like that. It’s the only MMO I ever tried where I really got into the social scene within the game. For a time I was loosely affiliated with a small independent corp which was loosely affiliated with a sort of informal federation of others. We all had the ability to make a living independently but we all usually had more fun when we cooperated and so we often did. I never really stopped to think about the politics of it but I guess it was pretty close to proper anarchism, in a way. The giant alliances that battled each other for total dominance were a but distant menace that we would occasionally snipe at or steal from.

Anyway, good book review. More interesting than I would’ve guessed when I clicked on the link.