COMEDIAN Chris Rock once said he loved hip hop, but couldn’t defend the genre’s somewhat abrasive lyrical content. As a stone cold gangsta hip to the hustle myself, I can’t agree with Chris condemning an art form that will always speak to me on the authentic street level to which I’m familiar. Hip hop, doncha stop. Indeed.

Modern video gaming, however, offends me more than any salacious suggestion of intimacy between mother and son or arrogant boast professing financial solvency through gold acquisition. Greed is never good, but a relatively new gaming business model – innocuously referred to as “micro-transactions” – is not good at all. As good as Ant McPartlin’s chances of ever seeing the Australian jungle again.

For those who haven’t played a game since Mario had bumfluff, micro-transactions are small “real-world” payments for in-game goodies like guns, armour and extravagant hats. Over the past decade, putting price tags on pixels has contributed greatly to gaming’s ascension to the entertainment industry’s top table.

Sales now easily eclipse music and movies combined. Netflix is Azad Video compared to industry giant Take-Two – producer of the twin phenomena Grand Theft Auto and Red Dead Redemption. It also owns Rockstar North, the powerhouse Edinburgh studio which helped create both titles.

Despite the staggering artistic and technical achievements being trailblazed by game companies like Take-Two, all is not well in the gaming community. In even the dustiest of online cubbyholes, you’ll find an aggrieved gamer condemning micro-transactions – holding them up as the cynical fleecing of loyal customers who have already paid £50 for what is now the “base” experience of a game.

Another grievance some players have is many major new titles arriving in broken, buggy states, quite clearly rush-released to meet the whims of shareholders within the frame of a financial year. You wouldn’t release The Sixth Sense without the bit at the end revealing Bruce Willis is a ghost – so why release an unfinished game? Sincere apologies to those who haven’t seen The Sixth Sense.

Yet, for the gaming community – about a billion or so folk at last count – it’s micro-transactions that are the final straw, turning what was once a relatively cheap and cheerful pastime into an all-encompassing addiction that leaves you as skint as Jordan. And not the country.

No redemption

MICRO-TRANSACTIONS are unfathomably lucrative for the games industry – providing milk and honey on tap for the extent of a game’s lifespan. This can last years – six in the case of the legendary Grand Theft Auto 5, which enjoyed a dark dose of Scottish creativity from Rockstar North and is still going strong, having spent longer at the top of the charts than Wet Wet Wet. Or P**h P**h P**h, as Billy Connolly, actually rather diplomatically, branded them.

It must be said that micro-transactions are not always bad for players – indeed, free-to-play games only exist because of them. This “free” business model mostly applies to basic mobile and social media gaming such as Candy Crush or Farmville, which harbour their very own darkly rewarding and addictive elements – and eventually hook your old mum into forking out for in-game bonuses, powers and upgrades to keep her dopamine levels buoyant.

Psychologists call the process “variable rate reinforcement”. “The player works for reward making a series of responses, but these are delivered unpredictably,” says Dr Luke Clark of the Gambling Research Centre. “Dopamine cells are most active when there is maximum uncertainty, and respond more to an uncertain reward than one delivered predictably.”

Beyond the wildly addictive quick fix of casual mobile gaming that has left grannies all over the nation living on yellow Whoops! sticker sandwiches, the micro-transaction problem takes new flight, with the black feathered wings of a demon, on consoles and PCs.

The issue mostly lies with what are known as “AAA” titles, such as the recent planet-straddling colossus Red Dead Redemption 2. In the few weeks since its release, “RDR2” – less a game, more a Western reality simulator – has become the world’s second fastest-selling entertainment product of all time. And the actual best-selling product of all time? That’d be the aforementioned GTA5, made by the same studio. A deal at the crossroads has obviously been made at one point – and it looks like the devil may now be demanding payment.

Much talk around RDR2 has focused on horse testicles adapting to in-game weather conditions and players having the option to shoot suffragettes, but these are simply smokescreens diverting from the real controversy-in-waiting – Red Dead Redemption Online.

This launched in a trial state last month and is, essentially, an old-school arcade machine in the home – solely designed to keep you feeding it a continual supply of cash to win. There are, of course, a minority of well-heeled gamers who defend the business model, some citing RDR2's “free” gold bars players get as an introduction in-game currency. Certainly comparable to the “free” £20 you get to join any online bookies. There’s no discernable difference when it comes to the chemicals being released in your brain. And the need to keep them flowing.

Back to the grind

For those unfamiliar with modern gaming, handing over real-world cash isn’t the only way of ‘powering up’ your digital avatar. Developers claim the micro-transaction system is fair as all upgrades are also freely available for players who "grind". Not the way Prince meant it – in this post-sex era, "grinding" is simply the process of wasting hundreds of hours of your finite conciousness carrying out mundane tasks such as selling animal skins and rummaging around drawers – again, not that kind – to raise a meagre fistful of digital dollars.

When you’re an adult with a job and children, with perhaps only a short time to play at night before the horror of reality once again arrives with the sunrise, you can certainly see the appeal of avoiding "grind" by handing over hard cash to become Godlike. Yet, despite creating what is truly one of the most immersive, impressive gaming experiences of all time, Take-Two seem to have their hearts set on poisioning much of the awed goodwill that they have garnered with their latest product.

Presently, as it’s a ‘beta’ mode, no micro-transactions exist in Red Dead Redemption Online - but it's been confirmed they’re coming soon. Yet even at this early stage, RDR2’s tiresome, slave-wage "grind economy" has disgusted millions of players, who are simply unpaid botanist beta-testers for a multinational conglomerate’s latest magic money tree.

There is very little financial reward for countless hours of grind in RDR2 – leading many gamers to suspect forthcoming micro-transactions will be far too enticing to resist. Infact, they may actually be necessary to compete on any reasonable level. It's perhaps simply the old story of art imitating life – the rich being able to instantly win and the poor having to ‘grind’ for years, working ten times as hard for the same reward, to achieve the illusion of social status amongst perceived peers. It certainly seems RDR2 Online is more of a reality simulator than we ever imagined.

Such bad hype is a disaster for a developer clearly aiming to replicate the astonishing success of its current golden goose Grand Theft Auto Online, which over the past few years has reportedly enjoyed revenues of $1 billion. Yet, Take Two CEO Strauss Zelnick seems indifferent to gamers' concerns. He certainly alarmed his loyal customers when he recently said: “We are probably under-monetising on a per-user basis. You can’t give stuff away for free in perpetuity; there’s no business model in that.”

Failing to mention that not so long ago, players forked out £50 expecting to get a game in return – a transaction now obviously viewed as simply an entrance fee to get inside a digital shopping mall, paying the price for the privilege of powering-up.

The world at war

THE lucrative online element of AAA titles is a ubiquitous presence these days. Keeping players terminally locked inside a prison of competitiveness is clearly the new modus operandi of major developers.

That the most recent Call Of Duty game was “online only” speaks volumes about the direction of travel gamers are being forcibly pushed towards. And there’s good reason developers favour online – it’s difficult monetising single player experiences. There’s only so many fancy hats a person can buy.

With the worm in the soul of human nature being what it is, the competitive online experience is clearly a piñata ripe for prolonged rattling. Little more than an online coliseum or bear pit, such dissociative mass kettling quite understandably bringing out the very worst in gamers.

Anyone who has taken out another online player with a perfect headshot has likely been accused, in a rather crude manner, of crossing a line of intimacy with their own mother or suchlike over their headset. Yet, developers now know that as well as bringing out inner ugliness, it also brings out gamers’ wallets too. Right now, many millions of pounds are being spent by folk making themselves digital gods, with impenetrable armour, monstrous guns and lovely hats – all bought with the sole aim of humiliating strangers, killing them and then looting their bodies for supplies.

The existential void gifted by a generational absence of global war seems to have been subconsciously remedied by the evolution of video gaming. Online, players are afforded meaning and status. And also getting in some good practice for a no-deal Brexit.

And finally ...

AN Atari 1200 blew my wee mind in 1982, hooking me on the thrill of trying to outsmart programmers for the next 40 years. My byline photo may suggest some Benjamin Buttony witchcraft is at play, but the secret behind that flawless skin and buoyant barnet is simple – Marlboro Lights, never Reds. And, of course, never giving up gaming.

I had, however, long given up hope of being surprised again. Incremental graphical improvements had been enough for me. Until I tried virtual reality (VR) – and again, I was a child giddy with wonder at the possibilities of technology.

There’s certainly good reason Mark Zuckerberg paid $2 billion for VR firm Oculus Rift. Watching live concerts and the footy with the best seats in the house will happen, and soon, but think bigger than that. Think leaving molecular reality altogether.

If you think paying £5 for a digital hat is outrageous, just wait until you’re forking out for a digital lampshade in your VR mansion. Or a digital spaceship to explore the digital galaxy. Or, inevitably, paying to wander around a cherished childhood memory.

Online friends will be able to join you exploring the corridors of your mind – or even AI chums. With them you’ll chuckle about the days when flesh folk typed on flat screens and feared physical death, before they had the option of uploading their minds to the digital cloud to live forever.

As the classic 1985 game Space Harrier put it, welcome to the fantasy zone. Get ready.