Having grown up in Japan, a land that blends the ancient historic feudal past with the 'Blade Runner' future and then living in Thailand which dwells mainly on its past and stubbornly refuses to enter the future in so many ways, it's always struck me that gamers in particular are often 'ahead of time' or even 'outside of time' in our heads. We play sorcerers and giants, The Dragonborn and cyberpunks, star ship pilots and stealth warriors, effortlessly switching between these persona as easily as Kryten in Red Dwarf with his 'spare head number 2, sir' ...
Our minds can encompass the vicarious challenges of a medieval warrior, a WWII soldier, a special forces operative in the 23rd Century enhanced by cybernetic technology or a cool commanding Star Trek Captain. Our expectations are so high that each new sensory experience pushes our desire and 'need' levels to drug like proportions. Indeed AR/VR itself will be the narcotic of the future in which many will lose their grip on mundane 'meat' RL reality.
Consequently in the internet age, we have many of us lost our patience, or our ability to simply breathe in, wait, and let time heal or create stuff to match our expectations. They used to say ' if something ain't broke, don't fix it' and now the mantra is 'if something ain't perfect we demand that you fix it.. right F*kin NOW!!!!!!!'
Much as we all love 'value for money' and can dream the truly BIG dreams, we expect our gaming, movie and TV show producers to have an almost flawless grasp on our desires and sweat human capital blood for delivery, (and still face the political correctness backlash). There are times we need to maybe take a step or two back and simply say... 'This is The Way' . Maybe yes, in this case we were sold a 'beautiful nothing' lacking in the depth we are now conditioned to want 'or else'.
We sometimes maybe need to accept that, as others here have pointed out, we hanker after a fix from a virtual experience of a dystopian world with corrupt corpos, obsessive financial interests, social disappointment, profiteering, and trashy 'rip-off' cultures.. and then when we get a taste of this treatment in our own reality we rebel against it with abhorrence, demanding our 'rights' .. these days, it seems, $50 (or equivalent currency) doesn't buy you a whole lot of those....
' Commerce is our goal here'...