attention

Games train the inner locus of control that media and institutions erode: malleable outcomes, noise filtering, instant hypothesis testing, and flow.

To the uninitiated it sounds crude. To someone starved of connection by a lifetime of shyness, ERP was an alchemy of attention, the forge where loneliness was quietly unmade.

Autonomy lives or dies in attention. Ad hominem, demographic determinism and coercion are ways to hijack it, and VRChat is the inverted proof.