More like Adsassin's Creed...

Pictured: not the map screen.
Not pictured: the snapping of the
last thread of Ubisoft's credibility.

I mean, I'm shocked but not shocked, you know? By this. By what? By the story at the link, which, since we both know you're not going to read it, I'll sum up: in-game ads. Wait, hang not, that's not new, but what is new is a console game stopping what it's doing--or rather what you're doing--to assault the senses with an advertisement for some other game. In this case, people playing Assassin's Creed Odyssey paused the game to look at the map only to be greeted with an ad for Assassin's Creed Mirage. 

A pharmaceutical ad and not, as one
would think, an ad for a toilet car.

And if you're not a video game player, you're probably like, what's the big deal? And you'd be correct. This hyper-capitalist hellscape we find ourselves in has inculcated the idea that by simply existing in the world we are consenting to be advertised at. Everything comes with ads. Try watching something on YouTube without your video being interrupted--often mid-sentence--by a sufferer of moderate to severe Crohn's or ulcerative colitis and her toilet car.

Green beans, salt, butter, shallots, garlic,
shaved almonds. Done. I just saved you
like a full minute of nonsense vamping.

And the fact that one can usually buy their way out of watching ads suggests that those bombarding us with them know how much we hate them. It's marketing by extortion. Case in point: I made green beans almandine for a Friendsgiving I attended last week, and found myself endlessly scrolling through a meandering and overly-adjective-filled story of the history of the recipe and why the French love green beans. Finally, after what seemed like an eternity of the writer's anecdotes about the dish, I hit on the part that tells you how many goddamn shallots you need. And it occurred that this was all padding to maximize the number of ads they could throw in. 

Oh shit, that's exactly what it is...

Basically, what I'm saying is that being advertised at is the worst, and so I'm particularly aggrieved that Ubisoft has set such a dangerous precedent here. Sure, they claimed that this was a technical error and that they were only trying to put ads in the menu screens preceding their games, but I think we all know that this is where this is headed. This was a test balloon to see how strong the outrage would be on Reddit or wherever, and--wait, is Reddit just a free focus group for game companies?

Anyway, it's not whether people like or dislike something ads, it's how much we dislike it. Advertisers are wearing us down. We'd have been outraged thirty years ago if we'd rented a movie from Blockbuster and a Mountain Dew commercial, or whatever we had back then, started playing in the middle of The Lion King, but some streaming services have tiers that allow ads during content, so here we are. The dislike can be fairly strong, so long as it doesn't hit the threshold that makes us cancel a subscription or not buy a game and I'm thinking this was just Ubisoft seeing what they could get away with. 

Look, Ubisoft, we're just trying to forget about the real world for
a little while and murder some hoplites, is that too much to ask?