When I see people complain about paying full price for a big video game title like Horizon: Zero Dawn, or Red Dead Redemption 2, I wonder where else they spend around a dollar an hour to be continuously challenged and entertained for months at a time.

I'm over 100 hours into RDR2, about 80% through the story, and I am *thrilled* that it's costing me about 60 or 70 cents an hour. I have made friendships and built relationships with fictional characters in a way I never believed was possible. I cried when my imaginary horse, Ted Danson, was killed by imaginary bandits, in a world that only exists when I switch it on. I care *deeply* about a family I will never meet, because they aren't real.

I've been making the argument for over a decade that video games are art. There is no other entertainment media, not books, not movies, not prestige television, that has ever made me feel emotions as intensely as Red Dead Redemption 2 has, and when I have finally experienced everything it has to offer (not counting the multiplayer, which I don't intend to play because griefers ruin everything), I will probably have spent less than *fifty cents an hour* for all of it.