As many of you know, I am a gamer. I love my video games, I'm a huge fan of several different video game franchises within quite a few different genres. One of my favorite types of games is the type where you get to make choices and either be a saint or a douchebag throughout the game and be treated according to your decisions in those games. Games that give you real choices and real consequences.

The last few years, I've noticed that the option to play the bad guy in games has been steadily being reduced. The first game I noticed it in was Mass Effect 3. Though you could be a completely evil person throughout the franchise, your choices ended up right at the end of the third game not mattering one tiny bit. You had three choices, and a fourth one added later on to give the illusion of choice to complaining gamers who didn't like the way BioWare built the game entire on choice only to stab their customers in the back. Then in Dragon Age: Inquisition, you are the Inquisitor and are good by default. You can be cruel to a point, but things in the franchise that you previously could do such as becoming a Blood Mage are now impossible. Funny how you could be a good blood mage warden in DA:O, or a good blood mage Hawke in DA2, but now all of a sudden you can't be a blood mage at all because that's blasphemy or some other such lame bullshit excuse. And you sure as hell can't be an evil character.

Then, we have Fallout 4, in which being a bad guy is somewhat possible, but highly discouraged and breaks the game in some cases if you dare to go that route. There are so many things that you could do in Fallout 3 that you simply cannot do in Fallout 4 that the game, though fun, still loses a lot of what made Fallout such a great franchise in the first place.

And then, the last few days I've been playing a Telltale game called "Tales From The Borderlands." I like the Borderlands games, and so naturally I wanted to see this game, and on my first playthrough I really liked it, because of all of the choices you could make. But in my first playthrough I played as a good guy, so I went back for a second playthrough earlier today, and as I started Episode 5 I found out the hard way that playing the bad guy is 100% impossible in this game. There's a place in the game where you join up with Handsome Jack, one of the big villains originally from Borderlands 2 and one of the antiheroes from Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel, who's basically a murderous psychopathic nutjob. The game builds up with all these choices you can make to side with him, but then in the beginning of Episode 5 he shows you a plan he has and all the choices you made up to that point to side with him are rendered completely irrelevant by making the only dialogue choices something along the lines of "I hate you and won't work with you anymore, Jack."

I mean, seriously. I played the big long playthrough of your stupid game as the BAD GUY because I wanted to be the BAD GUY, not so I could be shoehorned into playing the good guy against my wishes.

What is it with these idiot game developers who won't give players the choice to decide whether to be a good guy or a bad guy? I mean, seriously, I am so sick of being FORCED to only be the good guy, especially in franchises like Dragon Age and Fallout where the choice to be the bad guy has been a legitimate choice since the first games came out.

It's my computer, and goddamnit, it's my copy of the game. Let me decide what kind of character I will play, and stop hamstringing me and punishing me in other ways for having the audacity to decide for myself the kind of character I want to play on a given playthrough. It is NOT your choice what I play. It is my choice. Developers' refusal to honor players' decisions is doing far more to harm the industry than people who download the games illegally for free.

By the way, I pirated the Borderlands game I mentioned, and at this point in time I'm glad I did. I will NEVER pay for this game, precisely because of how it's built entirely on the pretense of choice, only to have those choices snatched away from you at the last possible second. Earn your money by making quality products and stop ripping your customers off, and then I'll be more than happy to buy your product. Until then, screw you.