Our entertainment masters have identified the enemy in their efforts to connect us to a smooth-flowing, never-ending pipeline of content. That enemy is: friction. The roughage in our gaming diet is bad because it might cause us to turn off or tune out. At first glance, this sounds reasonable. I tell stories and don’t I want to tell the whole story? Developers are painfully aware of the statistics that show that only the minority of players ever complete a given game – and many of the new system-level initiatives are aimed at the frustrations that apparently cause this. Sony’s Activities feature neatly breaks its games into convenient chunks of fun, packaging up the objectives and tasks available and teleporting you right into the action. In Spider-Man, this cuts out the effort of navigating an open world to find a mission trigger and lets you quickly hoover up side-objectives. But what does this say about the experience? The game already goes out of its way to streamline things with easy-to-access fast travel and map markers which lay out a red carpet to each of its snack-sized missions. Streamlining further is like giving diners at a buffet a hoover. Side-objectives were originally added to open worlds to encourage players to engage with their spaces – now the side objectives themselves are the point?