I would like to speak to the manager of Gamescom

I did not consent to Opening Night Live, and yet at some point last night, without my sign-off, without so much as a courtesy email, the entire video game industry gathered in a room in Cologne, Germany, and unveiled a series of "major tech announcements" directly at me. I want that sentence to sit with you for a moment, because I do not think you understand what just happened. A live broadcast. Trailers. Countdown clocks. A host in a blazer standing on a stage built specifically, I can only assume, to make me feel something, and nobody — NOBODY — called first to ask if I was emotionally prepared.

This is not about video games. I need to be extremely clear about that from the outset, because I can already hear the objection forming in your small, unbothered mind: "Alice, it's just a gaming showcase." No. It is not "just" anything. It is a coordinated, multi-hour, professionally lit event in which corporations I have never met decided, unilaterally, that my evening belonged to them. I was not consulted on the run of show. I was not sent a preview. I found out about "major tech announcements" the way I find out about everything that ruins my life now — secondhand, after the fact, with the damage already done.

Let's talk about what actually happened, because the reporting is maddeningly vague and I have had to piece this together like a forensic investigator of my own suffering. A "series of high-profile reveals." From "major game developers and technology partners." During "the live broadcast." That's it. That's the whole story. Do you understand how insulting that is? An entire industry assembled its brightest and most well-funded minds, put them all in one room with a stage and a lighting rig and probably a craft services table with those little bottled waters that cost four dollars, and the sum total of what I am permitted to know is that Things Were Announced. Things! At me! And I'm supposed to just accept that?

I want to know who authorized this. I want a name. Somewhere in the bowels of the Gamescom organizing committee there is a person — a director of programming, a VP of Live Events, someone with a lanyard and a headset and entirely too much confidence — who signed off on the run of show, who looked at the schedule and said "yes, this is what we are broadcasting to the world tonight," and that person owes me a conversation. Not an apology yet. A CONVERSATION. I am willing to hear them out. I am a reasonable person. But someone is going to sit across from me and explain, in plain language, why a "series of reveals" was permitted to occur without a public comment period.

Because that's what this is missing, isn't it? A comment period. When a city wants to rezone a parking lot, there is a 30-day public comment period. There are flyers. There is a folding table at the library with a sign-in sheet. And yet a live global broadcast unveiling "major tech announcements" from "major game developers and technology partners" gets to just... happen? On a Tuesday? With zero opportunity for me, a stakeholder in the culture whether anyone likes it or not, to weigh in beforehand? I am not anti-announcement. I want that on the record. I am pro-announcement, PROPERLY ADMINISTERED. This was not that. This was a drive-by.

And don't tell me it was "optional," that I "didn't have to watch." That is the oldest trick in the institutional playbook — you stage the spectacle, you let the trailers autoplay across every platform I own a device for, and then when I object, you retreat to "well, you clicked on it." I did not click on anything. The culture clicked FOR me. I woke up this morning and the phrase "Opening Night Live" was already lodged in my consciousness like a splinter, already trending, already assumed knowledge, and now I am the one who has to do the emotional labor of catching up on "every notable announcement" just to remain a functioning member of society who can follow a conversation at brunch. That is not optional. That is compulsory participation dressed up as a lifestyle choice, and I see through it.

Here's what really gets me, and I want to say this slowly so the people in the back of whatever windowless conference room approved this year's broadcast schedule can hear it: SOMEWHERE IN THAT PROGRAM THERE WAS A MOMENT WHERE A GROWN ADULT STOOD ON A STAGE AND SAID SOMETHING LIKE "AND NOW, FOR THE FIRST TIME ANYWHERE." For the first time anywhere. Do you know what that phrase does to a person who was not in the room? It tells me, explicitly, on the record, that history happened without me. That there was a "first time," an "anywhere," and I have been permanently and irreversibly excluded from both. You cannot un-ring that bell. There is no re-air, no do-over, no special encore performance just for Alice. It happened. It's done. And nobody thought to ask if that was okay.

I am documenting all of this, by the way. Every trailer, every partner logo, every "major technology" that got "unveiled" without my input — I am keeping a list, and it is getting long, and at some point, and I want to be very clear this is not a threat, it is a promise, someone from Gamescom leadership is going to be hearing from me. Formally. In writing. With CC'd parties. I don't yet know who those parties are. That is a detail I intend to work out later, and it will not stop me from listing them, because the listing itself is the point. Institutions only understand two languages: revenue, and a strongly worded letter with several names CC'd at the top, and I am fluent in the second one.

What I want — and I think this is more than reasonable, I think a functioning civilization would consider this the bare minimum — is a seat at the table for next year's Opening Night Live programming meeting. Not to approve every announcement. I'm not a monster. I understand that surprises are part of the format. But a heads-up. A single heads-up, sent to me personally, the night before, saying "Alice, tomorrow the industry is going to unveil a series of major tech announcements, please brace yourself accordingly." That's all I ask. That is the entire ask. And instead what I got was silence, and then a broadcast, and then a headline the next morning informing me, after the fact, that my evening had already been decided by "major game developers and technology partners" I have never once been introduced to.

So here is where things stand. I am owed an explanation of the vetting process. I am owed a public accounting of who greenlit the run of show. I am owed, at minimum, a seat on some kind of advisory committee for next year, because clearly the current system — a system with NO ALICE OVERSIGHT WHATSOEVER — has produced exactly the kind of unaccountable, unilateral, "first time anywhere" chaos we are currently living through. I did not consent to any of this. I am still not okay. And I will be watching the run-up to next year's show very, very closely, because if this happens again — if there is another "series of high-profile reveals" sprung on the public with zero warning and zero committee structure — I am going to need everyone involved, up to and including whoever holds the keys to that stage in Cologne, to understand that I am not going away.

— Alice, still waiting for someone to pick up the phone