Ever Crack indeed.
It's sad how they blurr the lines of reality and a fiction game world. More and more people are incentivised on these online games now to live in these game worlds, via in-game Fashion Wars, known as comsmetics (look at Guild Wars 2 end game), or survivalism (like Valheim, Minecraft type games), or Housing (LOTRO, Second Life).
These are basically precursors to NFTs in the centralized world of video gaming.
I don't spend much time on Online games, in fact these may probably be the last MMORPG videos i will do on LOTRO. Or any other for that matter. The digital video game landscape is filled with people who have no love for real life. They love their smart phones more (i bumped into a few people today walking, eyes clued to the smart phones every second of the way) and more. They walk around with Apple Airpods, blocking out the sounds of the natural world, even if their phone is out of sight.
Soon they will track people and further weaponize meta-data through these games. The loot-box addiction will be propelled by NFT technology...which means a huge gaming blockchain with AAA online MMO game titles built on it perhaps...and then it's game over...
To an extent these can be fundamentally a desirable attribute. In Second Life, for example, it is the main draw, in fact. In Valheim and etc, construction is almost a game in itself, and mirrors the draw in games like Sim City and many other games.
However, I remember when I took a look at WOW when it first came out and replaced the RTS earlier WOW games. I found it's more flashy graphics anti-immersive, as you relate, and vastly inferior to Everquest because of it. That also drew an entirely different crowd, which at the time was enormously different from the Everquest role players, or from what yet is found on NWN, and LOTRO. I've never even glanced with interest at any AAA game AFAIK, because of these issues. I, like you, prefer the more immersive, less flashy, games of our past.
Consider further back in the past, even before any kind of remote electrical communications, and even before the Pony Express and letters were possible because writing was invented. As you consider each iteration of the world that existed prior to the present, you discover greater freedom as communication of edicts from rulers was less possible.
The advent of recorded speech was a clinal boundary, because our brains are evolved to acculturate us, and can't natively differentiate between fictional speech and natural speech of our neighbors. Hearing speech informs us culturally. Visual presentations of people further created acculturation to fictional society. Such fictional presentations have always been created by Priests and Shamans, but were limited to local iterations prior to mass communication. The Catholic Church and Islam were evolutions of this acculturation that sought to become universal, global phenomena.
The more immersive such representations become, the more we are acculturated to fictional society. We are today trained to live in culture that includes extraordinary powers and strange beings riding flying turtles and laying waste to ancient civilizations to attain to magical boons.
How can trapping rabbits to consume their corpse compare? The extinction of the megafauna and end of the ability to create ~4k meals of ~4kcal each with one kill destroyed a way of life, an ease of production of wealth we can hardly even imagine today, about ~13kya. But even then people walked around imagining the fictional reality their shamans created, that enabled their local society to prosper IRL. The fiction we immerse ourselves in through watching TV or playing games is entrained and our real world cultures reflect our fictional acculturation.
Oh no. The 'Gentle Persuader' is fine. I have yet to check the door I applied it to.