In the next ten years altered reality, rather than virtual reality, will become the technological wonder of the age - every person interacting with dozens of different layers and elements of digital and physical worlds simultaneously, in constant contact, in constant contrast. By 2030 the future holds something even more involving - physrep implants. These bundles of fibres are grafted onto every muscle in the human body, and bonded with every nerve. The process takes weeks, and at first, is extremely expensive. What it allows is simple - total integration. You do not simply see and hear the alternate worlds and shells that exist all around you, you feel them too, swim in them, they are as real as reality. Five years after their first release the surgery is commonplace. Five years after that it is compulsory (either socially or politically) across the whole of the world. The companies who produce the equipment, write the software, and run the systems have control of the population of the world, not simply in terms of marketing, but potentially in terms of what you see, feel, are.
In a playground where everyone can sense whatever they like, what do people do? They work, and talk, and love, and eat, and everything they always have. And they play.
Games. Gaming is no longer the province of a screen, but part of who you are. What games you play are as important as your political beliefs - in many places, more many people, they are your political beliefs. Which company you support, which game you run, which subscription you buy - how you choose the world to look, which world view you buy into, defines you. For most people games are safe - there are solid features that replicate the excitement without pain, without actual risk, without the possibility of death.
But for some people, that's not enough. For some people, they don't have a choice - the companies impose no safety limits on them. They strip them of the comfort of "it's just a game", and abandon them to a world where everyone else thinks it's simply fun. Why would they do this? Because some people, as today, don't want to be limited by the restriction of software, but open it up, take it apart, and rebuild it. They companies can't stop them accessing the data, so they force the data upon them. If they can't put a stop to it, they'll make it all too much.
As these indviduals, these hackers, wander from place to place, desperate to survive, they wander through different zones of game - these are the areas that companies have set up to enforce their vision on the people nearby. Countries are forming in a medium where the idea of a country is bizarre, and the corporations are at the heart of this new development. Some hackers find a game they can live with, and stay there and survive the best they can. Some even become rich, powerful, influential. Most are killed indiscriminately, cut down by a teenager who thinks he's killing an orc, an old lady who sees him as a target to hit with her car. Only by banding together, and fighting with all their might, can they hope to overcome the system that traps them within their lives, and be freed. They are integrated, uncomprising, and threatened by fun.