For years, PC games companies have been pushing me towards pirating their games. Anti-piracy technology (DRM) has become so invasive that some games hardly work at all for legitimate customers, and we risk our computers being damaged if we dare to install a shop-bought game.

Meanwhile pirates get DRM-free copies that work perfectly and don’t do any damage.

I had three choices: (1) buy the game but then download the pirate version to play, (2) don’t buy the game and just pirate it, or (3) don’t bother with it at all.

So I stopped playing PC games. I still buy games on the PlayStation 3 but not nearly as many as I used to buy on the PC, so the games companies are losing out.

I’m finding that a similar situation is developing with movies…

Last night my girlfriend and I went to see Dear John, a film we’d been looking forward to seeing since we saw the trailer a month ago. We went to the Vue cinema in Inverness.

After we’d bought our tickets, the guy behind the counter asked if we’d like to pay £1.30 extra per ticket to get VIP seats. These are big, comfortable, leather seats in the middle of the cinema. As it happens I only had £4 left after buying the tickets, so either we took the VIP seats or Katie had her ice cream. It is a brave man that denies a girl her ice cream. No VIP seats for us :-)

But I had noticed that the car park was nearly empty so I asked the guy who was serving us, half-jokingly, would it be okay for us to just sit in the VIP area if there was nobody else there. He said no, they have VIP seating monitors who go in to the theatre during the film and check to make sure people in the VIP seats have VIP tickets. If we didn’t have the tickets then we’d be removed.

Fine. We took our regular tickets and went to see the film.

In a theatre with maybe 20 other people, we had been allocated seats over at one side. So I guess if you don’t pay the extra for VIP seats, you don’t just take pot luck on finding a good seat — you actually get put in bad seats. Nice.

The film was great. Better than I expected, in fact.

But a lot of it was spoiled by the half dozen kids on the back row who were constantly talking and, for some reason, rattling boxes of sweets. All the way through a 2-hour film.

The previous film we went to see, Shutter Island, was similarly spoiled by noisy people.

Interestingly, in a cinema that forbids you from sitting in an unused VIP seat, nobody bothers to enforce a NO DICKING AROUND WHEN OTHER PEOPLE ARE WATCHING THE FILM policy.

Now I write this as someone who has wanted to write for film from an early age, and who still wants to one day. I love film. I totally appreciate that films need to make money or there won’t be any more films, and the world will be a darker place. (Literally, when the projectors are turned off.)

But I’m feeling more and more like it’s not worth going to the cinema. You get charged extra to see a film in 3D, you get charged extra for a nice seat, you get punished with bad seats if you don’t pay the extra for a good one, you have to put up with kids ruining the film and nobody from the cinema makes the slightest effort to go up to them and ask if they could please SHUT THE F*** UP because they’re annoying everyone else.

I’m going to go out on a limb here and suggest that, if I feel this way, there are probably quite a few other people who feel this way. So maybe cinemas need to buck their ideas up a bit before we all start pirating films and put the cinemas out of business.