Posted by
Andrews on Monday, February 16, 2009 4:46:34 PM
I was reading something nonpolitical today, and yet I still ran across something that started me thinking. (I know, is there nothing I can't make political?) I was reading
a quite lengthy thread about the game distributor EA, and their policy of only allow only 3 installs before cutting off a user.
Let me start with disclaimers. I have purchased games from Electronic Arts (their formal name before they switched to just "EA") for decades. I bought M.U.L.E. and Archon and probably twenty or so other Electronic Arts games for my VIC20 and Commodore 64, so I have a generally good impression of the company. They sponsored a lot of cutting edge game development shop back in the distant past when gaming was not a multi-billion dollar industry, and when top talent tended to go into arcade game design rather than computer work.
On the other hand, I think the way they define "new installations" is needlessly strict, and the limit of three is absurdly low. I know with the easy access to CD/DVD burning hardware the old trick of requiring a CD/DVD to be inserted to play is no longer feasible, but some of these copy protection schemes seem a bit draconian. And, sadly, just like gun control only harms the law abiding, this too only seems to inconvenience the non-criminal. I could, f I were so inclined, go to a torrent site and get a cracked version in minutes*. So the plan has in no way stopped criminals, just caused bad PR.
However, none of that is really relevant to my point. But, before we go on, let me provide the quote I want to discuss:
The bottom line is that the casual gamer is
where the almighty dollar is and EA knows well that the casual gamer
won't even know or care or bother to remember who published the game.
The fact is that EA can be a complete SPORE to their customers and
it's not going to matter one whit, because casual gamers and soccer
mums are still going to buy their games. Their target audience aren't
the people reading this forum, or people who would ever visit a gaming
forum, or even know what DRM stands for. They're not the kind of people
that do extensive research about a game before buying it.
EA will continue to thrive, just as GameStop continue to thrive
despite blatantly ripping off their customers, and McDonalds continue
to thrive despite selling horrible food that makes you fat.
The average person is stupid, they will believe advertising and won't bother to research.
There is no way hardcore gamers are going to convert a big company
like EA, so threads like this are pretty pointless. But all is not
lost, there are still companies out there which make games for gamers,
and that don't pass the burden of piracy onto their paying customers,
the best we can do is support these companies until they get bought up
by EA and other small companies take their place. Because there will
always be independent game makers making great low budget games, just
like there will always be great film makers making cult films.
I doubt many of my readers find anything objectionable in that comment, and that is my problem.
Actually, to add a little digression, this fits in to another topic I wished to discuss. My wife is reading a book right now about how "individuality" has become the new conformity. With the ubiquity of lip rings and "tribal" tattoos** the fact is that adopting a false "individuality" is the new way to fit in. When we talked about it, I pointed out that I noticed something similar in the demise of "pop music". Back in my youth there was "Top 40" which was distinct from any given genre. However, today it seems any Top 40 chart is made up of bits and pieces drawn from other genres, and there really is no distinct pop music. Maybe boy bands fit the bill, but beyond that, almost everything out there is some niche, some "individual" type, as no one wants to be caught listening to "pop" music.
And that relates to this post. The author, and those readers who found him unobjectionable, are suffering from the same idea. They all think they are "different" from "most people". They can say things like "most people are sheep" or "most people won't care", ignoring that they and those posting with them really ARE most people.
It is a phenomenon we see all over the internet. There is a strange tendency to see one's self as unique and separate from the crowd. And so we have the bizarre phenomenon of a majority which considers itself a minority, a pop culture which considers itself "alternative". And people who can ignore thousands of complaints about something and claim that "most people" are apathetic.
And that is where politics comes in. As I described before, liberalism and more intrusive philosophies require the belief that "most people" are idiots who need to be told what to do. Since a huge number of people think they are above all that, so they can happily tell the government to go manage those "other people", ignoring that the laws apply to them as well, and they will be ordered what to do as well.
Then again, maybe we are seeing this in the sudden drop in Obama's numbers. Not only are his supporters upset that he is passing a stimulus that they see as pointless, but they are coming to realize that they are not part of some elite above "the masses", but are simply down here among the peons with the rest of us.
Maybe once Obama makes us all equally miserable a few more people will realize that "most people" are a lot better than they imagine.
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* Actually, it is easier than that. I once had a game, "Fantasy Empires" that required a word form a specific page fo the manual each time you played. I hadn't played it for a while, and realized when I tried to play again that I had lost the manual. Eventually I found a list of page numbers and matching words online, but before I found that, I found an even more simply solution. I moved the executable to my FreeBSD machine and ran "strings -a" on it. In the middle of the output was a list of words. When it asked me for the "word starting with S on page 68" or whatever, I would just try all the S words and get in. It wasn't worth the effort, but had I really wanted to play, disassembling code and removing the jump to password protection (which is almost always absurdly easy to find, which is why we have so many cracked games on bit torrent servers - though some companies try to trick us with pipeline tricks and self-modifying code, but if you know the pipeline length and track logic switches and pipeline flushes, you still can figure that out without too much trouble) is not all that hard either.
** Anyone have any idea what supposed tribe the "tribal" tattoos come from? Someone once told me "something Polynesian" and that is about the best I have found. Certainly doesn't look like the tattooing of any tribe with which I am familiar. Unless they mean "the tribe" in the sense of William and Mary's basketball team, or maybe "tribe of hipsters".
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POSTSCRIPT
By the way, to fend off lawyers, I have never modified any code I did not own, nor distributed any copies. I admit I may have violated EULAs on some code by modifying it to work without copy protection, but only because I lost a password list, lost a CD, or because the virtual CD drivers that Dell started using (some sort of Roxio drag-n-drop thing) breaks CD validation for some programs, though I solved that last by getting an external USB DVD burner which doesn't use the Dell drivers. But other than violating the letter of the EULA, which may itself be an unenforceable contract of adhesion, I am innocent. I have not provided anyone with copyrighted material nor distributed my cracked version.
Actually, before DMCA came to pass, I did download a copy of one of the old SSI Dragonlance games (
The Dark Queen of Krynn, I believe) when my floppy disk was damaged. It was on an "orphaned game" site, dedicated to games no longer produced but still under copyright. The DCMA shut it down, but before it did, I used the site to replace a disk which had been damaged. (The other two still worked.) So I suppose that may qualify. Then again, as I had bought it, I think I have a right to replace it, so I would argue I have violated no copyright laws. (And that is part of the problem, the grey area around these sort of situations. Unfortunately, rather than clarify, it seems every new law makes the waters even more muddy in terms of electronic intellectual property rights. But that is another post.)
POSTSCRIPT II
The title comes from
an earlier post in which I complained about those who call anyone with whom they disagree "sheep".