Why videogames just aren't worth it to me anymore....

In June 2011, I will celebrate my 40th birthday. When I hit human odometer rollover moment, I will have been gaming--videogaming, that is--in some fashion for more than 3/4s of my life. I remember being 8 or 9 years old and utterly enthralled by my 14-year old cousin's ability to dominate one of the first Asteroids machines to arrive in Pennsauken, NJ.  I've shoveled quarters into a Spy Hunter stand-up [raise your hand if you never saw an episode of "Peter Gunn" in your life but can somehow hum a 4kHz-quality of the that show's theme song damn near note for note], dismantled an Intellivision controller to try to figure a way to make the nearly-worn-through contact traces work just enough to get one more game in before begging Dad to order a replacement part, delicately untangled tape that wrapped itself around a spindle [or fumed because a friend's dumbass brother...or was it a classmate?...confused the game with some junk tape, taped over the punched-out "record tab" holes, and TAPED SOME FUCKING LOGGINS & MESSINA LP RIGHT OVER MY GAME], and spent hours, christ knows, swapping some 10,000 floppies, CDs, and DVDs, one after another, to install something that I just HAD to play that night, no matter how long it took.

I bought my first PC because I recognized that neither my beloved Mac Plus nor any its many subsequent more powerful kin were ever going to be the future of gaming--no matter how fucking cool [i]Pools of Radiance [/i]and[i] Sun Tzu's Art of War[/i] really were. I *built* my first PC because I knew I could offer a better experience than those dim fuckers at IBM and their many brethren could for a hell of a lot less money than those insane system tweakers at Falcon demanded. I've tweaked every setting and moved every jumper. I've stripped an OS down to the most minimal configuration necessary for the system to even boot just to try to squeeze an extra 5 frames per second out of a videocard that should have been replaced two generations earlier.

I bought teflon tape to resurface the bottom of my mouse, which now glided nearly friction-free over my steel mouse "pad." I also came to learn the Laws of Thermodynamics the hard way, in the form of popped capacitors, blown transistors, and nearly melted chips of every variety in a quixotic quest to see how far I could push a system in order get just a hair more performance out of a system I might have used to earn my living but that I designed and built around the gaming experience it could offer---even though I knew in my heart I could never exceed a 1:6 kill-to-death ratio in any of those games I built that rig to run.

I put up with being told I would be John Romero's bitch.

There's a little part of me that believes that man's flexible saddle joint and opposable thumbs evolved solely because Quake would have been just so goddamned hard to play with flippers.

I will readily admit that I shamelessly pirated a few games--some over a 9600-fucking-baud modem--when I had no money. I've also gone out and bought games that I had pirated because the game was hella fun and someone should get their $1 cut off a retail sale. Thanks to being quite gainfully employed for the last 10 years, I haven't had the desire, let alone "need" (that's the lie I'd tell myself it was, anyway), to pirate a game. While I've never waited outside in a line to be "first" to grab something the minute it goes on sale, the list of games that compelled me to detour into a Best Buy to buy them on Release Day+1 is too long to count. The number of times that I walked out of that Best Buy with *only* the game that drove me there could probably be counted on not more than both hands--there was always a movie, CD, card, or cable that caught my eye and ended up in my bag (and on my receipt).

I've also bought games multiple times over because I lost the "Play Disc" I needed to insert just to get the fucker to launch or because I irreparably scratched install CD 2 of 6 and couldn't load it on a newly installed hard-drive or freshly built rig. I've even bought those same fucking games YET AGAIN on some download service because I was so fucking sick and tired of the problems with the first two experiences in this paragraph.

PC games and all their attendant required hardware and the ancillary purchases that were a by-product of going into a big-box store were my steady contributions to the consumer-driven economy that is alleged to be The Way of Things these days.

Over the last decade or so, I've watched the number of hours of playable content in many of my PC games drift inexorably downward, particularly in the sequels whose development I followed so very closely because their mother game captured my imagination so completely that I quite literally lost days to it. I ground my teeth when the 50+ hours of game play in the original Deus Ex was whittled down to what appeared to be some 10 hours of content in its sequel. I bitched when that 10 hours of content featured multiple loads per *level* because, in one of the first episodes of simultaneous PC and console development, those levels had to fit on the 64MB of RAM the X-fucking-Box had to offer, and I was stupified by the seemingly endless menus that just had to be rendered in 72-point font because the Konsole Kiddies had to be able to read it on their TV from the 6-foot distance Mom insisted they sit.

I thought smart guys like Warren Spector would see the wretched experience console ports offered PC users and at least spend a little time, money, and effort to throw a bone to the actual power the PC--just about ANY PC--offered over any console.

That said, I certainly also recognized the economic monsters that the newer generations of consoles had become. I knew full well that the PC would become the red-headed stepchild of the game development community.

I am continuously irritated by checkpoint-only saves and games that don't give me an option short of a console hack of turning off the big flashing RELOAD command in the middle of my screen. I absolutely believe auto-aim was implemented for--and only used by--the developmentally challenged. I'm baffled why it continues to be designed into games and can't see why it is allowed to exist in any PC game, no matter how lazy the port authors might be.

And yet I accepted all of it because I knew that's what the Console Legions demanded, required, needed, or simply were most used to. If the games were good enough, I'd suffer it or find some series of console commands unearthed to disable as much of it as possible.

(I do take some solace in laughing at people on boardgame sites who cry about the "Cult of the New" and yet sing the praises of console games. Though my experience is based solely on walking the aisles of my local Big Box retailer and watching what my friends buy and quickly resell for a fraction of the initial price, most console devotees are not just Cultists. They're the digital equivalent of Khorne Berzerkers, punctuating their frenzied exchanges of new and old product on the GameStop battlefield with roared oaths of "Discs for the Disc God! DLC for the Bit Throne!")

What I can no longer accept are the ridiculous hoops I am being tasked with jumping through just to PLAY a fucking game these days. As I mentioned, I've bought all manner of games multiple times because the original disc, for whatever reason, could no longer work its arcane magicks that allow me to launch a game I quite clearly paid for. I've got games installing kernel-level drivers--i.e., rootkits--that my corporate IT security folks would classify as malicous code without a second thought.

I've suffered games (BloodBowl) that tell me exactly how many PCs I might ever install it on and actually requires me to EXPLAIN myself to the person from whom I bought the game if, for any reason whatsoever, something has caused me to exceed that limit. That same scheme requires games to phone home to the development team in order to UN-install them from my computer.  
I have games that require me to log into some online service at least once to install and authenticate just to play a single-player campaign (Steam). While this was bearable, the Digital Rights Management arms race "upgraded" this experience to require me to now log into some online service in order to SAVE my game--even though the save file is a local one (Bioshock 2's genius integration with Games for Fucking Windows)

Now, as I eye Silent Hunter 5, precisely the sort of command-heavy simulation that the PC platform was truly BORN to run, I'm being told, that in order to play any game from a publisher, I'm not only going to have to cough up $60, but I'm required to ensure a 100% stable digital umbilical is in place at all times so that the Publisher's DRM Placenta can feed me constant permission to launch, play, or save the game. If my router flickers for so much as a moment, I will lose the progress in my game. Further, should the publisher decide to take the Placenta Servers offline--or have the decision made [b]for [/b]them, as happened with this week's significant DDoS attack on UbiSoft--I can't even LAUNCH the game.

As also mentioned previously, I have not had the desire or need to pirate a game in years. I have the money; I willingly--even fucking happily--give it these people. And yet, I am now more intimately familiar with the PC game piracy scene than I ever was because I need to download the cracks, hacks, and piracy tools just to play the game I ACTUALLY bought without having to jump through all these hoops. It's a hugely troublesome pain in the ass, sure...but it's only a pain in the ass ONCE. Then I can just launch the motherfucker.

What I can't fathom is what new DRM approach could possibly be on the horizon. They've already tried to nuke my machine through poorly designed kernel-level drivers like StarForce and ridiculous system scan/launch-cripplers such as SecuROM, which won't launch if it finds--or merely believes--you have software installed that is capable of ripping and burning the original disc. The only thing I can see untried is that publishers will finally declare DEFCON 1 and try to simply kill me through some clever scheme to eject my "Play Disc" from my machine at near-hypersonic speeds to sever my head from my shoulders.

At this point, I just give up. To say I'll never buy another PC game is disingenuous (at best; it's more a "flat-out lie"). But I'm tired of this shit. As you can guess from the list of all the "features" that have been "ported" to PC gaming over the last half-decade or so, consoles hold absolutely no allure for me, outside of, perhaps, a desire to tap into their long-standing supremacy in the sports and Tekken-esque fighting game spheres. But beyond that, you know what? Silent Hunter 4 is probably a good enough gaming experience for me.

Postscript: I appreciate the need to protect one's intellectual property. I really do. I absolutely understand and applaud GW for recognizing the value of their IP, even while I jeer their approach. I've got shelves full of boardgames that I will likely NEVER get to play with an opponent in my house. I bought many of them specifically to serve as "cardboard licenses" to play the game via VASSAL, CyberBoard, or (yes, for a small additional fee), Aide de Camp II. I didn't intend this to be any sort of "how boardgames trump videogames" aricle, but take a moment to think how ridiculous the sort DRM that is a regular part of the videogame world would sound in the boardgames.

As hamfisted as Games Workshop's C&D blizzard was, it simply isn't analogous to what videogame publishers regularly ask one to endure for the "privilge" of possibly playing their (as at no point, per the End-user License Agreements, are they ever YOUR) games. I can at least take comfort in knowing that Kevin Partland isn't going to come to my house and sit on my copy of [i]Conquest of Paradise [/i]until I promise him I will only ever play it at 3 other people's homes, nor will Art Lupinacci demand I make a long-distance call in order to get some code off a WWII-era one-time pad to enable me to punch the counters for [i]Russia Besieged[/i], and then subsequently maintain an open teleconference line, at my expense, with Lembit Tohver any time I want to play the full campaign game.

Going forward, I think I'm going to be pretty fucking content if I only ever know "DRM" to be an acronym for "Die Roll Modifier."