cross-posted from: https://sopuli.xyz/post/44122961
After decades of living in a linux-FOSS world, I noticed these games at a 2nd-hand street market:
- Starcraft (few different versions/themes)
- Age of Empires (few different versions/themes)
- Civilization
They were a dollar each, so why not. I grabbed. Got home, installed win7 on a machine someone dumped on a curb, but could not install any of the games b/c I live offline. Fucking hell.
When I last played Starcraft well over a decade ago, I lived online and probably thought nothing of it. But it seems clear this shitty requirement is an anti-sharing policy because these games do not inherently need Internet. You can play against the machine or on a LAN. It’s not just the elitist exclusive WAN requirement that pisses me off… there’s a privacy issue too. And what happens when I enter the product key of a used CD? They probably have a tolerance on how many times that can happen, perhaps dependant on whether the hardware changes. Fuck the nannying.
Also consider that Blizzard and Microsoft servers are not going to run forever. They can pull the plug at any time and then no one can install their game. Should be illegal to make installation needlessly dependant on a service. Forced obsolescence.
Some of these games also require a CD to be inserted, which means you must have a fucking noisey CD drive attached at all times. Back when these games were made it was no big deal because all laptops and desktops had CD drives. Not anymore. I’m mostly annoyed by having to insert the disc, wait for it to spin, then I have to hear the loud spin as I play which also wastes power. So I installed Alcohol 120 to image the Warcraft 3 disc (which I still had from yrs past). It has 3 different versions of the crack for the particular shitty scheme used on WC3. None of the images work.
Obviously if I want to play these games I will need warez versions. How good are those dodgy distros these days? I can imagine some are just the original content but you still enter a product key (which I have anyway). But if they still need a WAN that won’t cut it for me. Do the warez versions overcome all these issues? Are they still in circulation?
Alternatively, I should ask, have there been any versions of these games repackaged and re-released for the retro gamers which don’t impose the shitty protections and server dependencies?
If not, I must say unlicensed cracked versions would be the most ethical ones:
- designed obsolescence thwarted
- privacy kept
- more inclusive (offline ppl and those without CD drives)
- better UX (no fiddling with discs and hearing the spin)
UPDATE
I am surprised about how much attention this thread got. The versions of software I experienced are as follows:
- Age of Empires III
- Starcraft II Wings of Liberty
- Starcraft II Legacy of the Void
- Civilization V
AoE does not require Internet… sorry for any misinfo I implied on that. AoE did not install because of a graphics driver issue that caused the installer to detect 0mb RAM on the video card. It ran fine offline after fixing the driver. The only fault w/AoE is the perpetual demand for a CD to be inserted.
The other three games certainly require Internet. It’s in fact written on the boxes so they covered their asses legally.
You’re not at fault if email is the only option. The lawyer would rightfully recognize that. So making (online) email the only option absolves you of the blame. Is that really all you want? I really don’t understand this reasoning behind the idea that only “internal data abuses” are ok.
To keep things short, there are two things that I feel like would satisfy a lot of your concerns:
The first addresses your issues with interacting with government services. It would allow you to say, boycott Microsoft while still using government services. It would extend to internal data processing. And it would even cover things like allowing Tor, since Tor is used to minimize data sharing with your ISP, which is a third-party.
The second addresses your desire to play games offline. The main reason why games force online connection even when the game doesn’t need it, is to prevent piracy. Without copyright, there is no piracy.
These are both fairly big goals, especially the latter, but still more reasonable and achievable than enforcing offline access imo.
It’s one thing to avoid blame. It’s quite another to hold someone accountable. Avoiding blame is only ½ the problem.
No, that’s insufficient. First of all, with knowledge comes responsibility. Even if email is the only option, I would be a witting participant in the abuse of my own data. Lawyers point fingers. I cannot effectively hold someone accountable for an act that I was a part of. The gov can of course argue: “you weren’t forced to do the transaction at all”. The gov can also get off the hook for wrongdoing on the basis that the people elected representatives who decided it’s okay to impose email. They point the finger back and say we did what the people elected us to do. We can bitch about their choice to use Microsoft, but the gov can rightfully argue: we cannot select an email provider that everyone will approve.
An internal fuckup is 100% outside of the people’s knowledge and control, unlike a situation where the people must directly interface with a bad player. The gov can’t argue that they were elected to internally use some shitty mechanism when in fact it’s a non-transparent operation. They were elected to do a /job/ and the fucked up in the execution of the job. As soon as it becomes transparent, we (the people) become good candidates for finger pointing.
I thought we’ve been over this. Minimization does not work. Europe shows this. It’s not just that it’s a symbolic law that rarely gets enforced. Even under an unlikely hypothetical situation of full-blown perfect enforcement, minimisation does not imply a ban on outsourcing. Minimal processing does not restrict /who/ may do the processing, just that excessive processing is banned.
Without copyright, game creators work even harder to protect their games from copying. Technological protections become far more important to creators when legal protections are gone. If you drop copyright protections, that does not ban game makers from using countless protection mechanisms. It just means they cannot take you to court for going against them. The game will still refuse to operate without Internet.
You seem to have a strong distinction between direct vs internal systems. I think you underestimate how easy it is to add a facade and convert a direct dependency into an internal one. In software this is called “adding a layer of indirection”. For example, if the government wanted to hide the fact that they use MS for email, they can simply use email aliases. If you send an email to someservice@website.gov, you will have no idea what provider they are using (assuming that they take measures to hide it).
I was talking about minimizing third-party dependencies, not minimizing data abuse.
Those same creators would work just as hard to work around laws that require offline access. Because as you just established, they want to protect their games from being copied, and online access is their technological measure for doing so. These game creators would just add an online leaderboard to their games and say it’s an essential component.
But if we go so far to abolish copyright, presumably other forms of creator compensation would become dominant. Forms that don’t rely on copy restrictions. After all, not all industries can just add DRM and technological measures to protect their creations. Photographers and digital artists also want to protect their works.
Though this is a big topic I’d rather not get into. I’ll just say that trying to force game companies to provide offline playability, is fairly unrealistic. I’ll wait to see how the “Stop Killing Games” initiative shakes out.
An alias would not shield them from an MX lookup (which is exactly what I do before sharing an email address).
Nonetheless, that’s just a technical nuance… your underlying point is still valid. A better example for expressing your point is the use of e-mail firewalls. I once did an MX lookup on an agency which resulted in something like “barracudanetworks.xyz”. I erroneously concluded: that’s not a surveillance advertiser so I will share my email with them. Then they later emailed me from a Microsoft server.
Email firewalls like barracuda effectively hide the role of MS, thus making MX lookups inconclusive. That opacity gives me a tangible thread of ammunition in court when the shit hits the fan because I would have no way of knowing that barracuda feeds Microsoft for that particular recipient. But then how does this play into your thesis? The gov has a choice of whether or not to use an email firewall like that. To support your position of forced-digital-transformation, you would have to mandate that a firewall like barracuda be used by all gov agencies. Of course from there who’s to say everyone trusts barracuda networks?
To be clear, I was talking about /minimization of data/, not abuse, but for the ultimate effect of mitigating data abuses. So that’s what I thought you were suggesting. As for minimizing third-party dependencies, I would certainly praise such a movement. But it’s unrealistic. There are far too many right-wing conservatives. Increasingly so. The hard-right crowd pushes for the extreme opposite. They love capitalism and want all gov services to be privitized to the full extent possible. They want everything outsourced and they are succeeding in that mission. Countless cases where privatization is abusive, inappropriate, and ineffective proliferates in the US.
So I suppose your question is: what if we could hypothetically pass a law the forces the gov to insource everything. It’s borderline crazy talk. Does that mean there should be government farms to provide food for those incarcerated in prison? It’s very unrealistic that you could ever have a minimization of outsourcing. So then the devil is in the details of where exceptions are made. Even in the digital space, surely some gov agencies would make a case for why they need MS OS on their platform because they have some specific special needs. It would be a game of exceptions… a mess by which abusive admins would make uncredible cases for why they should have MS Windows and whatever other garbage. It’s an impossible line to maintain.
So in this hypothetical world where outsourcing is banned, that would eliminate some of my problems with forced-digital-transformation. But it doesn’t wholly address the privacy issue (e.g. an insourced resource could still needlessly collect IP addresses). I doubt any of these problems would be sufficiently addressed in my lifetime to justify forced-digital engagement.
Sure, but to be clear I don’t think I ever said game makers should be mandated by law to support offline gamers. I winged about a problem without prescribing a solution. The solution could be a consumer boycott. Or it could be gov action. I think a somewhat effective gov action might be to simply state that copyrights are forfeited by artificial game requirements. Game makers would then have to choose between legal protections and purely tech protections. Whatever attempt they make to “work around” the law could also be regarded as an “artificially-imposed constraint”.
There is no perfect solution. Certainly across the board abandonment of copyright would not solve this problem. Which is not to say it’s a bad idea.
I agree. But it’s important to recognize that “force” comes in many forms. There is gov force; then there is market force (by which consumers boycott, for example). I will of course use what little force I have at my disposal, which is to never buy a game with absurd artificial constraints.