Who here remembers error 37? I don’t, but then again, I didn’t try to get onto the game immediately like a total dolt on release night with the stupid assumption that, like every other game that is centered around lots of online play (and online near exclusivity),  the servers would magically be able to hold under the weight of millions of people clicking the ‘log-in’ button.

However, I’m sure everyone remembers the whole ‘always online’ fiasco. I also didn’t mind that simply because I’m not a cheap douche or on the top of a mountain where the only connection I can get is one that involves people behind desks inserting jacks into slots to make my connection happen. Yes, I know I’m referencing how the phone lines used to work in the early half of the 1900s, that’s the damn point. Regardless, people are still pissed about it, and it’s not unjustified. I mean, the game was supposed to be single-player oriented with co-op focus, so it doesn’t really make a whole lot of sense to be online all the time. Couple that with Borderlands being a HUGE success (read: Unbelievably Massive) using a similar system with drop-in/drop-out connections and play, I sometimes scratch my head at the decisions with Diablo 3, but it was still a very enjoyable game, and a great way to kill time every once in a while now.

So, you’d think after all that, other companies would take a big hint and stay away from trying to keep people online all the time, helping spread rumors that ‘big brother’ is always watching what you do?

OF COURSE NOT YOU IDIOT! WHY WOULD COMMON SENSE DICTATE ANYTHING ANYMORE?!

The Xbox 1, or the Xbox One, or the ‘Xbone’ or the ‘Xbozone’ or the ‘Xbizzone’ or the ‘One’ as I’ve heard it from many people, is purported to have some very… eyebrow raising ‘innovations’, including the necessity to always be online to play any and all games that it supports. Brushing aside all the other problems and claims made so far: what?

Really, Microsoft? Are you sure you don’t want to take that back? Are you sure? You did see what happened to Blizzard, one of the top names in gaming and highly beloved by millions? You’re still going through with this? Well, okay.

Coupled with this ‘interesting decision’ is the new policies on used games and alternative account access. So far, the jury is still out on the official explanation, but the most recent headlines involve what I’ll summarize as the following: If you own an Xbox One game and you tie it to an account, it is tied to that account forever and ever. In other words, it is ‘soulbound’, or rather, ‘Account Bound’, if you will. You know, any other time and that really awful reference would be funny.

What this basically means is that you must know your account information at all times and at all places because if you don’t, god help you if you want to play your save of GTA V on a friend’s system; if you can’t remember that shit, you and your friend will have to pay some nominal fee not yet specified but in the range of a handful of dollars to the full retail price of the game in order to play it. That also means you don’t get your nifty save file as well, so good luck and have fun with that!

Effectively, what Microsoft is trying to do is, yet again, squash the used market. First, allow me a moment to laugh:

AHAHAHHAHAHHAHAHAAHHAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHEHHEEHEHAHAHAHOOOHEHUUHAHAHHAEYAYAYAYAHAHAYAAHAYAHAHHAAAA.

I’m done, and I feel like a really douchey middle school kid now; whatever. Second, are they serious? Are they honestly expecting their system, which has hardware that even the most averagely priced PC would laugh at (especially if it was a Mac with Apple’s over-charging on equivalent parts for no reason), will not be jailbroken in one hell of a hurry? Do they honestly believe that the next generation of game pirates will NOT figure away around their draconian stance on the used game market/pirated games? My word, this is funny.

If you have a single cell in your body that has a pulse, you should know the above is GOING to happen; it’s not a maybe, it WILL, and it will happen at near light-speed if these practices make it into the live version of the system. If Microsoft REALLY wanted to monopolize the gaming industry, they would stop making their poor excuse for a fucking console, dump some money back into Sega so we can get a Dreamcast 2 that will rightfully put all existing consoles to shame, and go back to making operating systems that make some goddamn sense while funneling research into high end computers that would make Alienware wither up and die. No, I don’t hate Alienware, I just find it incredibly asinine that Microsoft is spending MILLIONS of dollars on a box of components that is worse than, like I said before, any half decent PC. Congratulations, you hacks.

People and key gaming websites keep essentially keep claiming that this is, for lack of political correctness, a ‘big fucking deal’, and legally, I agree. I mean, this whole ‘licensing’ shit existed all the way back when these boxes of switches and processors and cards came out; people don’t remember because it was a long time ago and, here’s the key point: video game companies had the fucking class to not hassle people over nickels and dimes.

I haven’t looked yet, but I’m sure if I break out an old N64 cartridge or my four-disk set of Lode Runner: The Legend Returns, I’m sure I’ll be able to find copyright information there, and legal licensing laws and blah blah blah blah blah. I’m sure it’s in the manuals I never read, and I’m sure it’s on the few boxes from a serious hey-day of video gaming that I still have tucked away in the back closet. Regardless, that shit didn’t matter then because, again, the goal wasn’t about getting every last fucking penny. The goal during those days was about providing the biggest games, the best experience and fairly solid customer service and happiness. I’m not saying it was all roses and marigolds, but it sure wasn’t the bullshit that goes on now.

The real problem I have with all this is people chanting the whole ‘they made it, so it’s theirs’ mantra. Okay, that’s fair enough; if I made a game and someone just started handing out copies of it made from the original, I wouldn’t be enthused because that’s potentially lost revenue. I’d be much less enthused if they were charging for it, but that’s another story that is actually a huge legal issue that, if it were the case here, Microsoft would have a solid argument for, but it isn’t, so we’re not going there.

However, intellectual property, or IP (not the address) has always been vague, ambiguous and nearly impossible to nail down. The laws existing give broad terminology to what it really is, and when it’s thrown to the courts, it’s a fucking mess and a nightmare to deal with because there is no physical copy of it anywhere; the shit just exists in the ether of the realm I like to call the ‘data space’, or a pocket of space we all come in contact with every day but don’t really think about, and contains tons of information, either in our own imaginations or on hard C++ coding. Creative Commons was brought about to help with this kind of stuff, but as usual, it was well-intentioned but made everything more fucking confusing.

People have also been quoting the First Sale Doctrine, which states (in summary) that when you exchange a means of payment for a good, you, as the purchaser, now own that good. If you’re paying attention, you’ll realize what legal havoc this wreaks: do you own the box? What about what’s in the box? If there is a disc in the box or something that contains information that can be found in the ‘data space’, do you own that? You see what kind of hell this leads us to?

I think from here you can see where the issue comes in: when you purchase a video game, do you actually own the game, or just what holds the game. Technically, you don’t own the code that makes up the game, and that’s fair. Doing something like that requires time and effort from one person to full teams of people, and any and all contributions should be recognized and not immediately tossed aside. Despite this, what people never actually take into account is the actual medium the data is on, namely the disc itself. To make a comparison, let’s use a coffee maker, both because mine just went off and to prove this issue crosses all products and platforms.

My coffee maker is one of those dual-liquid fancy-shmancy machines; it makes coffee-flavored hot water and water-flavored hot water. It’s really something every college student should have, but they’re usually not allowed under the hilarious pretense that they’ll cause fire problems or something that never happens to people who aren’t dumb as dirt and overload electrical circuits in dorm rooms or put electrical things near heaters or easily flammable objects like paper while drawing huge amounts of power with no insulation. In any case, it is more than safe to assume someone wrote some code so that it would respond to certain button presses, display an adjustable readout for time, and play a sound once my choice beverage was classified by the standards coded into the machine as ‘ready’. However, if it ‘shits the bed’, so to speak, who pays for it?

Me, and only me. Despite it being a conglomerate of effort by people with various skill and machines, the customer has to pay if anything happens to it, and why is that? Wouldn’t it logically make sense that the guy who coded the display should pay if the readout breaks? Or, if that’s too specific, shouldn’t the company have to pay some portion to bring it back into working order? No, because of the First Sale Doctrine which, again, states that when I spend money or use some equivalent payment means to obtain said coffee maker, it is MY coffee maker to do with as I please; I could play fetch with it with the neighbor’s dog. I could cut little pieces out and mix them with my meals. Hell, I could even use it as a toilet if I so chose to.

Ick factor aside, the point I’m trying to make is that the FSD (First Sale Doctrine) is applied to nearly everything that is purchased, except video games, music and movies? Why is this? The developers don’t work on the discs, the plastic of the case, the packaging or the artwork on the case, so why is there a sand in the line being drawn here? If I want artwork on paper, I’ll call my resident artists at work and have them whip something up for me for a nominal fee (or gratis if they so choose). If I want plastic molded, I’ll get one of the machinists at school to cut me something nice. If I want a damn CD, I’ll go to a store and pick up a pack of fifty, and the company that made them won’t give a damn what I do with them because they’re a writable product, so whatever I do with them is legally within my rights and they can’t stop me.

If I can then buy a CD whenever, wherever, for some established price and it is well within my legal rights to do whatever I want with that CD, why is this not extend to video games? ‘Well, they have IP on them’. And? The IP is housed ON the disc, which the developing group or publisher does not physically produce or put any effort directly into making that disc. Implicitly, because a regular CD is considered writable material and thus allows me to do what I want with them, that means that I can do the same thing with a video game CD and, more broadly, AND disc-based product that holds IP. Why?

Because the laws protect the IP, not the disc itself, and the laws state that I can do whatever the fuck I want with that disc.

I really don’t know why people haven’t thought this through. This isn’t to ‘protect intellectual property’ because, if it was, the RIAA would cut bands higher percentages of the sales, thus lessening the need a band needs to sell tickets in general. This isn’t about ensuring the effort made into a huge part of the overall product or providing top notch customer support; if it was, Nintendo wouldn’t be claiming videos of their recent content commonly found in “Let’s Plays” on Youtube as ‘copyrighted’ and bilking people out of the effort that THEY put in while offering up free fucking advertising at the same damn time. This is video game companies becoming one of those misers from stories of long ago who make Cratchit work through Christmas because their new view of ‘upwards growth’ is short-sighted, overly avaristic and, in general, really shitty.

If the Xbox One were to launch today, and you wanted to play GTA V on it, you would need an internet connection to do so just to play the single-player mode. If you didn’t have it, you wouldn’t be able to play the game. The sole purpose of a Video Game Console is to play video games, so if you can’t play your video games, then the console is, by definition, broken. In other words, people are creaming their fucking pants over a console that will hike up electric bills, run on draconian control principles and practices and, should you have a middling internet connection, not even do what it was created to do. They are losing their minds over a product that, by very definition of the word, can be considered broken right out of the box.

I had intended to not offer Microsoft any sort of congratulations or praise in this whole piece, but I really have to hand it to them. Last time I checked, people returned broken merchandise and typically compensated by some means, yet they’ve somehow managed to get people to spend a heaping amount of money on exactly this.

Un-fucking-believable.