Secur-bomb

DRM (digital rights management) has been a growing concern for years now as publishers of any and all media try to find new and different ways of controlling the release and prorogation of that media to consumers.

Unfortunately, last century paradigms are still being applied to 21st century media, and industry by industry try and fail, repeating the same mistakes over and over again. Napster lead the way in the 1990's in regards to music and the internet. Consumers came to like and more importantly desire portability of music in manner never before scene. Mix-tapes and CD's become irrelevant in an era where hundreds and eventually thousands of songs could be shuttled around in smaller and smaller devices. Relatively small file sizes allowed consumers to transfer and share their music with others over email, the internet and peer to peer.

The music industry slow response was first to litigate everyone in sight to try and prevent music sharing, then misguided attempts of DRM were implemented (Sony rootkits, magic marker workarounds). Only Apple's monolithic hardware allowed them to leverage the music industry to become the single success story in monetizing digital delivery of music with Itunes, and even they have DRM laden product, though workarounds are easy to find.

As broadband internet has become ubiquitous, fast and cheap (relatively) the film industry has fallen into the same trap. By not adapting to the media rather than trying to force the media to adapt to an outdated business plan, movies are now traded on the net through P2P almost as frequently as music. Blockbuster hits can be found, in varying quality, on the net within days or hours of the films release to theaters. Like the mistakes made by the music industry, the RIAA have tried to litigate everyone they can find, while forcing different forms of DRM into their product. Unfortunately, each new encryption program is cracked within its first year of existence up to and including blu-ray. In a war of mutual assured destruction the music biz has shown they cannot win, because the courts and governments move exponentially slower than technology. Laws will always be far behind the ability to circumvent those laws. The only reasonable solution is to create a new paradigm for a new form of business.

Piracy and DRM have always been a bone of contention in the games industry with many early PC developers growing their fanbase and bank accounts by giving aware portions of the games as "shareware". The advent of consoles made piracy more difficult but like any encryption eventually beatable given time and a world of hackers who will do it just to prove they can. This has lead to a dichotomous approach to protecting and monetizing the intellectual property of the company while also trying not to alienate an increasingly well-informed and pro-active audience.

Various forms of DRM have begun to plague the releases of major companies, the latest and most prevalent being Secur-rom. Once a simple disc-check to ensure the game is in the computers drive when the game is started, secur-rom is now an invasive and often invisible piece of spyware that sits on the user's harddrive long after the game has been uninstalled. Lawsuits have sprung up regarding this as have virtual attacks against the bottom line of companies like EA with hundreds if not thousands of users spamming consumer review sites like Amazon with bad reviews on product because of the restrictive DRM.

Most disappointly my beloved Fallout 3 uses securom, but as quoted by the developers, "only as a disc check" which is fine, except that if I try to have a process explorer running (showing me what is running on my system and eating up resources) when I try to start the game, securom crashes out. Apparently it doesn't want you to know what it is doing on your computer, which to me is unacceptable and the behaviour of spyware or a virus.

It appears the game industry is now heading down the same path as music and film before it, the question is only whether there are lessons to be learned.

Game a Day: Dead Space

In the hopes of getting a lot of the nonsense rattling around my head out into some kind of record I am starting what I hope can be a daily blog about one of the bunch of games I always have running.

Dead Space first hit my radar over a year ago in the pages of Game Informer (the single best overall gaming mag out there). The graphic design of the game leapt off the screen shot loaded pages and I knew this was a game I needed to play.

The setup for the game is nothing new, a rescue team is sent out to investigate radio silence from a massive "planet cracking" spaceship and havoc ensues, seperating the player character Issac (the engineer) from his shipmates. Borrowing heavily from the influences of Alien, The Thing and Resident Evil 4, Dead Space improves on some of its sources in areas while taking two steps back in others. In the holy trinity of gameplay, visuals, and plot, Dead Space manages a 1 1/2 out of 3.
Visually it has moments of stunning dreadful beauty, where the claustrophobic linear progress of bland metal-grated corridors will suddenly open up on a massive chasm in the ships bowels, or force the player into the vacuum of space on the ship's exterior.
The gameplay is RE4 sped up, with the same tank controls but a slightly more nimble protagonist and a camera butted up tight to the leads shoulder. Dominating the frame with the main character forces tension in the player mechanically making it harder to see what threats may lurk just off screen. The "dismemberment" aspect of the gameplay creates a diversionary method of playing, forcing the player to avoid the normal aim-for-the-head approach and rather cut the limbs off the enemies in order to stop them. While this forces a different method of play initially, again it is a mechanical method of creating tension, relying on hampering the player's abilities rather than innovating. In between skirmishes with varying creatures, the player is sent on seemingly endless "errand" quests of the "go there find this fix that" variety. while the gameplay is passable and the visuals often gorgeous, the story is laughably bad.

Cut off from the survivors of his crew, Issac meanders about the monolithic planet cracking ship, following directions from holo-projected crew-mates as they shock/horror! discover various technical issues plaguing the ship beside the mutant killers running around. Strangely enough this issues are only discovered one at a time, further reinforcing the heavily linear aspect of the game. At one point, one of the support characters even states how ridiculous it is for these things to keep happening, a moment guaranteed to break any immersion.

While Dead Space does a have a few genuine "scare's",it loses any emotional cohesion with its by the numbers plot. In terms of pure visual design the game is a triumph, something apparent from those first screenshots so long ago, but this is truly a game made of style over substance.