Are you practicing digital hygiene in Gaming?

[XL xQgg?QcQCaTYDMjqoDnYpG]

I sympathize with the idea of "game ownership", but at its core, a game is nothing but an idea
In terms of a video game, it is nothing but executable code, mesh, textures, sounds, parametrization, etc.pp.
None of these things are scarce physical goods
Instead, they are "free" goods, in the sense that you can play a game without depriving someone else from playing it, your playing of the game does not in any way effect your own future supply of the game nor the present or future supply of the game for others
As "free", i.e. not scarce, goods, it is impossible to own them, and thus it is also impossible to steal them
In a way, the terms of service are very realistic, in that what they do is literally a service, and nothing more. Hosting infrastructure, allowing access to servers, offering downloads and multiplayer services, databases of profiles and chat messages and groups and user-created content
But there cannot be any "ownership" of these non-scarce goods without violating fundamental rules and laws regarding property ownership in real, physical goods
You (presumably) have the ownership of your game cartridges or CDs or other physical media, your hard drives and SSDs and what have you
But there can be no such thing as ownership of a digital good

 

[30+GameOvers]

I sympathize with the idea of "game ownership", but at its core, a game is nothing but an idea
In terms of a video game, it is nothing but executable code, mesh, textures, sounds, parametrization, etc.pp.
None of these things are scarce physical goods
Instead, they are "free" goods, in the sense that you can play a game without depriving someone else from playing it, your playing of the game does not in any way effect your own future supply of the game nor the present or future supply of the game for others
As "free", i.e. not scarce, goods, it is impossible to own them, and thus it is also impossible to steal them
In a way, the terms of service are very realistic, in that what they do is literally a service, and nothing more. Hosting infrastructure, allowing access to servers, offering downloads and multiplayer services, databases of profiles and chat messages and groups and user-created content
But there cannot be any "ownership" of these non-scarce goods without violating fundamental rules and laws regarding property ownership in real, physical goods
You (presumably) have the ownership of your game cartridges or CDs or other physical media, your hard drives and SSDs and what have you
But there can be no such thing as ownership of a digital good

What the fuck are you talking about? If I pay for a product, I expect to have ownership of it indefinitely. I am not renting, I am not buying a "service", I am buying a product, one that is on my hard drive and one I can back up to another hard drive if I feel like it. Companies taking that product away is no different than taking a shirt off my back in broad daylight or George Lucas breaking into my home, punching me in the face and telling me that he wants his Star Wars DVD back.
I swear, only gaming has this kind of nigger cattle mindset where we have to accept companies screwing us over and never demand what we were actually promised or should realistically expect like in any other industry.

 

[Ibanez RG 350EX]

But there cannot be any "ownership" of these non-scarce goods without violating fundamental rules and laws regarding property ownership in real, physical goods

I don't see how that follows at all. If a corporation can't arbitrarily rescind access to a game that I paid for and give me no recourse, exactly what property rights are being violated?

 

[Dysnomia]

If you have a little bit of extra cash lying around, I really can't recommend grabbing a PS Vita or a 3DS off ebay or facebook marketplace enough. Those babies are easy as hell to mod, you can slap a 512 gigabyte SD card in there and download every game for the system and like, the previous three or four console generations onto it, then buy yourself some replacement parts like batteries, screen protectors and spare buttons to keep it up and running so long, you'll be able to pass it onto your kids.

I still have my 3DS and I have a PSP. Sadly, no battery for my PSP right now. I did put cfw on it in like five minutes on a whim and now anything that doesn't run right on an emulator I can just play natively. I haven't started on the 3DS yet.

Sadly my laptop has like 40 gigs left.

 

[vomitusdeux]

I still have my 3DS and I have a PSP. Sadly, no battery for my PSP right now. I did put cfw on it in like five minutes on a whim and now anything that doesn't run right on an emulator I can just play natively. I haven't started on the 3DS yet.

Sadly my laptop has like 40 gigs left.

invest in large size HDD, it's cheap, you can get multiple TB out of the size, and you can store entire emulation collections on it. That's how I do it despite laptops

 

[Gender: Xenomorph]

> unique emails for each account
Yea as if gmsil and yandex now don't require a phone number and ID to log in lol

 

[Cheeseknife]

Go ahead. Half the article is just me reading the PSN TOS in full snark mode. Anyone can do that. Hell, XBOX Lives TOS is just as onerous. Even Steam is little better. You can do the same thing with any of these Satanic legal instruments.

I've also extended some talking points:

 

[vomitusdeux]

> unique emails for each account
Yea as if gmsil and yandex now don't require a phone number and ID to log in lol

stop using gmail. make a protonmail under a VPN so they don't leak your shit, and all you have to do is solve a fucking captcha. You dont even need an alternate email to link, it's just suggested. I do this all the time. At this point I probably have 90 of the damn things.

 

[XL xQgg?QcQCaTYDMjqoDnYpG]

What the fuck are you talking about? If I pay for a product, I expect to have ownership of it indefinitely. I am not renting, I am not buying a "service", I am buying a product, one that is on my hard drive and one I can back up to another hard drive if I feel like it. Companies taking that product away is no different than taking a shirt off my back in broad daylight or George Lucas breaking into my home, punching me in the face and telling me that he wants his Star Wars DVD back.
I swear, only gaming has this kind of nigger cattle mindset where we have to accept companies screwing us over and never demand what we were actually promised or should realistically expect like in any other industry.

There are things that cannot be owned.
For instance, if you pay for a musician to perform a piece for you, you cannot own his hands or his instrument or the acts of the performance.

Imagine I sell you a recipe.
If the recipe comes on a piece of paper, you very likely own the piece of paper (like, let's assume we're not dealing with some nutcase who just sells you the opportunity to look and photocopy or photograph a written recipe), but the recipe itself is an idea, something that cannot be owned, it can be copied, imitated, duplicated infinitely and arbitrarily. Any kind of attempt to define an "ownership" (read: the right to exclusive control of a thing) of a non-scarce good, you will end up violating real property rights.
For instance, if I as an "intellectual property owner" have some sort of property right to a recipe so that I can forbid you or fine you if you copy or imitate it, I have become a partial owner of you and your brain and your pencil and your pen. Obviously this is an unjust state of affairs and a clear invasion of your rights.
Now what the games industry is doing, with those platforms such as Steam, is a service. You are not buying a product.
Let me repeat, you are not buying a product.
If they sent you a physical USB stick or DVD containing the game files, you would be buying a product - a physical good which is agreed upon in the terms of the sale to have specific contents on it.
You are buying access to Steam's service so that they provide the content to you using their content delivery networks, they provide help and support by means of discussion fora and Steam Support, they provide the ability to leave reviews in this centralized place, etc.pp.
But when you buy a digital game, you are not buying a product.
You are buying a service.
Even if you literally paid some game developer who just emailed you a .zip file containing the game DRM-free, you are not buying a product.
You are buying the service of game developer doing that thing for you.
Once the .zip file is on your mail server and/or drive, it can be duplicated infinitely, it is not a scarce good and therefore cannot be owned by anyone without causing serious problems.

I'm not saying that I am in favor of platforms doing it this way, I am very much against DRM and online-only bullshit, but this logical interpretation is the only valid one.
The alternative, saying that you have some sort of perpetual and genuine ownership to the game as sold on, for instance, Steam, it would mean that you have expropriated them. It would mean that even a single outage or login issue would be theft/fraud on part of Steam because you no longer have access and control over the "product" that you bought.
The Steam Subscriber agreement I think it's called governs the terms under which Valve agrees to sell licenses and provide services, but simply arguing that it is a product you buy makes no logical sense if you examine it beyond the surface level

I don't see how that follows at all. If a corporation can't arbitrarily rescind access to a game that I paid for and give me no recourse, exactly what property rights are being violated?

If the "access to a game that [you] paid for" requires something on part of the corporation, you having infinite and arbitrary access would necessarily mean that the corporation has a duty to make that game available
However, that is very much against the general terms of service that you agreed on
Imagine you go to, say, a massage therapist and agree to book half a dozen sessions, but at the last session, you claim that you are entitled to massage sessions perpetually in the future
However, that was not the initial agreement
Arguing that the massage therapy must be perpetual, or unilaterally determinable by the customer, means that you have turned this massage therapist into a slave

Ultimately, if you go along with all of my reason and logic, the true solution to shitty gaming industry is simply not participating in shitty contracts and agreements
Just don't buy it, and get others to not buy it
But, alas, there are so many people who just accept the terms and services and expect them to have no consequences that it's not even worth competing on that front
Imagine if consumers and customers wouldn't be this fucking ignorant and shortsighted
Imagine if corporations like Bethesda and Electronic Arts would actually have to compete amongst one another for who has the more generous and compelling terms of service because, if their ToS sucks too much, nobody would buy the game

 

[30+GameOvers]

Buddy, if you're some sort of nigger cattle that gets off on having a company trample all over you and taking everything you own, that's fine. I don't judge, but this will (hopefully) never become the norm, and if it looks that way, people with an actual spine will fight it tooth and nail. Thankfully, Ross from Accursed Farms is already sort of getting the ball rolling on that, and I hope that is not the end of it by far.

 

[Ibanez RG 350EX]

Imagine you go to, say, a massage therapist and agree to book half a dozen sessions, but at the last session, you claim that you are entitled to massage sessions perpetually in the future
However, that was not the initial agreement
Arguing that the massage therapy must be perpetual, or unilaterally determinable by the customer, means that you have turned this massage therapist into a slave

That is such a bafflingly terrible analogy. You yourself brought up how IP is fundamentally different than physically scarce products and services and yet you seem to believe that property rights law must apply identically across them for some reason - that flies in the face of both a couple hundred of years of IP law AND the rationale behind your own previous post.

 

[XL xQgg?QcQCaTYDMjqoDnYpG]

That is such a bafflingly terrible analogy. You yourself brought up how IP is fundamentally different than physically scarce products and services and yet you seem to believe that property rights law must apply identically across them for some reason - that both flies in the face of hundreds of years of IP law AND your own previous post.

Hundreds of years of IP law are in obvious and blatant violation of real property rights, IP law itself is a perversion, an aberration
Claiming that hundreds of years of IP law are relevant to my point on property rights would be like saying that rapes and stabbings are relevant for a healthy physique, or that house fires, wars, and earthquakes are necessary components of a house
If property rights were applied consistently, "IP rights" would never be recognized as legitimate

 

[Ibanez RG 350EX]

Claiming that hundreds of years of IP law are relevant to my point on property rights would be like saying that rapes and stabbings are relevant for a healthy physique, or that house fires, wars, and earthquakes are necessary components of a house

I'm going to stop talking to you now because it's become abundantly clear you are either retarded, a schizo, or a retarded schizo.

 

[XL xQgg?QcQCaTYDMjqoDnYpG]

I'm going to stop talking to you now because it's become abundantly clear you are either retarded, a schizo, or a retarded schizo.

I hope you can forgive me for liking to use analogies to make unfamiliar and uncommon lines of logic more easy to grasp
The essence of my previous message is "this isn't the kind of gotcha you think it is"

 

[Prokhor Zakharov]

mIRC is proprietary bullshit

mIRC is just an IRC client. IRC is a completely open protocol and predates mIRC by a longshot.

 

[Slav Power]

This couldn't be further from the truth. IRC is a completely open protocol.

mIRC, a proprietary client, is not synonymous with IRC, an open protocol. Same as uTorrent, a proprietary client, is not synonymous with BitTorrent, an open protocol. People recommending old proprietary clients because it was "the thing back in the day", treating it as a synonym is a goddamn plague. HexChat is a better alternative for mIRC, even though it has been discontinued.

 

[mindlessobserver]

mIRC, a proprietary client, is not synonymous with IRC, an open protocol. Same as uTorrent, a proprietary client, is not synonymous with BitTorrent, an open protocol. People recommending old proprietary clients because it was "the thing back in the day", treating it as a synonym is a goddamn plague. HexChat is a better alternative for mIRC, even though it has been discontinued.

You gotta introduce the zoomers to these technologies with baby steps. Most don't even know what Internet Relay Chat even is, never mind how it actually works. They've grown up in a world where all communications are done through a centralized proprietary engine where they have no rights or control. If they have even heard of this stuff, its always in the context of terrorism and crime. The idea that there are ways to talk to your friends online that don't rely on Zuckerberg and Bezos looking over your shoulder is an alien concept.

 

[Kiwi & Cow]

Forever reminder that if you don't own what you pay for then pirating any of it can't be stealing.

 

[Xarpho's Return]

Ultimately, if you go along with all of my reason and logic, the true solution to shitty gaming industry is simply not participating in shitty contracts and agreements

Your reason and logic are nonsense. A "good" doesn't necessarily have to be "I must see it and/or hold it in my hands", that's like saying mineral rights don't exist because they're not tangible. On the subject of that, this is like believing that that property deeds are a physical piece of paper that you have to physically obtain to prove ownership (or to take ownership); reality is they've been scanned and notarized into the county clerk system years ago.

You seem to confuse goods and services. A service is a skilled, specialized specific job, like paying someone to fix your toilet, cut your hair, or perform a song. You can't have "permanent massages indefinitely" because it's a service, not a good. A video game, which is sold as a product, is, no matter what some incomprehensible block of text says.

 

[XL xQgg?QcQCaTYDMjqoDnYpG]

A video game, which is sold as a product, is, no matter what some incomprehensible block of text says.

Prove that video games are currently sold as a product.
In the case of physical media such as disks and cartridges, I argue that the product is the disk or cartridge that the game is stored on, and you merely have disk/cartridge ownership, and that the game which is stored or represented on that medium cannot be owned.
In the case of digital storefront, video games are not sold as a product.