When convenience isn't very convenient

In the part of the country I live in there's a chain of convenience stores named Circle K.  At these stores you have a cross-section of items generally available in any supermarket albeit with fewer options and higher prices. Still, if the wife sends you out for "feminine" products at 3 AM  (This really happened to me) and nobody's open no price is too high...

I have no idea why I wove that example into this but whatever...

So convenience is nice but it costs. 

I like Steam, it's very...convenient. 

I have some nice games that I picked up for some very reasonable prices (so long as they're not EA titles in a few months) The fact that I can access my purchases from any PC I own using just my credentitals is a godsend.  In fact I think Steam was the reason why you saw the relaxed licensing of a lot of PC titles.  It seemed ridiculous that you had to completely uninstall a game just to play it on another PC you own.  Steam makes it simple, if you log on another PC with steam active the first PC disconnects and won't allow reconnection without logging out of the other connection.

Simple, The very definition of fair use.  No reason to buy 4 copies for 4 PCs if you don't plan to play the game on all 4 at the same time.  Of course some EULA's allow 3 or more installations so this limitation can become a problem if you can't run the game outside of steam and/or the game has no local LAN option separate from Steam. 

I've run into that a few times but not with any recent titles I've played so it may be a moot point.  I have to wonder if EA's Origin service will be so accommodating considering their rather draconian licensing and copy protection schemes of the past.

So we've established that there's lots to like about the Steam game distribution system.  One could even say it's one of the forerunners of all this cloud stuff everyone's nuts about.  It's taken your software and detached it from your hardware from a licensing standpoint. 

Here's where it falls on its face...

Steam is a successful and robust delivery system and a model likely to be followed by Origin.  The problem arises when Steam has to deal with the publisher's strange delivery mechanisms.  I'll give two examples.

First, Borderlands...

I truly enjoy this game almost to the point of love (except for the zombie missions because the creeps keep coming up behind me unexpectedly...)What I do not enjoy is the way the DLC content works with Steam. 

When I purchased Borderlands on Steam I did so in a combination deal that gave me all the DLC (Downloadable Content addons).  Instead of these packages being pre-installed or pre-licensed with the installation it waits to activate itself till a player happens to venture into one of the DLC content areas while playing the game.

This would be fine if the process was easy but it's not.  On two of my PCs I had the same issue with activating DLC content for this game as did a friend of mine with his own copy.  What happens is that you venture into the DLC area, get a loading screen and instead of popping up into the map you get an endless "loading" loop. 

Only when I got curious and did an ALT-TAB did I discover a dialog had been raised in it's own window otherwise unreachable from the game environment.  Worse I had to keep Switching to ALT-TAB to get the window with the activation prompt to become active.  Since I own a digital copy that lives on Steam I have my installation keys available except that the steam console became unavailable during this process...

A long and boring story short, The only way around this contortion was to:

1. Get out of the game entirely by killing it in the task manager because I was trapped in the "Loading" screen

2. Pre-load the proper DLC key into my clipboard memory from the relaunched Steam console

3. Launch the game again and load the offending DLC area again

4.  ALT-TAB a few times to get access to the zombie'd activation screen

5. Get the activation screen to become active after another round of ALT-TAB so I can then paste the DLC key into the activation dialog and continue with the game once the activation process completes. 

Fallout:New Vegas did much the same thing but then I don't really care because I'm done with that game....

The bottom line is, that's a hell of a lot of work just to activate something I paid for.  I've seen less work to load a cracked copy of commercial software.  This is the point where EULA's and copy protection schemes become intrusive.  This whole process wasted about 1/2 hour of precious game time till I figured out the process and there was no guidance on how to deal with it.

I know it's not just me because my friend had the same issue and I saw it on two completely different PCs. 

I appreciate Steam and appreciate the convenience but I don't appreciate a convoluted process to access content I paid for.  There needs to be tighter integration or recognition by game publishers that delivery is an important  part of the purchase.  Less and less content is being delivered on physical media which demands that bugs like the scenario above are eliminated.

Since publishers have a channel that they can completely control from purchase to installation there's no excuse for copy protection schemes to cause these types of issues.  Let's divert a bit of that revenue from your AR departments to improving your delivery systems.

Gaming as an entertainment medium

I heard somewhere that gaming (PC or otherwise) was approaching the same level of revenue as Hollywood movies.

I can understand that...

I see maybe two movies a year mostly because the pickin's are pretty slim and I don't believe in wasting time or money on a lost cause...

I'm just not into vampire chic, dismembered co-eds, bad comic book adaptations, foo-foo chick flicks or comedies written by pre-pubescent 12 year olds.  I look at the pile of refuse offered up and I have to wonder about the collective intelligence of the U.S. if this junk passes for culture; popular or otherwise.

Then again I do live in a country that can't get enough of worthless people abusing each other on boring reality shows.  Sorry Big Brother and Survivor, you've been voted off my TV!

So where's the creativity gone?  Not much found in movies or TV but what about gaming?

Ah, there it is. 

As gaming platforms have become more powerful the opportunity for a more interactive experience has come to light. 

Sure, back in the day Freddy Kruger and Jason were pretty scary running around hacking up teenagers but that wasn't an interactive experience so you didn't have any real skin in the game (pardon the pun).
Remember how cool it was when a character on the movie screen would suddenly turn and act as though they were talking to you?  The best interactive experience you cold hope for was a midnight showing of the Rocky Horror Picture show and that, could get a little weird...

With a good narrative game that hint of interactivity is compounded a hundred fold.  So long as the developer doesn't destroy the illusion with convoluted controls or bad camera angles that is.  Anything that takes away from interacting with the narrative can quickly ruin an otherwise brilliant storyline.  Take a look at my recent post of Fallout: New Vegas for an example of a bad interface and poor narrative.

An example of a good narrative? Well that's largely dependent on  personal taste but I've personally enjoyed earlier Dungeon Siege titles, A few Need For Speed iterations like Undercover and even a shooter like Borderlands.  In each of those titles I had to care about the narrative if I had any hope of succeeding in the game.  The key to success is to hook you into the narrative just enough to keep you continuing on .  It still has to be fun with attainable goals, however.  After all, like a movie, you're supposed to be entertained not frustrated by sadistic level design. 

There's been a lot of crossover of Hollywood talent to the gaming world over the past decade.  So much so that now it seems that most of the summer blockbusters that aren't based on comic books are based on game titles. 

And why not?!  The talent and creativity involved in a good game title can provide 90% of the material for a decent movie.  It can even be woven into a franchise of gaming and movies if the movie studio doesn't screw it up (Think the DOOM movie)

It may be the case that gaming provides a less restrictive outlet to Hollywood talent than a movie studio could ever stomach.  Other than a sternly lettered ESRB rating there's not that much to prevent a creative idea to be fully realized by its creator provided the market allows it. 

I think the future holds a lot more interactivity in our entertainment choices.  It's inescapable actually with a culture demanding ever more interaction with their surroundings Hopefully it can prove to be a catalyst for more intelligent pastimes that don't involve wasting time on reality TV douchebags.