Remember the good ol’ days of staying up all night playing Nintendo games by yourself, completely at peace with the world (outside of the baddies in Metroid, Milon’s Secret Castle or The Legend of Zelda)? Video games were an anti-social pastime, and we liked them that way.
Not so anymore.
The advent of the Internet created a world of playing games with people across the globe. The video games which were once solitary became social, and a way to connect with others — most of whom you’d never met. It all started with Atari-esque challenges like checkers, and gradually grew into Massive Multiplayer Online Games. WoW (World of Warcraft, Blizzard Entertainment) is so successful, gameplay terms have become part of the pop culture lexicon. Commonly-used online words like “pwn” (the act of crushing your opponent and therefore “owning” them, but with a typo) and “FAIL” (a mistake or desperately misguided act) originated in the gaming industry.
One could argue that playing games with strangers who you can’t see in towns you’ve never been to isn’t social at all, but anyone who’s been deeply involved in an online game knows that your “character” or “avatar” becomes an extension of yourself, and the social world that character lives in feels quite real. Maybe now, everyone who’s seen Avatar gets that, actually. The online industry has created worlds with different rules — examples include magic, the ability to choose your appearance, rewards for killing sprees and sex with your ponytail — and for a monthly fee, you can live in those realities instead of your own, and play with all the other people who want to live there, too.
StarCraft II, also from Blizzard Entertainment, is the newest release in a military science fiction multiplayer game series which originated in 1998 as a Microsoft Windows game (StarCraft). Not so long ago, nearly all new releases of games were preceded by leaks and pirate copies, but this was not the case with StarCraft II. Have the video game pirates finally learned to love?
No. What has happened is that the gaming world may be outgrowing piracy. If you can’t play it online with thousands of other people, there is no point. If no human-powered characters exist in a world, no matter how clever the game designers were, that world, for all practical purposes, doesn’t exist. We’ve reached an era where playing Mario is not so great if you don’t have Luigi, Toadstool and The Princess — and they have to be played by real people. The original Mario’s world doesn’t feel real at all because there are no real minds in it.
“By making Battle.net [StarCraft II and other Blizzard games' home url] an integral part of the experience, Blizzard’s essentially made StarCraft II into a massively multiplayer game, and playing it any other way less than desirable,” writes Matt Peckham of PCWorld. Can people hack into the system with pirated codes to play without paying? Yes, but if Battle.net hasn’t launched the new game, no one can play. “‘Piracy really historically has not been that big of deal for [Blizzard],’ Blizzard executive vice president Rob Pardo told IncGamers in August 2009. When it happens, Pardo says ‘for the most part [Blizzard] can shut down those services,’” (via PCWorld).
So, people could pirate the software for StarCraft II, but playing it would be futile. Basically, if you’re not connected to the main hub everyone else is connected to, you’re not really playing.
If you think of gameplay as an investment of time, its no wonder that gameplay, which matters, or at least seems to matter, has flourished in our capitalist society. We don’t want to “win” the game anymore; there’s no quantifiable reward for winning; we just want to be able to continually make progress. Achieving a couple of levels or a handful of gold in a reality where other people exist feels like an actual accomplishment. And, as we know from the hundreds (thousands?) of people out there making a living off of their characters in Second Life, in a way, it is.
The implications that piracy can be outgrown by our increasingly cyber-social culture are huge. One day, maybe it won’t be any good to listen to music by yourself — every time you play a song you’ll want it to be a mini-concert enjoyed with cyber-friends. Maybe no one will watch YouTube videos without a live chat.
Regardless of that, StarCraft II is available now and there’s a whole new world there for conquering. If you ever thought you were too late to the party for games like WoW and Second Life, now’s your chance to get in at the beginning.
Screengrab via us.Battle.net.