Freewill can ruin a good story. How many of us, through the freewill that we express in our lives, end up with a good story? The good stories come afterwards through a retelling that edits out the drudgery and, perhaps, adds sparkle with a few judicious lies. (How many good story tellers are not liars?) The footage on the cutting room floor far outweighs the final edit. Games don't have the luxury of that much editing. That's why I think that it's important not to get too caught up in the storytelling paradigm. It's too easy to reduce games down to movies or books. It can be done, but I don't think that it's the best use of the game medium.
As much as I like what Warren has to say, I don't think that the word "story" is the best word to capture the creative vision needed to surpass the limits of books and movies. I prefer to think in terms of alternate world modeling, but maybe that's a byproduct of the type of playing and exploration I like to do.
- Nordstrom
In response to Playground Piracy from The Escapist Forum: I have to admit, this article brought up some nice memories; writing this from Croatia, where (sixteen years ago) you couldn't buy an original copy of a game even if you had the money. Back then I thought Razor 1911 was a game developer!
And, yeah, I owe my good (in Croatian terms) knowledge of the English language to computer games, especially Lucas Arts and their fabulous adventures. But originals were nowhere to find, and to my surprise - it was the publishers who refused to go to our market. They feared piracy.
- bazooka_joe
In response to Playground Piracy from The Escapist Forum: In the Netherlands there's an organization called BIG (Ban Illegal Games & software) that aired a commercial with a high tech FBI-like team that searched out illegal gamers! With sirens and in black suits with black sunglasses and high tech red lasers (why?) they would find all illegal gamers.
They resorted to scare tactics, spewing various lies (they don't search out illegal gamers, they just try to prevent it with... well there's no better word for it than propaganda). It is very much aimed at this 'playground piracy', as can be seen from their various posters in schools.
And as helpless as developers are as each of their copy protection mechanisms get swatted away like flies, I can understand the desperation of their side. I can understand the reaction to resort to fear tactics, but I don't think it's an effective solution.
As Kieron Gillen said, essentially playground piracy is an act of love, while lying to get people to pay for games is an act of fear (which is an interesting duality as the one is a crime, while the second is born of a sense of justice).
The solution for developers, is to accept reality as it is and either produce games for free with a Paypal link or bank account to allow contributions or go the other way and make sure your game can't be played without being connected to your server (with unique key of course).
- Capo Taco
