Gaming: Less Inclusive Than Ever

At the tail end of last year, my lovely friend Blair wrote a series of articles titled ‘Disconnected’ about his experiences without network access since he started university. He wasn’t the only one of us on the staff suffering though – I also started university in York last September, and in doing so lost access to the PSN amongst others. On Thursday, a (hopefully) lovely man from BT is coming to install a phone line so that I can get the internet all set up at my new house, unlimited downloads and all.

Not having access to online multiplayer wasn’t actually too much of an issue to me – the last three games I really got dug into online were Uncharted 2, Killzone 2 and MAG, and most of my friends had moved on from those by the time September rolled around – but I did get a pretty rare perspective for a relatively heavy gamer in this day and age; what it’s like to be a gamer without access to online passes, day-one patches and on-disk DLC.

Although I’m not a particularly heavy online gamer, recent trends have made it very difficult to avoid the network completely. I can’t play most of my Ubisoft PC games because they won’t launch without querying their DRM servers, even though they’ve all been purchased through Steam. Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit tells me twice when I launch, and on every loading and menu screen, that it can’t connect to Autolog. StarCraft II helpfully offers me the option to play as a guest and start from the beginning again every time I boot it up.

I can’t even play any of my PlayStation Plus downloads on my PSP because I can’t set the console’s time and date via the internet. In trying to integrate social networks left, right and center, and lock down their games as much as possible, the people who make the games we play are making it more infuriating to do so by the day.

[drop2]Here at TSA, I can be pretty sure that most of the staff and membership have a decent internet connection, a good number likely have a PSN or Xbox Live account, with a fair amount of those on Plus or Gold. However, in the rest of the world (those happy with their SingStar and Dance Central when friends are over, or who only boot up their consoles once or twice a year), that’s not the norm.

The longer I spent offline, and the more games that were metaphorically punching me in the face for god forbid trying to play my legally-owned, purchased-as-new games. Because its not just people like me with restrictive firewalls that get treated this way, but a good amount of the new-to-gaming population that the platform holders love to brag about recruiting to their particular sides of the fence too.

There’s no other industry that treats its users this way. No one that buys a new Blu-ray on release has to make sure their player is connected to the internet, validate their disk, then enter a twelve-digit passcode to unlock the second half of the movie. Even people that download their music from iTunes can play it offline or even on another company’s device!

But its not just the anti-DRM measures that you notice when you’re offline for a while. Not long before coming away to university I upgraded my PS3’s internal hard drive so I could keep more installs and PSN games on there at the same time, but I didn’t bother to transfer over installs and patches. This turned out to be not such a great idea when I realised just how many of the games in my collection ship in a half-complete or buggy state with a patch being released in the first week or so to deal with any issues that crop up.

Sure, that’s great for us and the always-connected hardcore, but not for those who pop down to GAME once in a while for something to play on a rainy weekend. Heavy Rain froze up on me so many times that I gave up trying to play through it again, and don’t even get me started on the hellhole that is a non-patched version of Fallout 3.

The fact is Sony, Microsoft, Nintendo, EA and the others are all to quick to celebrate massive sales figures, expansions into new territories, and having finally conquered that crucial casual market. But the game that a lot of those people are playing – a game they’ve played the same (if not more in the case of our GAME-visiting metaphor man) for as we have – could be buggy beyond belief, missing half its features, and might not even activate in the first place. If developers, publishers and platform holders really want to celebrate how inclusive this new golden age of gaming is, they need to take a long hard look at exactly what state their games ship in.