Playstation’s latest L has gamers concerned about the future of games as entertainment.
PlayStation’s servers experienced an outage from the evening of Feb. 7 to the evening of Feb. 8. This lasted more than 24 hours, making it one of the longest unscheduled server blackouts in this decade. The outage affected more than connections to multiplayer servers, but also the PlayStation Store, account management and its social aspects. These have since been fixed, with PlayStation crediting the outage to “operational issues” and promising PlayStation Plus members an extra five days of service.
Even with this compensation, gamers are frustrated with PlayStation’s lack of transparency surrounding the outage and their inability to access games that were expected to be operational outside PlayStation’s digital servers. This irritation has contributed to the looming concern about gaming’s growing dependence on digital spaces. Because of this, players are noticing that gaming is increasingly temporary and frighteningly easy to lose.
Corporations’ fear of revenue loss is turning into overregulation of who owns the games players buy. DRM, or digital rights management, is used to regulate games, providing entities such as PlayStation or Xbox with security against piracy and control over distribution of games. The use of DRM limits the gamer for two main reasons: It requires either an internet connection to create an activation key that proves the user bought the content or a server to pull from that provides an online license verification.
If an outage like PlayStation’s occurs, players are unable to access any of their content, whether it is digital, physical, single-player or multiplayer. This brings up a harsh truth – gaming is something that users are constantly paying to access but do not truly own. Inaccessibility to ownership turns gaming into a ticking time bomb of entertainment where players might enjoy a game one day and find it completely erased the next, either because of server error or an overhead decision that doesn’t take the player into consideration.
Shouldn’t players be able to play games that they paid for, whenever and wherever?
This argument has been long-standing in the gaming community, with some defending a strictly digital space for game ownership and entertainment because of its ease and accessibility. Others argue that defending games from piracy and the plummeting market it can cause is reason enough to keep the practice of DRM in gaming. While it is true that digital marketplaces make gaming more available, allowing more people than ever before to play, this does not negate the fact that those games can disappear just as easily as they are accessed. Alongside that, piracy is not a good practice – but preservation is. Neglecting that for fear of a “what if” of revenue loss makes it so games are less and less likely to be seen as a serious, impactful form of entertainment.
Furthermore, games are an art form, and like any other art form, they deserve to be protected, maintained and cared for. People buy physical copies of movies, music and books because they want to be able to come back to them, time and time again. Denying this to gaming makes people forget what makes games great. The fact that they are experiences that can be replayed, reimagined and passed down from one player to another allows games to thrive. Gaming is built upon a referential foundation, a structure of word of mouth and recommendation from communities built on mutual enjoyment.
Once that foundation is gone, what do players have left?
Art is meant to be looked at, and it’s meant to be engaged with. Players can do that through owning games and playing them as much as they want. That can happen through websites like Good Old Games that provide full ownership of games once bought by the player. These options allow gamers to treat games how they should be treated – as things the player can always come back to.
As gaming continues to be increasingly popular, understanding the importance of ownership ensures gaming continues to nurture itself as an art form and not as singular, temporary entertainment.
