We come to it at last, the final installment in the Week of Fives, My Five Favorite Gaming Moments of 2005:
1. Sony’s Station Exchange. I’m still laughing, maniacally, months after the launch of Sony’s Station Exchange — the sanctioned, sponsored and approved game items store for EQII. Virtual items and currency have been sold for real life cash for years, as we all know, this is just the next step in what will become the norm.
Gaming purity be damned, there is little that can been done to stem real money trading (RMT) when it’s what many, many players want.
Mostly I enjoyed this story because it was a 180-degree reversal of Sony’s previous mandates and because it was a textbook example of that ancient axiom: Money talks and bullshit walks.
2. Blizzard’s Big Warden. In a teeny, tiny paragraph in the ginormous documents you digitally sign when logging into the World of Warcraft for the first time and after each patch, is a teeny, tiny explanation that Blizzard’s Big Warden can and will crawl up your computer’s ass — as we learned later in more detail, said ass crawling was a scan of every open window and program while playing World of Warcraft.
Well, you did want to play WoW, didn’t you? You’re not a cheating hacker, are you? Then what’s your problem?
What I enjoyed about this story was how the times had changed. Few years back, when Sony wanted to do a much gentler ass job on the EQ players, we screamed like stuck pigs. (How dare! The nerve! Privacy rights! I pay for the equipment, keep yer mitts off it.) However, to Sony’s credit, they pulled the scan plan and all was well again in Norrath.
This year, Blizzard, Lord over all We Survey, implements a far more intrusive program without fully disclosing how thorough these scans are, and the playing public shrugs. For some reason that is not clear to me, we can trust Blizzard not to abuse the private information they could (and do?) collect, but not Sony. Wild, freaky stuff.
Not long after the larger details of Big Warden were revealed by smarter people than me, Sony’s BMG rootkit scandal hit the net: selected Sony Music CDs were shipping with aggressive self-executing anti-piracy software unbeknownst to the hapless consumer.
File this under Karma is a Bitch: WoW hackers used the Sony rootkit to hide their nefarious operations. Heee.
