#5. Hackers and DRM are Turning Gaming into a Nightmarish Clusterfuck

Imagine if every time you drove your car, you had to first check in with the car manufacturer to confirm that it's you behind the wheel. Let's say that this relies on an Internet connection, and if the connection is down, you can't drive. In many ways, gaming is already there. But more on that in a moment.

At E3, the big yearly event where game companies unveil all of their dazzling future technology and software, Sony led off with the unveiling of an amazing, cutting edge apology for their online service being down for three straight weeks. Oh, and for allowing the personal data of 77 million customers get stolen off their servers.

It will happen again. And in the future, you're not going to have the ability to just play the games offline in single player while you wait. The tethering of all games to an online account is coming. And with that will come annoyances.

The thing is, publishers ultimately want to get to the point where you're connected to their servers at every moment. This way they can continually check to make sure you have a non-pirated copy of the game and can then sell you downloadable extras and monthly subscriptions to play multiplayer. They also want you to buy all of your games via download so that you won't trade a physical copy in to GameStop (who will resell it and not give a penny to the publisher). After that, they will move to a model like OnLive, where you never get a copy of the game at all -- you simply play it off their machine, streamed over your Internet connection. For this, you pay a monthly fee, hopefully for the rest of your life.

All of this requires a constant connection. Which requires constant security. Which requires constant bullshit. Ask any PC gamer, they're already there.

That brings us back to the analogy of the car. Let's say you want to play Starcraft II's single player campaign. A few weeks in, you sit down to play the 20th map. At startup, it logs you into their server at battle.net and asks you for a password. If it can't make the connection, or you can't enter the password, you can't play your single-player campaign. Your only option is to start over from the beginning. And it's the same if you want to take your laptop with you and play the game on a plane or in the car or at Grandma's house.