barely fatal

There are different types of gamers. For example, there are those who have a favorite game, or game series. They know it inside out. They stick to that game and hardly play anything else. This might have several reasons: money, ignorance, love (for the genre) – or the game they play might be an MMO.

Then there are the greedy gamers. They buy every new game, play it halfway through and then move on to the next one. Those types hardly ever see the end credits or learn how to be really good in a particular game. It’s as if they consumed the games rather then enjoying them.

I would classify myself as sitting somewhere in between, and that really is a problem sometimes. I see all the new trailers, play the demos, and I want to have all of those pretty, shiny new titles. Unfortunately, there are some rare commodities required if you want to see them all: money and – no less critical – time. So I end up buying only those titles that I really, really want to have, trying to forget about the others as fast as I can.

But I’m not the typical “consumerist” kind of gamer. When I decide to invest my hard-earned money and my always-sparse extra time, I want it well spent. I check out reviews before I buy, prepare my PC to be up to the task if necessary (I hate playing at medium or low graphics settings. Why play it looking ugly when I paid for NextGen?) and I sometimes even read the handbook. I play the tutorials. I try to find and complete every quest. Look in every room. Break all the wooden boxes. Watch every possible ending. In short: I want to see it all and not miss a thing. Because I know, I’ll probably never come back.

That mild obsessive behavior has an advantage and a disadvantage. Advantage: Games take longer to finish. Disadvantage: Games take longer to finish. I enjoy every aspect of a game, but that leaves me being tired of it. And if it takes so long, I can’t start playing the next one – what I really would like to do. But there’s this one quest left. In that part of the map I’ve not yet completely charted. You get the point.

I have played no other game for as long as I have played Battlefield 2. There are so many great mods, I often get them confused. My overall playing time is a joke compared to some real addicts, but it’s great to just go online, play a few rounds, and leave again. Even if the game still has its quirks. And yet I’m not tired of it. Even World of Warcraft became boring after only a few months.

Anybody going to the Games Convention in August?

The title might be a little bit misleading, but it’s all about the loss of personal rights and the limitation of freedom.

Last week two new bills were “passed” in Germany. The first, nick-named “hacker paragraph”, makes it illegal to buy, sell and use software tools that can be used to gather restricted information or to hack systems. That’s doesn’t sound like a big deal, of course hacking has always been illegal. The problem is, this law also criminalizes security testers who require to use such tools to do their jobs. Of course they say that only those tools are meant which are typically used to illegally break into systems, but that won’t stop greedy lawyers from suing users. Especially people from the underground ‘hacker’ scene who often discover – and publicize – security holes and weak spots now have a major problem on their hands, they rely on “hacking tools”.

The other big thing is the second renewal of the copyright law. It tightens the grip around the consumer’s throats; personal “private” copies, usually a fair right in Germany – are hardly possible to make in any legal way. The so-called “bagatelle article” which tolerated small, non-commercial and private copyright infringements or try-outs is no longer valid, criminalizing nearly every school kid who ever copied an MP3. But they are not done yet, the third installment of the bill will probably make it illegal to use intelligent software to record online radio and further restrict the rights to make private copies.

Say, in your country, is it legal for the government to hack into your PC over the internet without you knowing and to scan your hard drives when you are suspected to be terrorists or otherwise “bad guys”? Because, the German minister of the interior is fighting with a vengeance for just that right…after the federal intelligence agency used to do that for two years. They were forced to stop when it became public and was declared illegal by the highest court.