It’s entirely true for me, and for Gabriel, and perhaps even for you; there’s seven point six gigs worth of wholly inert Diablo 3 dormant on one of our fixed disks.
Clearly, it’s not the most important thing in the universe. I imagine we’ll continue to respirate, performing gas exchange and generally maintaining consciousness. It is dumb, though, and weird; not the respiration, that’s something you should all be doing. I support that part one hundred percent.
No, it’s the idea that we have to go through all these gyrations even though scarcity and its crude attendant necessities have been (for a not insignificant portion of the gaming public) relegated to history. If anybody could break this thing, it would be Blizzard, right? If anyone could just say, “Hey, it’s 2012 alright, and nobody can play our game offline anyway because we won’t let them, and boxes are made of cardboard and are not in any way magical, so go ahead and install your game” it would be them.
It is certainly the case that there are crevices, holes in the earth, where one may not feel the light of the healing Web upon their skin-flesh. Those people are welcome to purchase physical objects. People of the Console must certainly remain People of the Disc, at least for the time being. But there’s no console version of Diablo, and there’s no secondary market to war with on PC games. There is no fiefdom to sustain, short of an ancient retail edifice the future will rapidly transform into a chain of mall-bound mausoleums.
For my part, to the extent I even have the opportunity to do so, I don’t have any intention of purchasing PC software at retail again. It’s animism, all this box worship; it’s down home and it’s hokey. But we’re still governed by this nonsense, even when its clearly a holdover from some prior phase of evolution, like “being afraid of cats.”
(CW)TB out.
