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The Lawbringer: A world without remedy
Pop law abounds in The Lawbringer, your weekly dose of WoW, the law, video games and the MMO genre. Running parallel to the games we love and enjoy is a world full of rules, regulations, pitfalls and traps. How about you hang out with us as we discuss some of the more esoteric aspects of the games we love to play? One of the very basic tenets of our society and our social structure is that when we are wronged, there is remedy. If your car is totaled by a careless driver, you have recourse through insurance companies or the driver's own wallet. There's someone you can sue, usually, and get enough money to make you whole again. The thing you lost, your car, has a certain value. The money puts you back in the position you were before you were wronged. Late last week, we learned about a startling occurrence in the games industry -- Crysis 2 was leaked. And not just any leak: Rock Paper Shotgun reported that not only was a developer build of Crysis 2 leaked with the full single-player content available, but also the multiplayer experience as well as a keystone master online authentication key, making CD key facilitation magnitudes easier for pirates. Leaks happen, but Crysis was mere weeks from release. The most interesting and potentially saddest aspect of this story is that when games leak out from the watchful gaze of their developers, there is little to no recourse for these companies on the scale that is required to be made whole. This week, I'm going to talk about a world without recourse, the location of one of the game industry's biggest and scariest problems, the world of online activation, and how Blizzard's tight-lipped security still doesn't prevent leaks even as one of the biggest gaming concerns running now.
The Failure of Secrecy: The alpha, leaks, and the WoW community
The past few days have seen leaks on an unprecedented scale. For better or worse, nearly the entire visual artwork of the expansion is out on the internet, and key and yet-unseen components of the lore, landscape and mechanics are now laying wide open for those who care to look. Many people have drawn lines in the community -- some believe these leaks are good, and others believe them bad. In both camps, basic information is lacking as to exactly what leaks are, how and why they originate and what they mean for the common player. It's critical that we as a community take an introspective look at what these leaks mean to us, why they happen and the consequences we all face as a result. Let's begin this examination with a basic question ... What are leaks? At the most basic level, leaks are previously unreleased information given to the press with the intention of distribution to the public. In the case of WoW, a leak can range from a release date for a patch to an entire client of a new expansion. Leaks like these comprise of data that are accessible publicly, one way or another, and are generally not considered trade secrets. Another type of leak, which is much more serious, is something like the source code to Windows 2000. Something that like is very sensitive and has a lot of real-world implications. WoW doesn't have anything secretive like that which can impact the very security of our computer networks and commerce infrastructure, even though WoW leaks are important to Blizzard in their own regard.
