Everything you wanted to know about gaming, and less.

by Jamison DeLorenzo

The Information Age has been a blessing for so many reasons. We have the ability to pull almost any tidbit of information off of the Web at any given time. As this beast has everything between an online encyclopedia, forums for almost any topic you can name, books and tutorials for a broad variety of topics including underwater basket weaving, and insanely powerful search engines that any day now will be able to locate your TV remote before you do, there is almost no information you cannot find.

Almost any gamer would call this the Golden Age of multiplayer gaming experiences. It used to be that if you had a game that you loved playing with friends they needed to be around to have a good time. Now it’s almost easier just to find someone online to play with than someone who lives down the street. While I would love to comment on how online friendships can almost become more fulfilling than real ones (which speaks volumes to our current social issues), today’s topic is something that I fear as another symptom of our Internet freedoms grinding to a halt.

I first started to get nervous about how online gaming would be affected when rumors started swirling about in-game money being taxed because it had a real-world cash equivalent. To date fortune has not favored the tax-happy morons. Now Time Warner and Comcast, our top heavyweight prize fighters in the Nauseating Greed Division, are considering implementing a downloading cap for their ISP clients. A couple years ago this would make me upset solely because restrictions on any level were being placed on me simply because a gigantic corporation has found another way to nickel and dime people because… nobody’s going to stop them.

Today, this aggravates me a whole lot more. In what feels like eons ago, the Department of Justice nuked Microsoft with anti-trust bombs. Many people rejoiced. Software geeks cried tears of joy. Cans of Red Bull were sprayed as though they held champagne. After we saw that Microsoft could still lock in companies with ugly service contracts and Intel could keep punishing distributors that thought about choosing a different chip manufacturer I realized not a whole lot had changed. For a brief period of time I pondered wearing a Thomas Dewey campaign button to commemorate this realization.

What in the world does this have to do with gaming? This may be a painful journey, so bear with me. I promise we are almost there. I also promise you’ll at least appreciate my insight on the matter. If that just isn’t enough for you we can make a quick stop at Dairy Queen to soothe the senses.

In many areas across the country people are very restricted on their television and high-speed ISP choices. In my area, you either have Time Warner or you have nothing for TV. For the Internet I can either use Time Warner or cripple myself with a much slower DSL option. Many people are in the same boat, except they might be stuck with Comcast. What strikes me as strange is that almost nobody but consumers sees this as a problem. Now if I want high-speed Internet I need to limit the rate at which I download information off of the web.

Therefore, if you are someone who purchases media through iTunes, watches TV shows via various websites, or plays online games, you’re pretty much screwed. If you perform all of these functions, as I do, you may be royally screwed. The prospect of being booted from a raid in an online game because my monthly quota has been reached scares me more than enduring another cover of Ballroom Blitz. Anyone fearing this scenario is effectively forced into going for the unlimited bandwidth option from these de-facto monopolies, which is something I’m betting they are banking on (surreptitious pun supplied free of charge).

If you’re fortunate enough to be living in Texas right now you get to be the country’s Guinea Pigs. Don’t worry about getting TV episodes off of websites though- I’m sure Time Warner has a baked in exemption for the media it already owns. More could be said on this, but the main point is nigh obvious.

If you’re reading this as I intended then you should be wondering why, in a country that lags behind over 20 other countries in the world in broadband Internet penetration, we are now going to a pricing scheme where you all of a sudden might have to pay through the nose to get an unlimited Internet connection. Maybe they’re simply trying to squeeze money out of people. Maybe they’re just trying to compete with the iTunes movie downloads. Maybe they are doing what they can to combat piracy. I don’t know if any of these reasons at all are going into this insane experiment but this move would seem counter-intuitive if we really are trying to provide the Internet to every American citizen. Knowing that mad scientists eventually get their comeuppance is almost allowing me to sleep peacefully at night.

In the broader scheme of things, however, my world view on this latest Internet tax has left me worried on what is going to happen with the Information Age. We are long past the point of becoming dependent on the Internet. Is there anything we can do if these dodgy price hikes are not met with enough hatred and disapproval? Is there anything we can do if every company decides to employ this strong-arm tactic? It took more than doubling the price of gasoline before we realized that every oil and gas company on the planet owns for at least another 20 years, so who’s to say that the ISP’s don’t wield this same sort of unwieldy power? Maybe fiber optic cables are the real world Soul Edge (for those of you unfamiliar with Soul Calibur, it’s about the same as the Ring of Power).

Or, maybe, I just need to take a chill pill and hope that the price hikes are not going to be that big of a deal. Maybe that trip to Dairy Queen wasn’t such a bad idea after all.

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