Distributed Mind

I was just reading the license agreement for the OS X Starcraft Installer, and... It turns out the license prohibits tunneling! In other words, you want to play, you have to play on Blizzard.NET.

This is, I think, one of the top three most ridiculous things I have seen in a license agreement (I have forgotten the other two... except I think I remember a license for an early spyware program that was supposed to give them the right to collect just about any data and reuse it - yeah, let me just click okay here...). I think it is repressive, and downright silly. In other words, twenty years from now, when Blizzard is shut down, none of us will be reminiscing about how great Starcraft was and pulling it out to play (like we do with, say, Combat, which is actually slightly older than 20 right now) because we won't be able to play it properly. Well, we will, but only if sitting on the same local network, which is much more restrictive than playing it wherever we want, as we do with every other networked game now. Not that there would be any technical restriction, that is the whole point of using the tunneling - we can get around even old dumb games networking code, like, say, our beloved Warcraft.

Way to step back in time, Blizzard. It's a shame Blizzard has turned out to be such an obnoxious company (this isn't the first time they've done something stupid and mean), because they are certainly excellent game designers. But eventually, bad business practice will catch up with you. Gamers won't put up with idiocy forever.

(I have to wonder how enforceable this clause is, but I assume completely. I mean, you know what you are getting into, right? I have to say though, I probably wouldn't have bought yet another copy of Starcraft if I had known playing it on Mac OS X would have involved seeling my gaming soul. Which makes me annoyed about licensing agreements in general. I havce always been against them, but the as they become even more idiotic, I am beginning to hate them even more, if that is even possible. You have no idea how much I appreciate open source software with a sane license at this very moment [er, I wasn't thinking of GPL-licensed software when I said "sane," though I admit it has its advantages].)