Quick update this time. Speak with haste I shall for rant this is.

And somebody please, get Yoda out of my head. It's weird enough in there already.

Most people who have met me face-to-face will know this, and for the rest of you this is a heads-up: I am a gamer. What this means is as my hobby, I join in contests with other people all over the globe in a video game or two. Tetris, zombie smashing, giant robots fighting in space or a martial arts showdown, you name it. I do these as my past-time whenever I'm not spending time with Sai or otherwise engaged and I usually have a lot of fun.

One particular favourite is the MMORPG, or Mumorpurger if you listen to Zero Punctuation. The acronym stands for Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game and what it basically amounts to is this: the entire game is based on cooperating with other, human players such as yourself against a common foe, be it a computer or yet more human players. It's like the ultimate in social recreation; no cricket game I've ever seen can have four hundred people on either team at once. And it's something I enjoy doing.

Now of course you have your fuckwits in these games, and they come in many different flavours. And I say flavours because I want to tear their heads off and devour the candy that falls out, because the only thing that puffed up and full of crap is a pinata. You have "hackers", people who break into the game itself to try to cheat their way through it and deprive you of any fun. There are "goldsellers", players who sell you in-game currency for real, cold hard cash which drives the in-game economy through the roof. "Botters" are players that use illegal programs to play the game for them while they go out for lunch. "Spammers" are idiots who do nothing but say the same thing, usually an advertisement, over and over and over and over and over and over and over and frickin' over.

So, to try to stop this inflow of the dishonest, the disorderly and disorganized and dumb, the people who are responsible for tending to these games - as the same way a shepherd tends to a flock of sheep, as it were - created special programs to stop them. GameSpy, XTrap, GameGuard, and a host of others... all designed to stop these morons from playing to ensure a fun time is had by all.

Only thing is, reality does not quite work that way.

One game (and sadly, my very favourite) Scions of Fate uses XTrap to try to curb its botter population, and the security issues it has caused are rife indeed. Scions is one of the many games that offer virtual commerce; a means of enhancing one's gameplay experience by purchasing, with real money, different items and effects - just a way of making the game that little bit more enjoyable. Unfortunately due to these security issues, most of the high-level players - those who have spent months and even years playing the game - were hacked and their items stolen, most of which were bought with their own hard-owned money. What this comes down to is real-life theft and yet nothing is done.

GameGuard is a program designed to stop thieves and hackers, by automatically disconnecting all parties involved in what it perceives as a threat. Sounds simple enough, right?

Ding. Cheque please.

I'll assume you don't know how this sort of thing works. In order for GameGuard (henceforth referred to as GG) to disconnect you, it needs access and control to your computer. This is something that one would expect permission for, however if all one had to do was deny it permission to do so and then go on a mad Hollywood-esque hacking spree then the logical solution would be to make GG do what it wants regardless, without asking permission in the first place - which is exactly what happens. And of course, to stop it simply being deleted and the Sunset Boulevard antics recommencing, it actively hides itself from your computer, making it very hard to find.

What this comes down to is, game companies are now putting a VIRUS in their products.

I mean, what better way to put it? It gets into your computer without your permission or knowledge, buries itself somewhere you'll never find it and then buries its tracks, and controls your computer for its own ends. It's a freakin' virus. And I'm getting sick to goddamned death of it.

Now I'll admit my Internet usage isn't exactly squeaky-clean. I swear at morons, have downloaded porn (hey, who doesn't? Anyone who says they haven't is a liar) and I consider myself a full-blown software pirate, complete with digital parrot on one shoulder. But one thing I don't do is cheat in my games, because what is the damned point? Where's the fun in it if you can never fail and all you have to do is press one button on your keyboard and hey presto, you win? It takes all the fun out of it and defeats the purpose of the game in the first place. So why the hell do I have to be treated like the fuckwits out there who think the Internet is their own personal playground where there's no consequences?

It's getting to the point that these systems that are set up to "protect" gamers such as myself are doing more harm than good. It's not just stopping the genuine players from having fun. These things are screwing with our email, crashing our internet browsers and wasting our hard drive space by copying itself repeatedly to avoid deletion and I'm not putting up with this bullshit any more. What these gaming companies don't seem to realise is these non-discriminating programs are not going to solve a damned thing.

These programs are not and never will be a magic bullet to solve this petty and piss-weak problem. The only real way to deal with it is if the people responsible for looking after them actually get off their arses, get into the game and deal with the problem personally. But of course people these days are trying to get as close as they possibly can to sitting on their arses and doing nothing, for money - and we wonder why we're all getting fat!

I have a world-class migraine, big enough to sink a cruise ship, because I just spent four and a half hours going through this computer over and over, using every fastidious method I know, to remove each and every trace of GameGuard from the hard drive, because yet another game company decided to utilise one of these uselessly ironic programs without telling anyone. Sadder still is the fact that it's a very famous company - NCPlay, who manage among others, Tabula Rasa, City of Heroes and Guild Wars. These games are not downloaded for free, you have to buy them from the shops and they are far from cheap. If it's getting to the point that we're paying good money for a set of rights and privileges and a certain level of service, but all we really get is screwed over in the name of the few and far between people that apparently need protecting from the big bad Internet, then I think from now on I'll stick to my books and my beloved games can go to hell.

The saddest part of all this is, the Internet is the only real medium of information and free speech we have. If we have groups trying to control, modify or stop us from using some parts, ANY parts of it for any reason at all, it's only a matter of time until the reasons they give grow more and more. And where do we go from there?

I'll let you ponder that for a while while I go hunting for some ibuprofen and the keys to my tank.