Pirates Cheaters, and Reddit

*Things I would like to get out of my life*

Here's an interesting conversation I had:

I used to play World of Warcraft quite a bit, but stopped before my son was born a little over two years ago. I finally realized that I hated everything about the game. I hated raiding the same content over and over and over and over and over again. I hated the barrier of entry into arena play. I hated the drama in guild chat. I hated waiting hours for things to start only to have them come to an abrupt end when someone would rage or disconnect or just flat out give up. I could no longer think of any reason I enjoyed playing WoW so I quit and while I was overtaken by old feelings of nostalgia once in the last two years, I reinstalled and played for a couple of weeks only to find all of my complaints still completely prevalent.

That was just a really long way to introduce the main character in the story I actually wanted to tell. A guy who I used to play WoW with text me (yes that's right, on the telephone.) I am not entirely sure where he got my phone number, but he said he wanted to see how I was and so on. I gave him my Steam name and we started chatting. As soon as I saw his first message I felt that uneasy sensation when you know that someone is going to ask you for something, but they feel obligated to make small talk before they get to their sales pitch. (You don't give a crap how I am doing today, door to door carpet cleaning guy, so just get down to it so I can say no thank you and go back to obsessively refreshing "r/gaming."

Anyway, so he finally gets to the point and lets me know that his WoW account was banned because he downloaded a bot that would make him money while he did other stuff, like play Starcraft II. I thought about it for a while and eventually just thought, "why the hell not?"

Since then, this person has continued to message me on Steam from time to time when he thinks I am playing something interesting. Most recently he interrupted my game of Recettear to ask me how I like it (I didn't know because I was still reading tutorials). I told him it seemed pretty awesome (as I will tell anyone about almost every indie game, unless they are truly terrible). He said that he would have to pirate it and give it a try.

Now, I am no saint; I have, in the past, pirated things before: movies, music and the requisite 8 and 16-bit emulators, but I have a real problem with people who pirate from independent developers. I told him that it was only $20, there was a free demo, and if he wants it, he should really pony up the money to support the developer. He attested that he was poor and I didn't push the issue because in reality, I don't know this person, so it's not really my place to be their mom, but bad, bad pirate.

Weeks later and a week ago I had the chance to sink some time into Recettear and really discover that it's an awesome game and not just because it's independent. The game can be hard as I found out after playing for a couple of hours I was confronted with a very definitive "Game Over" on my screen with no option to rout me to a save that could help me prevent my untimely end. The game was over. While I was disappointed that I had failed, I was so proud of little Recettear for having the balls to do something that modern games have forgotten, let me fail. Thank you Recettear for not being a hand held, barely interaction video story.

I started over only to have my former WoW companion interrupt me to ask me if I had a hard time with Recettear. I answered in the affirmative and let him know that I had literally just failed. He responded with something that made me laugh. "I had to cheat to get past the deadlines." So here is a game that he pirated that he has to cheat to be able to win. The duality of stealing something and then cheating his way through it just to get through it made me smile in an odd sense of awe and disappointment. Maybe I am the guy who has to smell his wine and swish it around his mouth before ingesting it, but it just seems like that's what you do with something you want to appreciate and savor. But he went through Recettear like a gallon of Thunderbird he tucked under his shirt at the local liquor store. Drank it to get drunk and wake up in the morning with a headache and no recollection of the previous days events. I won't go so far as to call Recettear a masterpiece, but people, if you have a game worth enjoying... enjoy it.

On a positive side note: You may have noticed that I have been writing more consistently in my blogs. This is because I made a rule for myself: I am not allowed to look at Reddit on my office computer (at which I spend most of my computer time). I can look at Reddit at PC in my bedroom, which significantly limits the amount of time I spend (see: waste) on Reddit.