Ars Technica had a great summary article of several interviews given by Blizzard regarding the hotly anticipated StarCraft II, due out sometime this year (hopefully!)  Rob Pardo, Vice President of game design; Dustin Browder, StarCraft II lead producer; and Chris Sigaty, StarCraft II lead designer, spoke with IncGamers, Destructoid, and 1UP over the last few days.

One of the major complaints from gamers centers on a comment made by Pardo, who stated, "we don't have any plans to support LAN."  Just in case that wasn't clear enough, he reiterated, "we will not support it."

Many gamers are miffed at these statements, because LAN was a central feature of the original StarCraft, which even included the ability to create a spawn copy of the game on the other computers connected in the LAN.  The fact that Blizzard currently has no intentions of supporting this feature in the sequel feels like a slap in the face to some.  Others are perplexed why so many gamers are concerned with LAN play given that games could just as easily be set up through Blizzard's own online service, Battle.net.

The debate has generally centered around these arguments, as well as claims that dropping LAN play is necessary to prevent piracy (debatable), gripes of the necessity of an internet connection to play the game with friends (reasonable), and proclamations of "get with the times, grandpa!  Who uses LAN these days anyway?"  What has been strikingly absent from this debate is the subtle realization that what Blizzard likely wants is for everyone to buy their own copy of the game.

Think about the nature of entertainment for a minute.  When you invite your friends over your house to watch the Iron Man film, does everyone bring their own copy?  Does everyone in your family open up their own copy of Monopoly when you'd like to play together?  If you go to a friend's house to watch The Daily Show with John Stewart, are you required to have your own home subscribed to a cable service that offers Comedy central?  The answer to all of these questions is no, but increasingly, the answer for video games is yes.
 

Why do video games have this ability to require every player to purchase his or her own copy in order to participate in the social aspects of the medium, while games' analog counterparts and other types of electronic entertainment do not?  We know the answer -- it's simply because game developers can.

Games are a digital medium from the beginning, and therefore, with the internet, the creator of a given work is able to have a greater amount of control over how the content is used.  There are no inherent limitations in this medium that prevent game developers from requiring each player to purchase their own copy of the game.

A game like Monopoly can't be split up in order to force players to purchase the game six times, as a single copy of the game would be useless.  There's just no way for Hasbro to force each player to purchase their own game.  Likewise, there's no way for Paramount Pictures to know how many people are watching Iron Man at your home.

But Blizzard can know -- by requiring that each copy have a unique CD-key, requiring that key to be tied to a unique online account, requiring that account to be connected to their online service to create multiplayer games, and then preventing one account from hosting a game for multiple players, which means removing support for LAN play.

For some reason, we let video games have this pass, but we'd cry foul if another entertainment industry attempted to do the same.  We allow game developers to dictate how we use the content that we've already purchased, and game developers can dictate the terms because the medium they work in gives them free reign to do so.

Addendum: I see that this article has made the spotlight, so I decided to take the opportunity to write this.  My argument is essentially that already made by Lawrence Lessig in Code v2.0, which is a commentary on the nature of copyright and people's ability to use content as they wish in a world dominated by digital content.  I simply wanted to highlight that Blizzard is engaging in a bait-and-switch.  The piracy argument is the bait, and the switch is the consumer's inability to play with friends on a single copy.  I can't exactly fault Blizzard for going this route, as their medium gives them the ability to do so and the nature of capitalism is to maximize profits.  But that doesn't mean I have to approve.