Recently, Twitter (I am never calling it X) introduced a new feature that automatically translates posts into whatever your local language is. I’m not not sure if all languages are supported, and machine translation itself is hardly a new thing. The beauty of the Twitter implementation is how frictionless it is. Posts are translated and incorporated into your feed without any additional action required on your part.
This has resulted in countries that have previously had minimal interaction on Twitter conversing with each other for the first time.
While most of these interactions have been wholesome, primarily consisting of sharing cat photos, the timing of the feature led to a clash between two cultures that are usually on friendly terms with each other. Japan and The West.
Nier
So, there’s a mobile game named Nier: Reincarnation. I’ve never played it or heard of it before now, but it was quite popular by all accounts. Anyway, Square-Enix saw fit to pull the plug on the whole thing rendering it unplayable. Thankfully for fans of the game, an independent dev created an open-source reimplementation of the server so the game can be kept alive. In the West, this was met with almost universal approval, but in Japan the reaction was one of shock and outright hostility.
It would seem that the Japanese opinion is that if a company pulls the plug on a product then that’s all there is to it. You should be thankful to them for allowed you to have ever played it in the first place.
Piracy?
A word that was thrown around a lot during the various heated debates was “piracy”. The Japanese opinion was that the rights of copyright holders is absolute and should be respected. Even creating a clean-room back engineered server to keep an old game online is an infringement of copyright and is automatically bad and is an ethical violation on par with piracy (which we’ll define here as obtaining software via unauthorised channels).
Piracy is a word that the entertainment industry loves to attach to everything from bootleg games and videos being sold under the table at the local market to something as innocuous as taping a song from the radio. It conjures images of privateers relieving others of their hard-earned goods, blunderbus in hand and cutlas between teeth.
On paper it seems like a reasonable thing to object to. Taking something without paying for it is bad, right? You wouldn’t walk into a shop and take things without paying, you wouldn’t steal a car.
I think the reality is far more nuanced than that, though. I think in many ways piracy and the entertainment industry exist in a kind of symbiosis. Far from being motivated by profits, many pirates share software and attempt to crack copy-protections simply for the intellectual challenge of doing so. Entire subcultures have evolved from sharing software cracks on BBSs. Cracktros (introduction screens from the group who cracked the game/app) are practically an artform in and of themselves, with online demoscene goldmine Pouet.net have a specific category just for cracktros.
Many younger or less affluent gamers relied on disk copying and bootlegs in order to engage in the hobby at all. Many of the gamers who now spend their wages on modern consoles and AAA game releases grew to love gaming through piracy.
I’m not saying that you should say a big “fuck you” to developers and pirate their stuff instead of buying it, I’m just pointing out the symbiotic relationship. It’s been proven time and again in studies that so-called pirates spend far more on legitimate products than non-pirates.
Even with all that said, applying the word piracy to something as innocuous as a DIY server for a dead game is just nonsense. There was a time when dedicated servers for games were commonplace. You can still fire up a copy of Unreal Tournament 2004 (and you should) and play online exactly because the devs supplied everything you needed to host your own servers. So now, after official support has long since ended, the game lives on.
Keeping old games alive should be encouraged, not shamed.
Anyway, that’s just a stream of consciousness ramble about the whole thing. Bye for now!