Nostalgia and Digital Rights Managment

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I fear my experience is bland and unoriginal, but it was new for me, once. I remember distinctly my first encounter with a computer game ownership mediated through a content provider/distributor software. It was back in the hazy days of the early millennium when computers game were still tangibly piratable by physically just burning a copy of the CD-ROM occasionally. I'd come to learn of a game, Counter-Strike that was supposedly something I might really enjoy and had inexplicable cultural value I wanted in on. I was very surprised to find how little anyone seemed to be able to pirate it. There's was no copies floating around, at least in my neck of the woods. Once I stumbled upon a download for an old demo of Counter-Strike 1.6 but when it asked to me to install some then unheard of additional program called "Steam" on top of the game itself, my sketch alarm went off and I just didn't bother with it.

Years later I would come to buy a corporeal box of "Steam" games that included counter-strike among others and I realized what "Steam" did. It was a content library system that you had to have an account for, and logging in was the only way to play the game. In exchange for this mild chaining of the game to your person (or your account) you got automatic updates and patches for all your games, had a chat function to talk to different Steam Members and all sorts of proto-social media attributes that have since grown substantially.

My steam account existed but half forgotten for a few years as I fell out of the gaming hobby, but many of my friends never quit. When finally some of the titles they were playing seemed really interesting somewhat recently, I was informed that Steam had developed a new kind of system where you could "share" your virtual copies (or really licenses) to play games, meaning that my friends could give me access to games they were no longer playing, and I could play them for free, so long as I wasn't on at the same time as them. Now while one might easily complain this is still a manufacturing of  an artificial scarcity ( *someone yelling "information, everywhere it is in chains!"*) the capacity to share actually brought me nostalgia to my old 1990s/early 2000s computer game days of mild piracy, where many of my friends would circulate copies of game titles that we liked amongst each other. There was a social element re-introduced into the virtual licensing, which I think is a very clever move by Steam, and not to sound too much like a corporate hack, I think this is why they don't get as much flak as Amazon Kindles or Netflix in regards to content controlling/dispensing services, they keep it playful and seemingly minimally legatious.

-Ben