Do What You Want...

But soft, what light through yonder window breaks?

It is the glare, and it is from a sniper rifle gun.

Arise, throw grenade into window, and kill the noob camper,

Who is already on a ten kill count streak.

If you are a fan of gaming and chances are that you are since you are here on a gaming blog you know this is one of the years most highly anticipated game releases. The Call of Duty franchise gets its newest addition to the family with Black Ops II on November 13th. Hate it or love it this is without a doubt guaranteed to sell well and will definitely be giving Halo 4 some stiff competition in the sales department. As is customary for Call of Duty releases somewhat copies of the game have found themselves on the internet by as much as a month in advance of store release dates. I had an interesting conversation with my co-worker today about the video game industry and how piracy is wrong so I figured I would drop a line or two stating my stance on the subject. Sadly this topic is a cloudy and touchy one which akin to religious debates is open to interpretation and perspective. However for the sake of entertainment and making this applicable to all individuals and not just gamer's this is my standpoint on the topic...

Now I know that some will say its still theft because you are stealing money from the original creators of the content but ideally most of the people who say this live in a first world country and have certain options available to them. Piracy is defined as the unauthorized reproduction or use of a copyrighted book, recording, television program, patented invention, trademarked product, etc. Granted i'm not justifying that pirating games, movies, etc. is necessarily OK but I just want people to understand that its not as big a deal as some over exaggerated and make it out to be. Ideally in a perfect world everyone would pay for their own copy of whatever data it is they want and only make copies for themselves as a means of backup/archiving in case something should happen to the original. Sadly we do not live in a perfect world; as such there are many reasons why people pirate all sorts of data, lets take a look at what I like to term the levels of pirateers. Which category are you in? Comment your thoughts below.

1. Joe Schmo -  This group includes parents, relatives, random girls, and so on that typically have to ask some one who is as I like to call it tech-inclined to procure the pirated copy of whatever. A lesser type of Joe Schmo are sometimes told by another class as a recommendation to try a pirated means of procuring what they need.

2. The Newbie - This is the next stage after being a Joe Schmo; these people now repeatedly seek out pirated data for purchase whether on the roadside DVD movie sellers or those douchebag computer repair shops that sell pirated copies of windows to people under the guise of fixing and formatting their PC's.

3. The Techie - Having seen the wonders of pirating and not wanting to spend unnecessary money this person now does research into piracy and finds out how to start doing it for himself whether it be copying borrowed copies of data or just downloading stuff and reselling it to the general public at large.

4. The Veteran - Been around long enough to know the difference between a crack and a fix, a rip and a release, a torrent and a direct download these persons know all the right places to get any and everything the internet has to offer. They ideally are the first to test the waters and then share the info to others once it has been deemed safe for consumption.

5. Based God - These are the people working behind the scenes to make things happen. These are the ones that get the original data and hack, crack, or otherwise re-encode it for mass production on the world wide web. Some do it for honor, others for glory but at the end of the day it's these people that are at the heart of it all.

With so many levels and people involved in the art that we have come to know as Piracy its sometimes a hard conversation to have with people. Some feel that it is wrong but then there are those people who solely pirate things to see if they enjoy them and then actually buy a legit version of the aforementioned item. This further breaks down when you get a person saying that they live in a region of the world where it is just financially unsound to pay exorbitant fees for the original thing when you aren't exactly being charged the original price in the first place. Case in point gamers in Jamaica who have to pay upwards of nine thousand dollars or more for new game releases that in the USA cost on average $60. Times that by our current JMD exchange rate at the time of you reading this and you will see there is a big price gap that seems very unfair to us as customers. Sadly digital copies of games are not yet industry standard so we have to make due as best we can. Then there are people such as myself that will buy games legit but sadly aren't made of money so try as we might to curb our gaming enthusiasm to match our wallet capacity it is an equation doomed to fail so we take solace in the fact that we aren't pirating every thing. Well with that being said ill just end this post here since my copy of Black Ops 2 is almost finished downloading; thank god for digital downloading for online gaming. I'll just leave you with this bit of awesomeness...