Bethesda Softworks: Premier Game Rental Corporation.

The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, is stunning. No question about that. I'm not prepared to write a blog post about how wonderful Skyrim is; there are approximately seven-hundred thousand, six-hundred and nintety-four and a half blog posts on that exact subject, if you're interested. What I'm interested in talking about is the fact that I don't seem to own my copy of the game.

I don't have a job, because I'm too young. Therefore I was required to pay for half of the game while my dear brother payed for the other half. Our plan was to install the game on both our seperate computers in order to avoid dividing play-time between us. That was when I discovered the Steamworks digital rights management system. All I knew of it before was that your game was automatically installed onto popular games libary Steam, rather than as a seperate program. Fine. Then I was informed by no less than Pete Hines of Bethesda Softworks that "one copy means one game". Basically, either me or my brother could install the game, the other one was as stuffed as a teddy bear who'd just eaten a large meal and been told he couldn't install Skyrim on his computer. Fortunately, my brother (who does have a job, therefore rendering him one million times more responsible and less likely to commit crime, according to most members of Parliment) bought a copy for himself, meaning that we could both hide away from the bleak coldness of real life. I've currently spent 168 hours doing so.

But the thing that rankles with me is the issue we had. We both bought the game. Surely that disk is now our property, to do as we will with it. If you want to stop us uploading it to Piratebay, put some software on it that stops that from happening. Don't **** over customers by forcing them to shell out for two games just because you're worried about piracy. The "One copy, one game" rule implies that we had rented the game from Bethseda to install and now we must give it back and never look at it again because IT'S THEIR'S. When I voiced a rather more modest version of these opinions to Mr Hines himself, I was called "selfish", "Self-entitling" and "a wannabe pirate" by onlookers, who had obviously bought the game for Xbox 360 or supported SOPA. The two of us had a right to both install the game, because we both payed money for it. In fact, they actually lost money on this transaction, because my brother ended up buying the game through Steam itself, giving a portion of the money to Valve, the Steam developers. Oopsie daisie.

I was only joking about the SOPA support. Imagine if people actually agreed with it! Imagine if Congress did! Ha!

Now leave me.

Tour Guide Removal Service

Old ruined castles. Once you’ve seen one, you’ve seen them all. They’ll have battlements, and a keep, and a gift shop where the armoury used to be, called “The Armoury Gift Shop”, or some other life-sappingly imaginative name. Worse still, they’ll run a guided tour.
It’s bad enough walking around these fetid piles of stone and feudalism. Trudge trudge. Look, some stones! Trudge trudge. This is where they fired arrows at attackers! It looks a lot like the other holes they used to fire arrows at attackers! Trudge trudge. Does anyone think that pile of stones there looks like a boot? Shut up and keep trudging! But then an overly chirpy or terminally bored very young or very old person will walk you around the ruin, pointing out all of the tiny little details you didn’t notice before because you really have better things to do, like counting the number of spots on that man’s face, or guessing how many people threw themselves from the battlements on one of the guided tours. You will be informed there is a re-enactment at midday, in which a couple of gap-year students dress up in ill-fitting false armour and go through a painfully unexciting impression of a swordfight, or a jousting match, or a demonstration of how bad sanitation was back then. Ha ha, he threw poo on his head! How savage these people are, with their lack of flushing toilets.
None of this compares, however to the most hideous experience of all: The guided tour abroad.
It’s the same combination of boredom and rock. But this time the endless droning may as well be in Elvish for all you know. Your look of bored befuddlement will be noticed by the tour guide, who will suddenly stop his incredibly long sentence and turn to you. In the tone used by adults explaining to a child that the custard goes into the mouth, not in the ears, they will say “is tower”. All of that, just to say that it was a tower? Any other details are irrelevant really. It’s a tower. My great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great uncle might have died there (as many French tour guides are keen to suggest, the smug people from France), but I really don’t care. Rock is rock, stone is stone, homicidal impulses are making a great deal of sense right now. Then you feel guilty and stupid, as your failure to listen at school has required the tour guide to stop boring the tears out of the others to direct the boredom beam straight at you. All that boredom isn’t just for you, you know! Now keep trudging! Allez!