The Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and Protect IP Act (PIPA) have lost a lot of ground in the previous week. With politicians, corporations and the ESA all pulling their support for the legislation in the wake of the largest online protest in history, voting on the bills has finally been postponed indefinitely. But that doesn’t mean that the danger has passed just yet. Ordinary gamers, in particular, must continue to stand up for themselves until the egregious laws are put to rest for good.
Many people know that the bills will be detrimental to the internet in many different ways (if you didn’t already know that, you probably wouldn’t be reading this article). But what exactly will SOPA and PIPA mean specifically for the video game industry?
As gamers, how will SOPA/PIPA affect us?
The video game industry has seen a pretty sizable explosion in content over the past few years. In large part, that’s because of how much easier and profitable the industry has become for independent developers. Minecraft was created by a single man with an idea. Now, two years after the game first launched into an open alpha, the game has earned millions of dollars and funded an entirely new development team.
But how do millions of people pick up a game and bring it up to sensation-status when the game has literally zero funds in terms of marketing and publicity? Well, that’s where we came in.
Gamers, bloggers and journalists manned their media siege engines and showed everyone just how wonderful Minecraft was. Videos showcasing fan-made tutorials, scale-models of the Enterprise-D and simulated computers within games within computers set the likes of Youtube and gaming blogs ablaze. Rarely before had so many fallen in love with something brought to them by so few.
And that’s exactly the sort of communal spirit what SOPA and PIPA would destroy.
You see, word of mouth is a very powerful thing. Minecraft isn’t the only indie sensation that can attest to that. However, word of mouth also relies on one’s ability to actually spread the word. Things like Twitter, Reddit, Wikipedia, Facebook, Youtube, gaming blogs, N4G, LinkedIn, Stumble Upon and just about the entire goddamn internet make this easier than ever. However, SOPA and PIPA would make spreading the word about anything tangible without the express permission of those behind the product in question illegal. Not only that, but it would make the service that allowed something as tragic as free promotion to pass without question liable.
Smaller games that rely on all of those precious stories and videos could be silenced in the shockwave caused by some blitzkrieg CEO that doesn’t like what someone said about the latest Madden game on Youtube or even a news blog like Joystiq or Kotaku.
It’s also true that our homegrown video games wouldn’t bear the brunt of the damage. That’s because the legislators behind SOPA and PIPA have decided to veil their ridiculous bills behind the xenophobic notion that those barbarian hordes known as ‘foreigners’ are somehow more liable to be pirates than us here in the States. SOPA and PIPA are technically only supposed to be able to block content from other countries. The trouble is, most gamers these days aren’t old enough to even remember what a Regan looks like. Tons of games, big and small, good and bad, come from all corners of the globe. On average, foreign games tend to rely a lot more heavily on word of mouth than domestic stock. Not only that, but (and this may be a surprise to the kind of people writing these kinds of laws) not every country in the world is run like the United States. If some nation out there does things a little bit differently than those behind SOPA/PIPA would like, they could potentially restrict access to content from that country. That means we might never hear about games like The Witcher 2, which was developed in Poland and managed to crack SideQuesting’s own 2011 Game of the Year list.
Obviously, journalists and developers depend on people being able to know about video games. However, so do all of the gamers out there that rely on healthy competition and innovation to ensure the best possible quality for the products that they spend money on. If television stations were to lampoon a FOX property, the government wouldn’t be able shut down every other network but FOX. I’m pretty sure that this is the case since I still don’t watch Fox News (that being said, I don’t watch a lot of network television period).
So if you thought that SOPA and PIPA were only dangerous to pirates or the film and music industries, you were wrong. These bills are dangerous to just about everyone; possibly to gamers most of all.
That’s okay. It’s not always wrong to be wrong and it’s never too late to make things right.
Recent protests have made a lot of headway in terms of shutting down the threat of SOPA and PIPA. The internet has shown a lot of solidarity in pushing the bills back to their wrinkly, Gold Bond-soaked hives. The bills are likely in for some major overhauls before voting finally begins. But the fight isn’t over. You can still support the cause, as well as your hobby and yourself, by contacting your local representatives and telling them that they shouldn’t support these draconian laws in their current states, or not at all unless drastic changes are made.
It’s not too late for them to be right too.
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