Comment by matheusmoreira
15 hours ago
> cheating
Not a problem. It's their computer, they can edit the game's memory to freeze their character's hitpoints or look through walls if they really want to. As the owners of the machine, it's their god given right.
> People are breaking the social contract of competitive games.
This is not even remotely close to being worth sacrificing our freedom and leverage over. Let it happen. Play with friends you know and trust instead of internet randoms.
> Booting into a special environment just for competitive games would allow both to coexist.
There will never be such a "special environment" for games. Every government and corporation under the sun wants this for much more sinister reasons. The notion that this will be limited to video games is laughable. Video game are merely how they are selling this subversion to you.
Either your computer is yours or it's not. And if your computer allows strangers to set up an untouchable embassy within your system where they can do anything they want and remain forever beyond your reach, then it's not really your computer, is it? It's the corporation's computer, they're just generously allowing you to use it... Provided you follow their silly policies and rules.
The abuses that will materialize if we allow them to get away with this nonsense will put science fiction to shame.
So even murder is okay under your philosophy? It's just a social contract that stops it and it's your nature given right to murder other life forms.
This is happening irregardless of what your wants are. Booting into a self contained game image allows both to co exist, rather than Epic and such locking down normal distros.
Let's not compare computer issues with murder. And of course it is happening regardless of what we want: trillion dollar industries and governments want this. We're nothing to these people.
Coexist? That's total nonsense. This is merely a temporary solution for them. The end game is the total destruction of computing freedom as we know it today. Video games are just the first thing they will take away from you. They also want your encryption, your local AIs, your torrents, your adblockers, your emulators, anything and everything that harms their bottom line and subverts their laws in any way.
Soon you will no longer be allowed to boot into anything that will give you any form of control. It's the war on general purpose computing, cheating in online games is completely irrelevant next to that. The democratization of cryptography allows citizens to defeat police, judges, even literal spies. Computers are too subversive to allow us citizens to own them, they think we should only have computers that run a restricted set of government signed executables. It's the end of everything the word "hacker" ever stood for.
What makes it especially hilarious in a sad way is the fact that this is what makes personal computers truly special. Consoles are just locked down computers, we're the ones who have freedom. Considerable effort is spent on jailbreaking consoles precisely to restore that freedom. Yet the PC gamers seem to be almost eager to "coexist" with these hostile corporations whose entire mission is to reduce our computers to appliances.