The Day Of Mixed Anxieties

The distress however, belongs almost entirely to the Wife, not me.

For the most part, I thought my day was going to be pretty run of the mill. I was just going to work on the Bioware submission a bit more, then go off to a little seminar about Copyright and Intellectual Property Law as it pertains to Massively Multiplayer Online Roleplaying Games, and then go home and work a bit more. It sort of went half that way, anyhow.

In the morning, I got a little bit of work done, and then the Wife enacted her new decision to move her computer from end of the room to the other. This seemed like a relatively straightforward proposition until she hooked everything up and got it running, at which point, the router that controlled our mutual access to the Internet, promptly refused to work. No matter what she did, Internet access was dead. Time was counting down and she had another appointment to get to–she wanted to bring a Mac she had recently acquired over to her Uncle’s to trade it in for a Mac Powerbook–and so I went with her to dutifully lug said Mac around.

Then I went over to the lecture, which was not, I state now, my idea, but the assignment from the editors at GameAxis.

It was kind of interesting in that most of the people there were either lawyers or people with the Economic Development Board, or the Infocomm Authority, and not a single one of them had the faintest clue of what was happening in the realm of MMOs, or just how crazy the legal wrangling is getting there. It’s the damn Wild West frontier all over again, with all kinds of cases going to court that have no precedents, and what amazed me was that while they obviously knew their law very well, they were almost dumbfounded with amazement to hear about things like the infamous “Jedi for sale” fiasco that plagued Star Wars Galaxies, or the millions of US dollars transacted on E-Bay for virtual goods, or the hands off approach game developers have taken to Seconed Life.

All of these things, I might add, had to be brought up by ME, the most unlikely person in the entire room, since everyone was wearing business shirts, shoes and jackets, and I was sitting there with my birkenstocks, “Lone Wolf” T-shirt, and a Nintendo DS with Kingdom Hearts: Chain of Memories to pass the time. I think I short circuited a few brains when I talked about the Jedi thing, since even the speaker hadn’t known about that.

Towards the end, there were case studies that were given which resulted in the entire room being broken up into four discussion groups to debate the merits and ramifications of each case. They were supposed to be hypothetical, but I recognized one of them as a thinly disguised scenario of what happened between NCSoft, creators of the Superhero MMO City of Heroes and Marvel when Marvel sued NCSoft because the game players were infringing on Marvel copyright by creating their own version of Spiderman and Wolverine within the game. I told my group, “This is the NCSoft/Marvel case,” and when I explained it to them, the speaker ended up asking me to explain the entire case and its unsatisfying real world result (An out of court settlement, thus avoiding the burden of having to establish the first legal precedent).

After I spilled the beans on it, I think I got a whole lotta’ credibility from the people in the room for A) Not speaking with a Singaporean accent, and B) making it abundantly clear that I knew exactly what I was talking about. A couple of people even asked me what company I was with, and when I said “GameAxis” they wanted to know which games they made, which confused me until they explained that from the way I discussed the industry, they thought I was a developer. And I got a bunch of people asking me for my card, to which I replied, “I’m just a cog in the machine, man, don’t look at me, I’m only the writer, you wanna’ talk about this stuff, talk to my editors, they’re the brains, I just do what they tell me.” The scariest one was when the lawyer in my group asked me if it would be all right to occasionally contact me for consultation with her clients on the dynamics of the game industry which flipped me out, and I again referred her to the office. This is Not My Scene…

After that, I found out that the Wife was over at the Geek Mall, Funan Center, having spent the last few hours getting a tech-head at the shop to look over the router and finally say, “Yup, it’s broken. That’ll be $80, please.”

In the end, we didn’t get out of Funan until sometime close to 9:00 pm, because she went to another place, asked them to help get the router/internet situation fixed, and they reccomended a new router/modem combination. The Wife at this point was in the “Fine, I’ll pay whatever you want, just please, please, PLEASE make this problem go away…” and so he obliged her by offering the configure the new doohickey to work using my laptop (She’d brought it with her to get a new battery for it) and promptly spent a couple of hours being unable to do so. At which point he advised, “Maybe you’d better not buy this, since I can’t actually get it to work…”

So, the end result was an incredibly frustrated Wife (who has sanctioned the purchase of a pack of cigarettes for HER stress) and only one computer at a time allowed access to the internet.

Right. Off to bash more demons in Digital Devil Saga 2, then go to bed. Hopefully tomorrow will be a little calmer and I’ll actually be able to get more work done on the Bioware submission and start writing up my article on the Intellectual Property seminar, carefully leaving out all the stuff about being asked for my business card and offers to be a consultant.

Man. TOO freaky…