Next Fest: No Spoilers

Before I got started on my review of the Nighthawks demo this morning, I thought I'd better play the last remaining demo on my list, Æther&Iron. Next Fest ends today and sometimes demos become unavailable immediately after.

To that end, I fired up Steam, hit Play and the first thing that appeared was the screen you see above. I've played a lot of demos. I wouldn't swear I've never been confronted by an EULA in the opening moments but it's certainly not anything I'd expect. If you're hoping to persuade people to give your game a try, I'd have to say it's not a great way to open.

Over the last forty-five years or so I've been playing computer games (Does anyone call them that any more?), the last quarter of a century mostly online, I've signed hundreds of EULAs. I used to be in the habit of reading them all the way through, carefully, but as time went on I became more and more resigned to simply clicking the acknowledgement box and taking the contents as read.

I was encouraged to start doing that when I learned that, under UK law, at least, the Unfair Contract Terms Act of 1977 provided a fairly reliable safety-net against any unreasonable clauses in these kinds of agreements. I did a short course in law when I was studying for some insurance exams back in another lifetime and I had a passing familiarity with the way the law worked in that particular area from my studies. 

Then, in 2015, that act was largely replaced by the Consumer Rights Act, with which I am much less familiar. I'm a lot fuzzier on the whole thing now.

More importantly, perhaps, most EULAs these days make quite specific stipulations about the national, regional and local laws that apply and about which jurisdictions would be used in case of legal action, making it somewhat uncertain whether UK law would be the primary factor in any case. It would be comforting to be able to say no-one would ever be extradited over something they'd done in a video game but given some of the attempts that have been made in the past, I would hesitate to say it's never going to happen. 

Not being clinically paranoid, I don't really expect any such action to be taken because someone did something silly in a video game but there is a slightly more realistic possibility that some publisher or developer might take exception to something someone might say about their game in a post or to some image used to illustrate it. Games developers and designers have occasionally dropped by the comments section here to mention that they've read a review so it's always somewhere in the back of my mind that anything I write might be seen by the makers of the game I'm writing about.

More cogently, I'm also somewhat interested in what happens to what I post, after I've posted it. Having been so frequently critical of the entire copyright system as it's existed since the eighteenth century, I'm aware it's somewhat hypocritical of me to want to hang on to ownership of my own work but hypocrisy is a failing I'm wiling to acknowledge in certain circumstances. 

It's not so much that I care if people copy my work and re-distribute it, which has happened occasionally, albeit not to my knowledge recently. I'm not making any money from it and I very much doubt anyone else would be able to, either. My objection isn't to so much with re-use of my work, with or without credit, as it is to the dictatorial proposition sometimes found in EULAs that all my base are belong to them. 

I still rarely read EULAs all the way through these days but I do often scan them quickly to see if anything stands out as unusual. If I come across one of those clauses that effectively read "Everything you ever do, anywhere, that remotely involves our game in any way, isn't yours, never was yours and never will be yours, so don't come crying to us about it if we take it and use it, in or out of context, anywhere, ever, you whining little baby",  it's quite likely I'll decline to play that game at all, let alone write about it.

As I said at the top, though, it's hardly something I'd expect to have to think about when loading up a demo. Demos are commercials. Advertisements. Promos. They're supposed to lure you in, not put you off. They exist to generate publicity, don't they?

Consequently, I thought I'd better have a quick squint through this one, just in case. And what I found was very interesting. 

I haven't read every word but I have skim-read the whole thing and given the sections that particularly caught my attention a bit more attention than that. It's not draconian or over-bearing or objectionable in any way. It's quite a friendly, even jolly EULA, as they go. 

And I can see what they're doing, I think. Maybe all EULAs are like this now or will be soon. 

For a start, the document makes very clear indeed that you don't, won't and never will own the game you're about to play, regardless of whether you've paid money for it or on which platform you've chosen to access it. 

I do like that short, declarative opening sentence: "We own the game". No room for quibbling there. Later, there's another clause that says they may at any time stop supporting the game and that's an end to it. I imagine this is exactly the way the Stop Killing Games campaign was hoping developers would react. Nothing like a bit of clarity to calm things down.

There's a fair bit more about access and changes to the game and platforms and availability, all of which makes it very plain that you, the player, have some very limited rights only, to play whatever version of the game is made available to you, for as long as it's made available, where it's made available. And that's it.

Again, very reasonable. It just codifies in advance what has always been the reality of online gaming, that being that you have to have an up-to-date, patched version of the game to access the official servers on which the only legal version of the game will be running and that the service can be suspended or terminated at any time, with or without notice. Anyone playing any MMORPG will recognize that as their existing reality, I'm sure.

For a demo, though, it feels a tad over the top. A demo is generally a throwaway experience, isn't it? Is anyone really expecting to be able to keep playing a demo indefinitely?

I wouldn't have bothered much about any of that. Par for the course for games, if not for demos. I was more interested what I could or couldn't say about it. And there's a lot about that in the small print, some of it quite unexpected.

It tells you what you can and can't do if you stream the game (Demo, I should say.) on Twitch or upload videos of you playing it to YouTube. It tells you how you can monetize your content via Patreon and how you can't.

I found these sections surprisingly chatty for a legal document but the intention was obviously to be helpful and supportive. Developers want people to make content about their games (By which they mean videos and streams, mainly.) and these devs also understand that people make a living doing it so they're willing to meet content creators halfway over monetization.

There's also a lengthy section about making Mods that I won't address because I know bugger all about Mods, neither creating them or using them. I will say that I can't remember seeing that aspect of the ecosystem being addressed in such detail in an EULA before but that's likely to be because I would have skipped right past it as irrelevant.

So far, I hadn't seen anything that would prevent me from ticking the box and playing the demo. Or writing about it afterwards. And then I saw this:

"If your User Content contains "spoilers" of the story of our game, your content must contain an appropriate "spoiler warning" either at the beginning of your User Content (If your User Content contains spoilers throughout.) or at the beginning of a segment of your User Content (If the spoilers are contained within a segment of your User Content.)"

That, I'm afraid, is a condition up with which I am not prepared to put. Not for a demo, anyway. 

It's a demand for editorial control, isn't it? It's telling the reviewer on what terms they may review the product. The fact that the request is entirely reasonable, in the best interest of the reviewer's readers or viewers and no more than any well-mannered, properly socialized reviewer would do without any prompting from anyone, is entirely irrelevant, especially when the demand is allegedly enforceable by law.

Also, it's a demo FFS!

If I was reviewing the finished game, I would without question employ spoiler warnings before getting into any detailed discussion of the plot. Not to do so would be plain rude.

But for a demo? The whole point of a demo is to showcase the game, drum up interest in it, get people excited and in the case of Steam encourage them to add it to their Wishlist. The demo should be specifically designed so that spoilers aren't relevant. You want everyone to know what's in it or else what the hell is the point? If you can't manage that, then it's your problem, not the reviewer's.

There aren't any spoilers in this post because once I read that clause I decided I wouldn't bother playing the demo at all. It's a shame because it looks like something I'd enjoy but, hey, there are lots of games out there. It's not like I'm going to miss one. 

I might even still try it when it releases, supposedly next year. I won't get any reminders about it because I'm not going to wishlist it either but if it's a big hit no doubt I'll get to hear about it anyway. I'd have a lot fewer qualms about signing that EULA for a full game than for a demo although I still think the spoiler clause is unwarranted and presumptuous. 

The last thing I have to say about all of this is something that actually annoyed me more than anything I've mentioned so far. When you get to the end of the document there's a line thanking you for reading all the way through, which I couldn't help but read as ironic, although maybe it was meant to be taken straight, but there's no way to exit the EULA without agreeing to it.

Seriously? You're thanking me for reading it all but I'm not allowed to say "No" to what I've read? WTF!

There's no Decline option. Escape doesn't work, either. I had to close the demo from the taskbar to get back to Steam. That really pissed me off. I'm still cross about it now.

I did at least get a blog post out of the experience so there's that. The Nighthawks post will have to wait until Wednesday now. Or maybe Thursday. It's going to be another busy week and this hasn't put me in any better a mood for it.