Steam, to the Last, I Grapple with Thee

This is a tragic tale of how Steam broke my five-year-old son Elijah’s heart, directly causing that world-is-ending lip tremble that all parents know so well. But first, a little background information.

Mine has been a love/hate relationship with Valve’s Steam online distribution system. Early on, the platform was a catastrophe. Bandwidth and latency issues were not thought out thoroughly, and countless Half-Life 2 early adopters were completely unable to play the most anticipated game of its time. Even pragmatic individuals who had signed up for pre-loaded versions of Half-Life 2 to avoid the inevitable rush were unable to authenticate their games and load the single player version. In short, it was a complete disaster.

Eventually, Steam’s many issues were patched, and as a mature platform, it’s probably the best online distribution system known to man. For instance, it’s night and day better than Xbox Live’s convoluted menus and disassociative points for money system. However, Steam’s biggest contribution is the rapidly swelling potential of completely removing big name publishers from PC gaming.

These huge publishers like EA and Ubisoft stifle the entire spectrum of games by only allowing for huge “bet the farm” type development cycles. This style of development serves the dual evil of crushing the will to live from our already overworked development community while stifling the innovation of smaller games. Hundreds of crown jewels slip through the cracks for lack of shelf space. I’ll just name a few examples of fantastic games you probably never played thanks to big name publishers; Pontifex, Armadillo Run, Garry’s Mod, Etherlords, MoonBase Commander, Narbacular Drop, Darwinia, and Gish. Ouch. Steam aims to change all this by providing a middle ground for small teams of developers to bestow their individual tidbits of genius upon us in the previously unheard of $14.95 price range. This untapped potential of small development artists actually making a living at their craft was quite enough for me to recant my early hatred of Steam and happily jump aboard ship.

Ok, now back to Elijah’s broken heart. For those of you that don’t know, Garry’s mod is probably the coolest toy since Lego’s. Essentially, the game is a user-friendly front end for the Havok physics engine, making use of the huge library of textures and models found in Valve’s Half-Life 2. After downloading and installing the mod into Steam you can literally do anything. Want to drop 100 bathtubs from 500 feet in the air onto your papa’s head and giggle? No problem. Want to design your own battlebots and pit them against each other in a custom built hazard-filled arena? Garry’s got you covered. Want to stage an epic battle between all the AI characters in Half-Life 2 (with Elijah’s army consisting mainly of Dog robots obsessively playing catch with toilets)? You guessed it, Garry can make it happen.

This kind of sandbox is a five-year-old boy’s dream world; like Lego, pyromania and Disney World all wrapped into one. It also happens to be our favorite father/son activity. Equally fun for kids of all ages, and up until yesterday, Valve was giving us the wink and nod. I only own one steam account, and had it installed on mine and Elijah’s computer. Valve didn’t seem to mind, and allowed us to play Garry’s mod in LAN two player mode until blue in the face. This kind of Digital Rights Management (DRM), which is completely invisible to fair use, is the only kind I will tolerate. Apple’s Itunes uses a similar kind of DRM, in which you’ll never run into any restrictions on copying until you actually start burning CD’s for profit.

Picture if you will, the glow of joy in Elijah’s eyes as Garry’s Mod boots up for a little LAN deconstruction with me, Elijah, and his uncle Zack last weekend. Then, snap, Elijah’s game turns off as mine is turning on, “my computer crashed, papa,” is Elijah’s first suggestion. However, upon looking at his error message, I see the dreaded exclamation I’d been expecting to see the first time I tried booting both games up at once, “your Steam account is logged on in another location.”

To make a long story short, Elijah was crushed, and being the pragmatic guy that he is he suggested that I call Valve and ask them to fix it, resulting in this article. However much I doubt that Valve will fix this horrible “error,” I do have a legitimate complaint. If Valve had wanted to lock my son and me out from playing multiplayer on the same Steam account, it is certainly within their rights to do so; however, baiting us with tantalizing freedom for several years and then cutting us off cold turkey from our favorite pastime? That’s just cruel.