The Final Maha Avatara

You know those guys over at Major Game Publisher? They’ve been putting together a new MGP game. Has a budget of like $40 million and a sweet bespoke “campus” and a ball pit and fireman’s pole and they all got Nexus Ones for meeting some milestone and I have to stop now because my molars are about to splinter from the grinding…

Answering a recent invitation to check out said game, I try my best to remain cool and disaffected, but it’s hard as I’m ushered past towering vending machines that burst forth with every kind of chocolate confection at 60% of supermarket prices. And a coffee cart. And actual carpet on the floor that doesn’t try to dissolve the Boots as we walk on it.

I’m here as part of MGP’s outreach program to angry young games journalists who feel that recent innovations in digital rights management - that which we old-schoolers still call “copy protection” - are getting beyond a joke.

The incredibly attractive receptionist hands me the best mocha I will shortly have ever tasted, and ushers me into a tastefully lit studio space. It’s totally chill. Mood lighting, lava lamp, bean-bags, a sunken carpeted mini-amphitheatre with awesome entertainment system that’s currently being used by a couple of devs to play some game about killing retro-futuristic time travelling Nazi werewolves, and around the walls some actual workstations. Nothing too worklike, though. Most of these PCs look more personalised than a 12 year-old’s Celeron.

The hot receptionist bats her eyelashes at the workspace I’m supposed to be interested in, bumps me playfully with her hip, and sashays away. I sip at the mocha. Yeah.

In the command chair, as it were, sits a guy who appears to be part William Gibson, part Hare Krishna. In that he’s sporting a Shakta tilak on his forehead, and a black leather jacket. He tells me to call him Kalki, even though his actual name is Rupert Scorne. The whole time we talk, his fingers fly over his ergonomic keyboard, coding as if with ten minds of their own.

“So the kids hate on the DRM,” says Kalki, with an air of infinite sadness. “But we must protect the sacred knowledge of the Holy Mother.”

“The Holy Mother?” I ask. Kalki indicates a MGP logo on a nearby letterhead. The letterhead appears to be on a strongly-worded memo about costs of replacing keyboards after bits of yoghurt, rice and saffron keep falling off the foreheads of wannabe Westerners who don’t know how to apply a Tilak properly.

“We have created a system that’s so ingenious, so powerful, so capricious, it will be a challenge to even the greatest ‘cracker’ at large in the suburban bedrooms of modern Australia,” says Kalki, with a gentle smile. “Let me take you through it.”

He boots up what looks like a standard MGP game activation dialogue. The system asks me for a serial code which, of course, I don’t have. Like so many before me, I look to Kalki for guidance.

“Well now,” he says. “Like any good pirate, you jump on to krakhowse.net and grab a keygen.” His fingers fly. The way he dismisses porn pop-ups is like some 21st Century equivalent of wielding a sword that turns every way.

We install the keygen, gen a key, plonk it into the installer, and the famous blue bar begins its long crawl to the east. I use the time to finish my mocha and check out Kalki. He’s wearing sandals, of course. The Boots snort in derision.

“Okay so now the install is complete,” says Kalki. “You see the system wants to activate the game online, but of course it’s tried to match your fake key to the main database and has rejected you.”

The fingers fly again. More porn pop-ups are dismissed.

“So now we jump on a torrent aggregator and download a little app that emulates the MGP central servers. And now we install… and there goes activation… and now the system wants you to create an online profile to track your stats and progress - though your server emulator can’t handle that. The game is also going to use the GPS chip in your phone to backtrack and check if you actually went to any known box retailer to buy your game - because this copy knows it’s a boxed copy, not a Steam copy, and if there’s no logical path of travel, it will lock you out.”

Kalki’s really on a roll now.

“So then you unlock your phone and install a GPS spoofer app. The game then cross-checks with store inventories, compares known sales with numbers of games currently logged in to the central server, and installs a rootkit to tunnel past your server emulator to the net at large. So you feed it a trojan which spoofs your IP, and then that unlocks a whole NEW set of protections that… well, we’re keeping them a secret for now, but I’m confident crackers will be really excited by them.”

Kalki smiles and sits back.

“Great,” I say. “I can see you’ve really thought a lot about DRM. So what’s the actual game?”

He looks at me blankly. “This is the game,” he says. “It’s the whole point and purpose of PC gaming. Crack or be cracked.”

It’s a philosophy worthy of any guru. As I’m leaving MGP with another mocha and a smile from the hot receptionist, I reflect that we truly have entered a new age of enlightenment.