Lodium: l still remember the days only local multiplayer existed
back in the arcade days there was no such thing called drm free multiplayer over internet or over lan
you had to show up physacally in person and be in the same room as the other person to ba able to play against another human player simiultanusly
Quite restrictive versus the idea what drm free shoud be
rjbuffchix: DRM-free is better viewed as a matter of purity/quality than a spectrum. Viewed by my standard, "restrictive" definition is not really a coherent idea, as something is either partly/wholly DRMed or wholly DRM-free. The example I usually use, admittedly a bit gross, is that if someone is served soup/sandwich with a hair in it, it can no longer be said that the food is "hair-free." To say it is "mostly hair-free" or "you can eat around the crust" or "that's just how chefs design their soups now, if you get on your knees and beg maybe they'll remove the hair in a few days after the soup has gotten cold" is all nonsense.
That said, I didn't necessarily mean to imply local is the only form of DRM-free multiplayer (though if pressed, I would say it really is the truest form).
I think something like play-by-email is better than connecting to a game server but LAN (without restrictions such as each player needing to own a copy, etc) is better than play-by-email, and same screen is better than LAN. I am a bit confused by the rest of your comment (not quoted) as it seems you are sympathetic to some people missing out (e.g. in the early days, not everyone had internet and it seems you claim play-by-email wasn't really in the spirit of DRM-free multiplayer as a result) when it seems to me having multiplayer locally on the same screen would on the whole give more people access. But I've said my piece and will leave it at that.
The point of my post was to point out its quite ridiculus calling the early years in videogaming history with lan drm free
or like you did having rose tinted glasses looking back on an area thats gone past
The arcade cabinets back then was owned by companies so not even single player games was owned by people
since you had to put a coin into the machine to able to play it
Only once Pong machines and atari games starting getting sold to priviate people instead of the games being controlled by the companies you coud see the resemblence of drm free multiplayer
and even that was quite restrictive the way most people think of Drm free multiplayer when using the term drm free multiplayer
What most people mean is beeing able to play lan connetcted games remotly not needing to be in the same room as other players and not the game mode contolled by the gamecompanies or corparations
Remember
the complaint was about the content beiing gated by a client was the argument
one can also argue that the early examples Play by mail was kinda also controlled to a degree since you had to pay large bils to the companies that operated the dial up modem lines.
Gaming online was not cheap during the early years of the internet
So my post is asking the question
when in the timefrime do you think the content was drm free?
back in the days the content was gated when the internet service costed an arm and a leg or later when the content was less gated and it didnt cost a fortune connetcting to other people ?
