morning thoughts about yarrharr
Reflecting on my relation with piracy growing up. Having my experience with games being a Polystation (look it up) with multigame cartridges, a disk with ZSNES and a fuckton of roms, and only seeing CD and DVD-Rs with the game's name written in markers on the opportunities I had of playing the PlayStation 1 and 2... I didn't understand the concept of "original copy" of a game until I was around 14, when I started studying at a rich kid's school (thanks to a free scholarship I got).
I visited a classmate's house whose adoptive father came from Denmark(?), and he got a PlayStation 2 with original copies of games like Kingdom Hearts, Need For Speed and etc. and what shocked me is that he only had a few games, whereas everyone I knew who had a PS2 had a whole ass folder filled with disks.
He explained to me about what original games were and that they're expensive and hard to find in Brazil. He wanted to jailbreak his PS2 but his father was adamant on not letting him do that, so he only got access to new games when he traveled to Europe. It was a downer to me because while I found it interesting to learn about and these shiny disks, covers and manuals he showed me sure were pretty... none of the few games he had interested me (I was going through a Guitar Hero phase so I'm partly to blame lmao)...
Eventually this friend would, in secret from his father, jailbreak it so he could play more games he wanted. So we did play some Guitar Hero a year later.
This internalized in me the notion that owning original copies of games is not only a "rich people thing" but something that they actively make the choice to spend an immense amount of money on a single copy (read as the kind of money my mom would never be able to give me for entertainment), instead of just going to the small store around the corner and buying 4-5 games for 10 reais (~5 USD at the time, 2 USD now).
As I grew up, got into the internet, started working for the industry, etc. etc. my mind about it has changed. Of course, it's important to support developers. I still don't make enough money to be able to buy triple A-priced games without a discount easily, but I buy what I can afford... but I won't lie, that old mindset has been coming back more and more often recently with the discussions of topics such as preservation, ownership of media, digital vs physical, availability, lack of localizations, and etc.
The only thing I can think of saying in these discussions is "it's not that big of a deal, piracy already solves it", and I cannot sympathize with any "but"s to not use that instead when companies and etc. don't do anything. It always feels like they're making an active choice to not do it out of privilege just like that rich kid's dad.