1) Have you watched The Wire, Battlestar Galactica, Deadwood? In view of your incredibly (I’d say ridiculously, but that’s faintly confrontational) high standards for broadcast television, these are possibly the only three TV shows in the last five years you might be interested in. I’ve never met anyone with such high standards, and I’m really interested in what you might think of these three. (Of course, if you haven’t seen one or more of them, my highest recommendations – they’re all worth at least a try.)

2) Other developers *do* not only follow Valve and Blizzard’s formula, but in fact lead the way. Witness Stardock, creators of Galactic Civilizations and publishers of Sins of a Solar Empire, very beautiful games with very reasonable hardware requirements, that have *no DRM whatsoever*. It’s in fact company policy, as you can tell by their “Gamer’s Bill of Rights” (which you should read, I think you’ll like it very much, since the rights they impart on their customers make your requirements seem positively conservative and lenient). All the games are of course downloadable directly from the company site, with the physical box completely optional.

I wholeheartedly agree with the article, though. I just got finished throwing away all of my old game boxes and most of the manuals. It was at first a painful admission that no, I’m not going to play these games ever again, but then it became liberating as I saw how much shelf space those huge old boxes take on my shelf.

“Hey. I’d sort of like to play Civilization IV.”
[I go to the Games folder and double click on the app. It asks me for the disc.]
“Huh? I have no goddamn idea where the disc is. I guess I won’t play this game.”

On the one hand, this is cutting off my nose to spite my face. Maybe the publisher shouldn’t care: I did buy the game, after all. They already have my money, right?

I have, however, noticed that I do this. Which means that I’ve pretty much stopped buying computer games that require me to have a disc in the drive. I’ll still put up with it for console games, but frankly it sort of pisses me off there, too. I should just be able to fly home from work with my jetpack, have my robot serve me a Manhattan, and be able to play games, watch movies, and all the rest, without the burden of having to locate a physical token on any sort beyond the device required to play or display it.