Over the holidays one long-time reader bought the retail version of the hit game Half-Life 2 for his eight-year-old son. "Half-Life is a PC-based first-person shooter game, you against the monsters and bad guys in the programming," the reader wrote. "There is a bonus on-line multiplayer mode called CounterStrike which my youngest son has no interest in playing. In fact, his computer didn't have Internet access. So we try to install the game and discover that, even to play against the computer, you have to have an Internet connection to get this thing called Steam."

Steam is the online game network for Valve Software, developers of Half-Life 2, but it also serves as the activation mechanism for the software. To install the game on his son's computer, the reader would have to set up an Internet connection for the machine. "So over Christmas week I start running a cable to his room," the reader wrote. "In the meantime, my youngest son asks his older brother if he can play the game on his machine, and his brother says yes. Now, my older son has played CounterStrike and already has a Steam account. It seems the Half-Life 2 install sees this and applies the new game to this account."

Once the reader had the eight-year-old's computer hooked up to the Internet, he once again tried to install the game. "As soon as we sign on, it says this is someone else's game," the reader says. "I contact Steam and get an e-mail telling me that the CD key was already assigned to another user. Er....duh! I had told them that in my e-mail to them explaining how the existing Steam account hijacked the install and, at least from the point when the kid started asking questions about 'accounts,' I never saw anything telling me that he would never be able to play the game I just bought him if he ever played it on another computer. Steam technical support keeps sending the same auto reply and refuses to address the issue with a human response."

The whole situation leaves the reader with a number of concerns. "If one doesn't want to play online, why is the game requiring that one 'check with Valve' to make sure it's OK for you to play it?" he wrote. "How is an eight-year-old kid supposed to know and understand these limitations -- is he supposed to read the Steam EULA? And there seems to be no way to undo an install mistake. If a kid bungles an install, as in the case of using an existing user's Steam info, the CD key is gone forever."

Mostly, though, the reader wonders if it is the intent of Valve's DRM to restrict even family members from sharing a program. "Is Half-Life 2 the first 'user-limited' software?" he wrote. "I buy a book, my son can read it. I buy a movie and my son can watch it on his TV after I watch it on my TV. I buy software, and I can't let another family member use it?"

Of course, I don't know what Valve's intentions are either. I do know, though, that at the same time the reader was vainly trying to get help from Valve that the company was announcing it had just killed another 30,000 Steam accounts it believed were trying to illegally gain access to Valve games. And I can't help but wonder if one of those 30,000 was an eight-year-old boy who made the mistake of installing his new game on his brother's computer.

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