In college I had a roommate who made poor life decisions as a matter of course. I’ll call him Vandal. A Spaniard by heritage, Vandal paid significantly less tuition than his fellow US-born, Euro-descent compatriots, having gotten away with checking the Hispanic minority box on his entrance application.

Vandal’s personal hygiene recalls that of a chimpanzee held in captive isolation at an Uzbek zoo. Stepping into his room was like stepping into a landfill, and the piles of soiled clothes, reams of paper rubbish, and heaps of empty food cartons would engulf you to the knee. I once found in his room a sock that had been reworn without being washed so many times that when I picked it up with a pair of tweezers, the fabric remained rigid, molded as if with papier-mache to the specifications of his foot.

The landfill analogy works on an olfactory level as well.

Vandal had pet geckos that he fed store-bought maggots. The maggots were supposed to be stored in his personal refrigerator, alongside his soda and Red Bull, but they were routinely left out on his desk, forgotten under mounds of shifting refuse, where they would fester. Vandal once used conditioner for three solid months, all the while thinking it was shampoo.

Personal responsibility and accountability weren’t so much a thing for Vandal, either. In Columbus, we lived at E. 12th and High, better known as the epicenter of Ohio State’s student slum, riot residential, crack-den central, where the city’s inveterate poor abutted campus’ itinerant indigent. I witnessed exactly four vehicular immolations in my time at 12th and High, all the product of drunken revelry following some Ohio State-Michigan game or other. I was once woken by a helicopter spotlight, the beam like balefire vaporizing 2 a.m. as it caught my window en route to a 30-boy melee below.

In this environment, Vandal couldn’t quite grasp the gravity of locking our front door, until, of course, we were robbed. The deed was done overnight, as we slept. I lost an Xbox and PS2, my roommate a TV. Vandal his backpack, sans books, presumably to schlep my consoles. Our fourth thought she was spared until, “Hey, has anyone seen my car keys?” Being broke saved her ass on that one, as the thief made it only 20 miles out of the city before the gas gave out.

I distinctly recall the aftermath of that incident, all of Vandal’s finger-pointing. “You didn’t check the door before going to bed.” “You left everything out in the open.” “You knew the risk of living here.” “You knew I couldn’t be trusted.”

I received a handful of emails from Blizzard Entertainment over the past couple of days. Here they are, reprinted as pertinent in the interest of getting to the point:

from: Blizzard Entertainment noreply@blizzard.com
to: me
date: Sat, Jul 14, 2012 at 6:28 PM
Greetings,
Account Name: XXX@gmail.com
A user of the above account has recently been involved in actions deemed inappropriate for Diablo III.
Account Action: 1 Hour Suspension of Chat Privileges
Offense: Spamming
This category includes:
* Excessively communicating the same phrase, similar phrases, or pure gibberish.
* Saying the same phrase more than once in a period of 30 seconds.
Based on a review of the information presented, this Diablo III account has had its chat privileges suspended. While the account has been placed under review, you will be unable to speak to other players using any chat systems in Diablo III. Should spamming behaviour continue we may proceed to apply further penalties, including extended suspension of chat privileges, account suspension, or account closure. Once an account has been closed, any heroes, items, or auctions will be irretrievable.

from: Blizzard Entertainment noreply@blizzard.com
to: me
Sun, Jul 15, 2012 at 3:44 AM
Greetings,
Account Name: XXX@gmail.com
A user of the above account has recently been involved in actions deemed inappropriate for Diablo III.
Account Action: 1 Hour Suspension of Chat Privileges
Offense: Spamming

from: Blizzard Entertainment noreply@blizzard.com
to: me
Sun, Jul 15, 2012 at 6:59 AM
Greetings,
Account Name: XXX@gmail.com
A user of the above account has recently been involved in actions deemed inappropriate for Diablo III.
Account Action: 6 Hour Suspension of Chat Privileges
Offense: Spamming

from: Blizzard Entertainment noreply@blizzard.com
to: me
Sun, Jul 15, 2012 at 7:55 AM
Due to suspicious activity, the Battle.net account XXX@gmail.com has been locked. To restore access to this account, please follow these steps:
Step 1: Secure Your Computer
In the event that your computer has been infected with malicious software such as a keylogger or trojan, simply changing your password may not deter future attacks without first ensuring that your computer is free from these programs. Please visit our Account Security website to learn how to secure your computer from unauthorized access.
Step 2: Secure Your E-mail Account
After you have secured your computer, please create a new password for your e-mail account since it may also be compromised. Be sure to check your e-mail filters and rules and look for any e-mail forwarding rules that you did not create. For more information on securing your e-mail account, visit this Support page.
Step 3: Choose a New Password
You must change your password in order to resume using this Battle.net account. Please click this link to choose a new password: https://us.battle.net/account/support/password-reset.html
*Note that your former password no longer grants access to Battle.net account management, World of Warcraft, or any other login-protected Battle.net account service.
If you still have questions or concerns after following the steps above, feel free to contact Customer Support at http://us.blizzard.com/support/article.xml?locale=en_US&articleId=20606.
Sincerely,
The Battle.net Account Team
Online Privacy Policy

So, a few things here. I haven’t touched Diablo 3 in over a month. I actually don’t even have it installed on my computer, having never brought it over to my new machine. Also of import: Thanks to a delightful bit of formative psychological damage when it comes to trust, no one save my wife has been made privy to my passwords.

All of this being the case, I’m not entirely sure what to make of this statement, from a Blizzard community manager, made in May:

Despite the claims and theories being made, we have yet to find any situations in which a person’s account was not compromised through traditional means of someone else logging into their account through the use of their password.

Is Blizzard suggesting that, perhaps as a means to supplement our income due to my unemployed state, my wife has taken to unauthorized Diablo III item selling and/or general chat-channel griefing? Or perhaps they are suggesting that, in some hypnotic or somnambulant state, I posted my login details to 4chan? Or perhaps it’s simpler than that. Perhaps Blizzard is suggesting I’m careless and gullible, and have simply been taken by someone claiming to be my buddy. And, by extension, that I just lied to you all about having never given anyone, other than my wife, access to my login information. Is that it, Blizzard? Am I liar?

Judging by the automated emails I’ve received from Blizzard, those emails above, that’s the vibe I’m getting. Thus far, Blizzard has done nothing but mete out punishment to me, first suspending my ability to communicate with others and then revoking my access to Diablo 3, as well as Starcraft 2. Incidentally, I paid well over $100 for those two products.

I’m also curious about what in our extensive history together would lead Blizzard to believe, after “a review of the information presented,” that I had suddenly up and turned into some kind of disruptive spammer. What were the words that came out of my mouth? How much thought went into investigating whether these were indeed my words? If the decision was made after only a cursory glance, why and why present it otherwise? Is this situation too pervasive to thoroughly investigate each case, or should we take this Blizzard community manager at face value when he (or she) says, “The number of Diablo III players who’ve contacted customer service to report a potential compromise of their personal account has been extremely small.” (Emphasis in original.)

And just to be clear here: I didn’t volunteer my login information to Blizzard; Blizzard ransomed it out of me. Blizzard issued me an ultimatum: Give us sensitive information, or else no game for you.

The whole ordeal has me flashing back to Vandal, his irresponsibility, his failure to protect what I had entrusted to him, and his blaming of me when a thief sauntered through our front door and walked off with my stuff.

So I guess, like then, Blizzard’s security breach is my fault. I guess since I didn’t pay $6.50 for the Battle.net Authenticator or download the Mobile Authenticator app, this is my fault. And ultimately, I guess in the future, I should exercise better judgment when it comes to whom I entrust sensitive information to, and do a more thorough analysis of whether what I pay for is worth what it may end up costing me.

I’ll not lie: For the past couple of weeks, I’ve been caught in a temporal vortex. It came on quite suddenly, without the motion blur and solar flare that one might expect from a rift in space-time. I simply sat down at my (ingenious, incidentally) VIKA AMON and then was consumed by a not there-ness. This is to say, I took a vacation in order to look for a real job. Dear reader, my shit? It flipped. Mea culpa.

Let’s continue bouncing around. Pastiche is, like irony, a word I’ve never fully gotten my head around. I first ran across it in some ridiculous literary criticism course I took at Ohio State. Here’s how it was put to me, vis-a-vis some ridiculous something Fredric Jameson wrote:

Pastiche is, like parody, the imitation of a peculiar or unique, idiosyncratic style, the wearing of a linguistic mask, speech in a dead language. But it is a neutral practice of such mimicry, without parody’s ulterior motives, amputated of the satiric impulse, devoid of laughter.

Are we talking about hipsters? No! We’re talking about Diablo 3! It’s not that Diablo 3 is a bad game. It’s actually quite fun in its nihilistic compulsion (see: Internet pornography). What I’m saying is I haven’t found a shred of anything in Diablo 3 that has the potential of conjuring up the same level of fond nostalgia as, say, a cow level, or Wirt’s Leg, or “stay awhile, and listen!” Instead I’m getting stuff like Act I (or is it Act II?) ending with a mediocre boss fight against The Butcher, one that wasn’t nearly as gratifying as its original incarnation.

Oh, oh! There’s a distinction here that I’ve been waiting for the opportunity to draw. Companies like Blizzard (or Activision Blizzard, as it were) don’t owe it to the industry to innovate or push things forward. To me, it seems perfectly reasonable that these companies would follow the film-industry precedent of repurposing and repackaging everything that Shakespeare ever wrote. It’s a business. Make money. Whatever.

The issue I have here is that even when the film industry is cashing in, it still typically does so with verve. And it’s not like this concept is foreign to the game industry. BioWare certainly had it with Mass Effect 3. Hell, even Infinity Ward managed it with Modern Warfare 3. Those games had a cinematic thrill to them; a tinge of the unexpected or outrageous seamlessly integrated into the familiar. They make the player feel something.

Diablo 3, conversely, does nothing other than appropriate the clever touches of its predecessors, without contributing anything of its own. It leaves me feeling nothing, hence all that talk of pastiche.

Why is this the case? How did such a large, well-funded studio produce a game with absolutely no verve? Reflexively, I’d say it has to do with Blizzard’s iterative development style, and its tendency to tweak out anything remotely controversial. And here I’m drawing from Rob Pardo’s GDC 2010 panel on Blizzard’s design philosophy.

Near the end, and I’m paraphrasing myself here, he spoke about the company’s “culture of polish,” and how the teams will refine what they’ve got, as soon as they’ve got it, even if it’s just scribbles on a whiteboard. Creating comes from chaos, and it seems to me like this design method would too rigidly stifle chaos. There’s no room for happy accidents. Plus, it’s hard to go on a tear, to get hot with your ideas, when your head’s swiveled in reverse.

And of course the risk-aversion, shareholder appeasement, profit necessity, blah blah blah. It’s interesting, though. Can you imagine Blizzard making a game that, in an honest way, delves into the nature of morality, immorality, and amorality? That explores the enigmatic dark matter bookending both good and evil? That presents a complex character who willingly consumes an ultimate evil, contains it and confronts it within himself, instead of just hitting it with a sword until it dies? And then ultimately fail?

Yeah, right.