Critic’s Notebook: Unwelcome Innovation Earns Gamers’ Jeers

The applause was not only for Sony, which was promoting its forthcoming PlayStation 4 at an event on the eve of the three-day show. It was also a sign of growing resentment toward Microsoft, which was promoting its own new console, the Xbox One.

Microsoft has proposed limiting players’ ability to resell games that will be made for the Xbox One, due in stores in November. Companies that create games for Xbox One, Microsoft said, will be able effectively to prevent consumers from reselling the games by ensuring that the resold games no longer function on the console. No companies that create games have yet indicated that they will exercise this right.

This controversy led to the odd spectacle on Monday: At an industry event devoted to new games, there was raucous enthusiasm for the untrammeled right to sell and purchase old games.

Microsoft is promising new experiences with the Xbox One, which will require a constant Internet connection, because hundreds of thousands of machines in the cloud will enhance an individual console’s computational power. But players seem to be hearing only what is being taken away by Microsoft’s online monitoring of their gaming: the ability to resell or give away your games to whomever you choose, whenever you choose.

Microsoft says Xbox One users will be able to give away a single copy of each game to one other player, provided that player has been an Xbox Live friend for 30 days. Whether players will be able merely to lend games to one another, or to rent copies for a few days from a store, remains unclear.

Sony’s PlayStation 4, also scheduled for release later this year, is promising no such restrictions. And, for the record, Shigeru Miyamoto, the creator of games like Super Mario Bros. and the Legend of Zelda for Nintendo, which makes the Wii U, said during an interview this week, “We would never create our system that way.”

Microsoft’s problem is that it is heralding a fully digital, downloadable experience, but offering a game system that is powered only partly by the Web. Players will still have to buy and install game discs on their Xbox Ones.

We may be heading toward Internet distribution of all games, but we won’t be there in 2013. Disc-based games are here to stay, at least for a while.

Because they are such large digital files, games have been slower than books, music and movies to adapt to downloadable and streaming media. In the interim — and it could be a very long interim — Microsoft looks as if it were trying to place restrictions that are commonplace on the virtual Internet onto physical discs. People don’t complain about their inability to lend or resell their iPhone games, so Microsoft argues that its position has a precedent. But many gamers are responding as if Amazon tried to apply the rules for the Kindle to new hardcover books.

At some point, Microsoft is going to win this fight. Even Sony is not promising to let players lend and resell the downloadable games they purchase for the PlayStation 4.

What’s more worrisome to me, as a lover of games and a believer in their historical importance, is the possibility that Xbox One games are destined for oblivion when the inevitable day comes, 10 years or so in the future, when Microsoft stops supporting the Xbox One. I can still play games that were made for an Atari 2600 or the Nintendo Entertainment System as long as I have a working version of the hardware.

The Xbox One, on the other hand, demands a daily check-in with Microsoft’s servers. And it is a near certainty that one day Microsoft will turn off those servers. That means that most of the Xbox One’s games will be enjoyed only by the current generation of players.

Maybe that’s fine. Once upon a time, when a movie left theaters, you couldn’t see it anymore. When a TV show was canceled, it was gone forever. And when a Broadway show closes, you can’t expect it to reside forever in digital memory somewhere for your convenient retrieval.

Still, there is a downside to using the Web for instant access to books, movies and music: a sharp reduction in our ownership rights. In the world of new media, we’re all renters.

When it comes to novels, songs and movies, you can choose to rent, paying less for a service like Netflix, or to own, paying more for, say, Blu-ray discs.

When it comes to video games, the Xbox One will no longer offer that choice. That’s why players are responding as if they were being treated not like renters, but serfs.