The gut reaction to GameStop pulling OnLive coupons en masse from retail PC copies of Deus Ex: Human Revolution usually includes the words “how dare they,” or something to that effect. The legality of it all has been discussed to death, with mentions of tortious interference floating about, and GameStop has come under fire for the missive pretty much unanimously.

Except for the fact that Square Enix issued what amounts to a public apology and acknowledgement that they had not previously informed GameStop of their third party coupon inclusion.

Obviously, whenever the publisher, developer, or whoever includes something in the packaging, the end consumer is going to feel cheated if they don’t receive the full product. Cutting open factory sealed copies in order to remove a slip of paper and then selling them as new anyway is, ethically speaking, kind of shady. But so is trying to slip coupons into the games for one of GameStop’s direct competitors.

The law behind trademarks is somewhat of a sticky wicket. Similar can be said about patents, but that’s an entirely different set of loopholes and barrel rolls. In the world of gaming, there is perhaps no more well-known case than that of Tim Langdell, his trademark of the word “edge” and his many attempts to legally hustle various companies. The lengthy history of Langdell is best divulged by Rock, Paper, Shotgun’s coverage of the most recent court case and, by extension, the ChaosEdge blog. But to summarize a bit: Langdell has been legally (and allegedly extralegally) haranguing anyone and everyone that used the word “edge” in any way related to games. Sometimes, as was the case with Mirror’s Edge from Electronic Arts, he managed to tie up the trademark in such a way as to make sequels and the like a bit tricky for developers, publishers and anyone else involved.

Flash forward to the here and now. Markus “Notch” Persson, famed developer behind Minecraft, revealed not all that long ago that the next game from his company, Mojang, would be a game taking bits from the collectible card and board game genres entitled Scrolls. If your first response to this announcement was along the lines of, “but wait a darn second, are they making an Elder Scrolls game or is this some sort newfangled contraption” then you seem to be in good company as that’s what the lawyers from ZeniMax Media would seem to believe.

To some developers, it’s become a dirty curse. To others, it has become a venerated phrase, something immediately associated with excellent growth and revenue. To the common gamer, it is instead a promise of gameplay without immediate monetary investment. Considering the typical console game has a sticker price of $60 whether the player ends up liking the game or not, this can be the point that pushes their curiosity over the edge.

Regardless, we are living in a free-to-play gaming revolution.

But that’s a good thing. It means that developers and publishers are aware enough of their customers’ wants and needs to provide them with tailored content specifically for them.

There’s been something of a kerfuffle going on based on the decision to run a contest on Facebook to decide the new default female avatar in Mass Effect 3. On one side, some creative types and feminists find it disappointing that the avatar that was far and away the winner of the vote, Shepard 5, was horribly generic. The other segment of the population tends to sway between ambivalence and amplified outrage that the other side would consider the female avatar generic “just because it has blonde hair.” Before going too much further, please keep in mind that this is an argument on the Internet.

But when digging just the tiniest bit deeper, it becomes a little clearer that this isn’t just about the hair color of some default model. For the fans of FemShep — like the ones who finally convinced BioWare to include FemShep in their marketing at all — this is about the first depiction many gamers will be seeing of the female avatar. The first truly marketed version of something they have come to embrace as a sizable community. And guess what? It seems like many of those who fought for a promoted FemShep aren’t pleased with an avatar that lacks personality.

Imagine, if you will, that you’ve bought a lovely steak for dinner. It might be a good or a bad steak, but it’s still a steak. Now, imagine if all you could buy from the store was a variety of steaks. Rib eye, T-bone, sirloin, strip — lanes and lanes full of different kinds of steak. For a while, this might seem great, especially if your favorite meal happens to be steak. But eventually, given some time, even your favorite meal will become tiresome if that’s all you’re consuming. Worse yet, what if you don’t like steak or happen to be a vegetarian? Then you’re just out of luck.

This is the current lamentable situation of the modern gamer. There are so many games that are just paint-by-number rip-offs or less direct clones of other noteworthy franchises. Often enough, even the games that they rip-off are clones themselves. This kind of reciprocal cycle is fairly obvious to anyone that plays their share of games. Those who study or write about games on a regular basis are particularly aware of this issue.

Though it might have only recently come to the attention of the mainstream media and received a level of unprecedented press over the past year or so, achievements and the methodology behind them have been in place for years now. It just happens that they’ve become increasingly attached to more positive behaviors. Even then, there’s some question as to just how positive this kind of “gamification” truly is.

The most evident form of this is the constant barrage of badges, achievements, gamerscore, trophies, completion rates and everything else that they’ve come up with to disguise what is essentially the same thing: An attempt to engage those using the product with arbitrary and digital goods that typically have no value beyond what we, as the players, assign to them. They are often assigned their own arbitrary numbers as well, depending on the platform, but someone at some point sat down and said, “This is worth a gold star and not a silver star.” Often as not, it’s meaningless.

In addition to owning my fair share of games that I’ve never once played, a great many of the games that I own are also the special or collector’s edition. Owning them in some kind of limited format hasn’t particularly made me any more likely to play them, but it sure does take up a lot of space. In fact, often enough, I’ll buy the collector’s edition for games that I would never have bought otherwise. (Record of Agarest War Zero, I am looking at you.)

So, why is it that we, as gamers, are so entranced by the words special, collector’s and limited that those in charge of making them keep producing them? Obviously, enough of these are being purchased to keep making them financially viable for companies to come out with or we’d see a distinct petering out of such things. The moment they slap on that little sticker and add in a few trinkets, people line up to get their copy.

In a market that’s constantly fluctuating, it’s in the best interest of companies who are in the business of business to diversify their holdings. In fact, it’s pretty much in their best interest regardless of how the market looks. I’m no expert, and my degree certainly isn’t in business, but this much I do know. Companies have a habit of swallowing up smaller companies in order to branch off in new directions or to solidify a previously tenuous position.

So, Electronic Arts making a bid to acquire PopCap Games—even if it’s at the purported $1 billion mark—makes complete and total sense.

Hacking seems to be on the mind of all those who utilize the Internet these days. It’s kind of a foregone conclusion that when you open something up to the vast legions of the web that it’s going to get wrecked by someone at some point. That hasn’t stopped folks from being incredibly lax about security, but this is a problem that stems from people who know little to nothing about the details making decisions in opposition to the advice they’re given from specialists.

So the high-profile hacks of late were really inevitable.

Nintendo’s press conferences remind me of the movie Signs. Keep in mind that Signs was made prior to last year’s The Last Airbender and long before the novelty of the twist ending wore off. Specifically, I’m reminded of the scene where Joaquin Phoenix’s character is revealed to hold both a home run and strikeout record. No matter what the coaches told him that he should do, he insisted on swinging as hard as he possibly could.

And that’s where I associate Phoenix’s character with Nintendo. He’s being mocked in the movie by another member of the town for his penchant for always trying to hit it out of the park. As the scene comes to a close, he utters a line that feels completely in line with Nintendo’s current design philosophy, it “felt wrong not to swing.”