I’m a firm believer that inching towards a more private life and future is a good thing in and of itself. However, I also believe that striving for a healthy social life and finding individual happiness is very important.
One area that I’m a bit lost on how to achieve better privacy is gaming. I also believe this is an area that is often overlooked. Do you all have any tips, tricks, or guides on how to game while retaining some level of privacy?
Specifically I’m referring to privacy from corporations, governments, and to a lesser extent friends. I’m also thinking about all types of games, from MMOs, to competitive FPSs, to RTS Games, to RPGs.
With Linux gaming becoming increasingly viable in conjunction with the mainstream success of the Steamdeck, I would imagine one idea for most people is kicking windows to the curb.
As far as Steam goes, I believe there are privacy options to keep anyone from seeing your activity. Honestly, as long as you don’t play multiplayer games or add any friends, you mitigate a lot of privacy risk. I do not see Linux as some kind of panacea for privacy. You have to be careful not to give away your identity or personal information, online or in real life.
I sometimes buy from GOG, but for the most part I use Itch.io. Like movies and music, I have a strong preference for independent work and experimentation.
Also, there is decades of history in gaming, with physical media or with emulation that does not require making an account or being online.
Those are good points. I too really love GOG’s DRN free policy. It’s what keeps me buying from them. Now that Steam has amazing Linux support though I’m torn. Steam’s games are so easy to get running it really makes me want to support them for wider Linux adoption.
That is an enormous dilemma. Steam, besides having incredible Linux support either natively or with proton, is also extemely economical.
I used to have a moderately large Steam collection, over 300 games. One day I drank too much of the privacy kool-aide and deleted my Steam account. It felt liberating at the time, but not too long after Steam started becoming more Linux centric, and seeing free and open source zealots be so enthusiastic made me feel like an outright fool.
Yet, my entire collection were gained through bundles and sales, so the amount of my money I “threw away” was actuall very little, but still a waste. I now have a new Steam account, and once again I buy convervatively the stuff I actually want to play at the lowest price I can wait for.
Side note: It is still important to buy DRM, and set up a robust system to backup and organize those purchases. The archiving efforts by certain communities and enthusiasts make it almost guaranteed that most video games will be preserved… but that is not true, is it? If you want to play a game 20 years from now, you have to own it and preserve it. There are so many games I used to love but simply cannot find anymore.
… and no, I am foolish and have not set up a system yet for all of my digital media.