Enter the Matrix Review

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            Enter the Matrix

Review by SteerpikeMay 2003

The World’s Longest and Most Meaningless Movie

Being a red-blooded American male who likes hot women dressed in leather, kung fu, clever plotlines, and big gunfights, I naturally enjoyed The Matrix. Being an educated individual with little patience for intellectual patronization, endless expository dialogue, and lectures about the nature of causality, I naturally found The Matrix Reloaded hugely disappointing. Being a Sacrifice fan who is still mad at Shiny Entertainment for failing to make a sequel, and a student of gaming history who knows how good movie-franchise games usually turn out to be, I was dubious at best about Enter the Matrix. And this game, by far the most expensive ever made and sporting a plotline nearly integral to understanding the second movie, is indeed the mediocrity that I feared it might be.

Enter the Matrix follows the adventures of Captain Niobe and the crew of the hovercraft Logos. Niobe, played in the game as in the movie by the delectable Jada Pinkett-Smith (indeed, the whole cast of the movie appears in the game at some point or another), along with her first officer Ghost, are the two principals in a story written and directed by Larry and Andy Wachowski, who quite frankly flexed their narrative muscles much more expertly in this game than they did in The Matrix Reloaded.

Twisting in and out of the movie’s plot, Enter the Matrix immerses you in adventures corollary to—and occasionally directly alongside—the travails of Morpheus, Trinity, and Neo. An army of crazed machines is digging toward Zion, the last human city, and it’s up to you playing as either Niobe or Ghost to do what you can to save humanity from its own fiendish creation: a savage artificial intelligence that has enslaved the species by plugging it into a computer program that simulates normal existence while drawing power from the heat generated by six billion human bodies in tanks of pink goo. The handful of “free minds” not enthralled by the Matrix computer program move freely between the virtual and real worlds, combating the nefarious programmatic constructs of the AI.

Niobe and Ghost follow somewhat different paths through the game; each is an expert at different things and you’ll have to play Enter the Matrix twice to enjoy everything. Enough of each course is similar that you will find yourself replaying a significant portion of it if you choose to go through the game a second time to see both stories. Niobe is the pilot/driver; some of the more thrilling levels in Enter the Matrix deal with piloting either land vehicles (in the Matrix itself) or your hovercraft, Logos. Ghost, who does get the opportunity to drive now and then, is really best when it comes to riding shotgun and providing support for Niobe.  Outside the vehicle levels, both seem more or less equal to the tasks at hand.

This review is of the PC version. Console players, I’d be curious to hear your take on the myriad ports—a massive worldwide release on May 14 included all major platforms—so shoot me an email at Steerpike@fourfatchicks.com if you found your experience to be notably different from my own.

Hello, Cray Supercomputers? I Need to Place an Order

Enter the Matrix wins the award for the most staggering system requirements of any PC game. Minimum processor speed, at 800 MHz, isn’t so bad; GeForce 4/Radeon 8500 and 4.3 gigabytes of hard drive space, on the other hand, are going to limit the potential PC audience for this game. The tradeoffs for these demands are blisteringly fast load times, comfortably high frame rates, and a relaxingly smooth gaming experience implying that the requirements were a conscious decision intended to enhance immersiveness, not the product of bloated code. But I wouldn’t recommend that anyone spend money to upgrade specifically for this title. Because though Enter the Matrix is a vaguely entertaining game, it is by no means spend-money-to-upgrade good.

If you liked the hand-to-hand combat of Oni and the slo-mo gunplay of Max Payne, then Enter the Matrix is the game for you. Despite serious flaws, it elegantly combines elements of the two with sufficient artistry to escape overt comparison but brings little else that is stylistically new to the table. Gamers should prepare themselves for frenetic action, a cleverly constructed storyline, and thematic tie-in to the movies that marks Enter the Matrix as the first game that truly builds on an existing cinematic experience, rather than being a mere product of a franchise.

Machines Don’t Need Testers

Game developers could stand to learn a lot from Enter the Matrix, especially on the subject of securing good writing, talent, and effects sequences for cinematic games. Because the entirely professional movie cast and crew is employed, the game features slick production values unrivaled by anything else out there. It’s a good example of the nebulous line between cinema and mediated interactive environments such as games.

But the problem is not with the story or the script, or even with the talent. Problems with Enter the Matrix fall into two distinct and equally crippling categories: first, it contains bugs of nearly every description, from the minor to the crashworthy.  Second, it sports ill-conceived design that keeps players focused on the deleterious aspects of the game rather than enthralled by other, superior, sections. Since these two aspects of the game fall entirely under Shiny’s purview, I lay all the blame at the feet of a company still occasionally hailed as a leader in the evolution of games as a new narrative art form. Enter the Matrix comes across as a sloppy game, with flaws that would have been corrected in testing had the release not been timed to coincide with the movie.

Some of the graphic work is terrific, including particles, fogging, and fire effects. Niobe and Ghost are both heavily motion-captured but would look better if their joints would quit popping so badly; what few shaders are used are employed to great effect: subtle reflections off a pair of sunglasses or a snakeskin jacket. And the cinematic cutscenes are so obviously the work of the Wachowski brothers that watching them is almost like watching another Matrix movie.  Everything from the slow motion segments to the moving camera freeze frame technique that won them a special technical achievement award is present in this game.

But the graphics, while good, do feature console port leftovers such as ugly joint-popping and minimal use of shading technology.  Shadows cast by objects are few and far between (the game has no dynamic light) and flicker so badly that they’d have been better off without them. Shifting textures and clipping problems cause entire objects to disappear into one another both in the game and during cutscenes—honestly, developers, is it that hard to create a good collision algorithm?

The sound, too, suffers from a Januslike schizophrenia also caused by this game’s rushed production schedule. Musical sequences pulled right from the movie help enhance the action and further underscore that this is very much a Matrix game; sound effects, voices, and the like are well-synced and employ some really spectacular environmental effects. But sound crashes infuriatingly often, blaring into a static feedback so deafening that people down the street know I’m playing this game. The only escape is to quit the app altogether, start over, and hope for the best. The designers also fell in love with music and reverb, so voices are often drowned out by the soundtrack or are too echoey to understand, and the voice volume slider in the game options defaults to maximum.

Enter the Matrix also crashes—a lot—either freezing up or dropping out to Windows unexpectedly. I imagine a patch is on the way; even the most damning reviews (and this is not intended to be one of them, though they will be out there) won’t stop the Matrix juggernaut from carrying on. Millions are seeing the movie despite damning reviews; the same will happen with the video game.

Ultimately, this game is a console port. The inability to save at any time is proof of this (the game offers to save for you between segments), and obtuse controls that would be far better suited to a gamepad than a mouse cement the issue. Enter the Matrix doesn’t take advantage of most of a PC’s vastly more advanced technical capabilities, from graphics to memory to saves, and the result is a highly unsatisfying game that I imagine will also be highly unsatisfying to console gamers.

Like in a movie, there are warning signs for a bad game. In a movie, if the studio denies a filmmaker nothing (to the point of looking the other way while they blow $60 million on a 14-minute chase scene), that should set off alarm bells with potential viewers. In a game, the inability to save at any time and, much more egregious, making game cheats available in the Main Menu (as they are in Enter the Matrix) should do the same. Any time a game is so weakly constructed as to allow cheating from the Main Menu (cleverly called “Hacking” here), we should know that what’s under the hood will be seriously lacking.

Pow! Biff! Sock! Blam!

Enter the Matrix is a third-person game, but it sports such obtuse camera control (or, rather, a complete lack of camera control) that the player is often at the mercy of foes that cannot be seen.  If the camera were a more trustworthy ally, the game would receive much higher marks for general control, as I’m pleased to report that Enter the Matrix is the very first game I’ve played where I’ve felt no desire to remap the default keys in any way.  Despite the complexity of what’s happening on screen, the actual control scheme is quite simple—WASD, the mouse, and a handful of other keys are ample.

Like The Matrix Reloaded, Enter the Matrix tends to focus more on chop-socky combat than techno-powered gunfights. Firearms are available, of course; ammunition, however, tends to be limited.  And while you have the opportunity to pull off some of the supercool movie moves like the cartwheel-while-shooting or dodge-bullets-in-slow-motion, flaws in the gun combat system make such maneuvers rather inane.

There is, for example, no clear method of aiming. You shoot wildly at opponents. When you “focus your mind,” Enter the Matrix-speak for Max Payne-like Bullet Time, you shoot better. But unlike Max Payne, a game in which you shoot where you’re looking, the mouse has nothing to do with what you’re aiming at in Enter the Matrix.

Meanwhile, the kung fu elements of the game are much more expertly implemented, if it weren’t for a desperately thick camera that inevitably fails to be where you need it to be in order to see what you’re doing. Since both Niobe and Ghost are motion-captured, the combat engine works hard to make all hand-to-hand encounters look very cool—it never seems like you’re repeating the same move over and over again, even though in point of fact that’s exactly what you’re doing. Left mouse is punch. Right mouse is kick. Hand-to-hand combat is just a lot of clicking.

As mentioned above, Enter the Matrix will endure a lot of comparisons to two games: Oni and Max Payne. The hand-to-hand combat in this game is much simpler than the complex, multi-button combos of Oni; falling into the category of “minutes to learn, a lifetime to master.” Yet despite Oni’s occasionally ridiculously complex fighting moves, its camera and controls are sufficiently tight to limit the frustration factor. The clickfest that is hand-to-hand combat in Enter the Matrix makes you feel like you’re watching the game, not playing it.

Focus, Baby, Focus

Moving back to “focus.” The cool factor of this power would be significantly greater had we all not already played Max Payne; essentially, you hit shift and time slows down. When you’re “focused” you tend to be better at things than when you’re not; your attacks do more damage, you shoot more accurately, and of course you can run around on the walls and perform some of the more amazing wire acts we remember from the films. Like Bullet Time, focus exists in limited quantity and replenishes slowly. There is almost always ample focus available for quick use (I, at least, tended to use it in very short spurts), but once again the uncooperative camera and simplistic controls makes mastery of focus very difficult.

The camera’s unpredictability is comparable to the unpredictability of how you behave near surfaces such as walls or crates. In most cases, you can lean against them for cover and even peek (and shoot) around them while still protecting most of your body; however, in some cases you can’t—even when it seems perfectly plausible.  Surfaces don’t adhere to reliable laws of game physics. Rather than a glaring flaw, minor issues like this strike me as further proof that Enter the Matrix was very rushed and released with insufficient testing.

I also wonder about some of Shiny’s decisions involving powers available inside and outside the Matrix. While most of the game takes place inside the Matrix, your character’s health slowly replenishes over time, along with focus. That’s great. Yet you can still fall to your death in the Matrix, despite access to focus; you can jump farther when focused, but you can’t leap tall buildings in a single bound; and you’re generally better at pretty much everything you try, but there seems to be no rhyme or reason to how much better you really are. Compared to the Bullet Time in Max Payne, focus has a lot of deficiencies.

It Ain’t All Bad

Much of Enter the Matrix resonates more effectively with the overall Matrix mythos than the second movie did. The cast tends to look and act cooler in the game than the movie; there are fewer grueling bouts of creaky exposition. Jada Pinkett-Smith has the perfect attitude for a Matrix character, and Anthony Wong’s smooth and unrufflable portrayal of Ghost lends adequate emotional attachment to his role.

The story is so expertly interwoven into that of The Matrix Reloaded that it’s clear why the Wachowskis prefer to see the game and movie as little more than two halves of a whole. It’s also interesting to observe the activities of a group seen only briefly in the film, because this sort of sideways narrative is useful for reminding the audience that dozens of stories are going on around us all the time, and those we actually experience are limited to those we are fully privy to.

Though I think it would be difficult to overstate the clumsiness of the game’s level design, which is labyrinthine for the sake of labyrinthinism, or the maddening camera, it’s also necessary to point out that everyone came out of The Matrix wishing they could emulate those cool chop-socky moves, run around on walls, dodge bullets, and so forth. The fact that gamers already had the opportunity to do so with Max Payne doesn’t necessarily diminish the cool factor you feel when engaged in some combats, especially those involving the inimical and ubiquitous Agents—who are significantly more threatening in this game than they seemed to be in The Matrix Reloaded.

There Are No Rabbit Hole Metaphors in this Review

So Enter the Matrix is not an abject failure; it fails on many levels, is irritating on many more, but ultimately its ratio comes out to about 60:40 bad to good. That’s not a very impressive score, especially from a company as revered as the mighty Shiny Entertainment, producer of some of the greatest and most fascinating creative executions of gaming in the past five years. What really burns my boys is that the Wachowskis, ostensibly filmmakers, made a mediocre movie and a great game; Shiny, ostensibly a game development house, made a mediocre game that would have been a great movie.  Go figure.

For the inability to save at any point, for obtuse camera and fighting controls, for subpar level design, for irritating crash and sound bugs, and for the failure to make any effort to improve the technology behind this console port, Enter the Matrix enjoys the dubious distinction of a Rotten Egg award. And for Shiny Entertainment, a loud “shame on you” for kowtowing to a surefire movie franchise with a game of inferior quality rather than sticking to creative guns and bringing us more of the work we’ve come to expect from such a body of talent. The End

The Verdict

The Lowdown

Developer: Shiny Entertainment Publisher: Infogrames/Atari Release Date: May 2003

Available for: Game Cube Windows Xbox PlayStation 2

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System Requirements

Windows 98/Me/2000/XP PIII 800 MHz/AMD Duron 800 MHz (PIII 1.2 GHz/AMD Athlon 1.2 GHz recommended) 128 MB RAM (256 MB RAM recommended) 4.3 GB free hard disk space (7200 RPM or faster recommended) GeForce 2 256/Radeon 8500 Sound card 4X CD-ROM drive DirectX 9.0 (included)

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16 Responses to Screw the Internet

  • Matt "Steerpike" Sakey

    God damn, Scout, I’d never heard of this Lanier fellow, but that’s pretty profound.

    Information is not a manufacturable item… as you said, we are making less and less. This is either indicative of a larger-scale societal transformation, or a bad thing. I’m afraid I’m inclined to assumed the latter.

    Thanks!

  • Mike "Scout" Gust

    Steerpike, that was exactly the argument Lanier was having with callers on the BBC. Lanier was all fatalistic about society’s drop in real productivity while his opponents claimed that this was a huge transformation and that he was just too old to grasp the coolness of it all. If you notice, the web address of that first Lanier link is well.com. I mean, that is old! The Well?

    Lanier’s thoughts were pretty much echoed by David Simon, one of the creators of The Wire. Here he speaks with Bill Moyers about the fate of paid journalism in the face of the web.

  • Spike

    I’ve read many criticisms of Facebook et. al.  I’ve also read contradictions of those criticisms, namely, that social sites are making people more connected than ever.  I think that that connectedness is an illusion.

    For several months at the end of 2008 and the beginning of 2009 my daughter badgered me to join FB.  I could connect with her and some of her friends that I know as well as renew old acquaintances with some of her friend’s mothers.  I finally signed up so she’d quit the badgering. I used to check in every day to see what daughter and friends were saying because if I didn’t she’d ask if I saw her post, or a friend’s post. 

    What I’ve learned is this:

    1.  “Karen Likes John’s photo (or post)” IS NOT communication.

    2.  The reason I lost contact with some of these “friends” in the first place is that we no longer had anything in common.

    3.  I am bombarded with so many ads in so many places that I can do without more.  My policy is to never click on ads on FB or on many other sites. 

    4.  While FB’s original mission was connectedness/communication, I think it has become “Let’s make as much money from these fools as we can.”  “Wanna have gobs of fun playing a free game on FB?”  That game is gonna cost ya big, folks. 

    5.  Social sites are just more places where your personal info can be stolen.  There’s enough risk out there as it is.  Additional risk is not providing any valuable payoff for me.

    6.  Why do I want to “friend” a certain handbag manufacturer?  Why do I want to take a quiz that tells me what my personality is?  FB content providers tell you up front that if you click the link to take their quiz (goes for other types of content as well) you are giving them permission to access your profile info.  That’s ok.  I’ll also give you my SSN, bank account number and the key to my front door.  Not.

    7.  Don’t even get me started on the number of people who start an account in a pet’s name, and even have the pets making friends and posting.

    “…he was just too old to grasp the coolness of it all.”

    No, it’s just that most of us get to the age when we demand a bit of wheat with our chaff.

    At 38 my daughter is older than the average demographic of social sites although I know that that demographic is skewing up.  She seems to be cooling on FB.  Some of her 221 friends are as well.  Many of them do want some wheat.  When more cooling has taken place I will unjoin.

    I wonder, though, what new fad will come along when FB, Twitter and others run their course?  MySpace, anyone?

  • Mike "Scout" Gust

    My favorite line from the BBC interview was when Lanier was comparing MySpace and Facebook. He admitted that MySpace had some eye gougingly bad pages but said that he liked the “strangeness” of personalities that you get with it. With Facebook, he claimed that it was like looking at a tax form. A boring, watered down, bland presentation of people.

    I joined Facebook almost exactly a year ago. Apart from sparking up a new friendship with a very dear buddy, I’ve gotten about zero back from it. I sort of read with bemusement the activities of people I hardly know and could care less about. And when you consider how much information the devs harvest there…it’s scary. Lanier claims that the information is so far worthless to the investors and that the whole thing has become a sort useless ritual serving no purpose. He claimed that Google’s ads on the other hand will probably turn out to be the greatest advertising model ever created. He also thinks Google should stop before it’s too late but says they probably won’t. Just a glance at the side bar reveals about 4 ads for advertising agencies. Heh.

  • lokimotive

    Has anybody read Anti-Oedipus? I’m slogging my way through it (the third attempt I believe), and Deleuze and Gauttari’s ideas seem relevant to this in a way that I’m not sure I can articulate. This probably has something to do with a conversation I was eavesdropping on that, coincidentally, mentioned a lot of Deleuze and Gauttari’s theories. Someone was talking about another theorist (whose name I didn’t catch) who was defending “Generation Y” essentially. The argument went that Generation Y is an example of a “de-Oedipalized” cultural group (that’s Anti-Oedipus jargon, just stay with me). Apparently this meant that they made connections in a different manner than other generations, the idea of bricollage was brought up and things were generally mired in a lot of reasons why I don’t have my Masters in English. What I got from it was this Generation Y shoots out connections everywhere and attempts to make up a whole idea with them as opposed to relying on predefined pathways. In Deleuze and Guattari’s language: the schizo as opposed to Oedipus. In language that probably makes sense: Peer to Peer as opposed to client-server.

    So, of course, no one’s really right. I’m skeptical of the idea that Generation Y (full disclosure: I’m 29 so I’m part of that group) has enacted some sort of paradigm shift in how to operate in social systems, but facebook has changed how I connect with people. Then again, it’s not like I don’t value face to face communication.

    The future is somewhere in between. I’m really not cynical enough to believe that we are at the end times of civilized society because of Web 2.0. Instead society will change and stay the same because that’s what it does. Facebook is not the future; it’s probably a rung up the ladder though.

  • kaythomas

    To me, Facebook and Twitter are 0’s. They are not worth my time.  I do not care what someone I know or don’t know did a half hour ago or will do next.  I have met up with people on facebook I had lost contact with.  But, in truth, the reason I had lost contact was I was not that interested in staying in contact.

    I think for many people the Facebook/Twitter world is great.  For me it has nothing to offer. 
    kay

  • Matt "Steerpike" Sakey

    Tap has an automated device that twits… tweets… whatever whenever someone posts a new article. Just in case it draws some visitors.

    To be honest, though, I’m on Kay’s side of the fence, I don’t understand Twitter and I don’t understand why it’s so popular. I barely care what I’m doing from moment to moment, why should anyone else?

    I don’t get Facebook either, though I’m a member to keep track of all the girls who wouldn’t give me the time of day in high school.

  • Lewis B

    Tweets are great for giving me snippets of news.  If I like what I’ve read in the short paragraph tweets give, then I will visit the main page for that tweet. (Very good for following world news, favourite columnists, etc.)

    However, reading tweets from people such as “Just woke up, Madonna is giving me a massage while I shave my nuts” is not my idea of a good read.

  • Toger

    I use tweets the same way Lewis does. Of the people/things I follow, if the tweet is interesting I’ll follow the link to read the entire article. I follow fairly intelligent people, so I’m not subjected to the idiocy of “Just brushed my teeth while sitting on toilet”.

  • Gregg B

    @loki: I’m afraid I’ve not heard of them. I’m a couple of years below you so that puts me in the same Generation Y as well. I read through a few of those links Scout posted as well as a few more on Lanier’s new book “You Are Not a Gadget” and it took me a fair while to get to the crux of what he is saying and he has a lot to say, most of which I find very confusing.

    As a graphic designer the whole “everything is becoming advertising” thing has been bothering me for years. The incessant barrage of advertising is like fingernails on the chalkboard of my soul, which sort of makes me a hypocrite. After all the years of tuning my art and design skillz my creative abilities have amounted to nothing more than crafting pretty ads that sell things. Non of it speaks any truth or has any sort of ‘beauty’; it’s just stone cold mechanical capitalism. Granted there are ads out there that are beautiful, clever and visionary but the front line stuff is as dull as it gets. I’m sure this isn’t strictly what he’s getting at but it’s definitely something that irks me in relation to Scout’s last remark.

    Anyway, I remember Twitter just exploding in what seemed like the space of a week and I still can’t fathom the allure of it aside from providing a direct stream of consciousness from famous folk to their ravenous fans. I wish I’d thought of it to be honest. I can see the creators sitting around a table staring at Facebook and then saying “I know! We make a website that’s just about status updates! You can even update them with your mobile phone!”.

    With regards to Twitter news snippets, unless it’s for a phone, I don’t see the point because RSS feeds do a great job. At present too great; I simply can’t keep up with my subscriptions. There’s too much information on this super highway.

  • Jen

    Twitter is officially the dumbest thing ever.

    That said, it looks like I will have to be the official “tweeter” for my day job before too long. I can’t wait! (roll eyes)

  • xtal

    I’m with everyone else here. I’m glad to say I’ve never signed up for Facebook; I fear that if I ever had I would have long ago died from loss of brain cells due to reading moronic status updates. It’s as Kay said: ninety-five per cent of people with whom you lose contact are probably no longer in your life because you have nothing left in common. And echoing Steerpike’s comment, me eating toast and jam on a Sunday morning watching Fawlty Towers is not interesting, not to me. Why the hell would anyone else give a shit?

    Twitter I signed up for about a year ago, not really understanding what it was. I now understand it…but don’t care to use it often. I have made 58 tweets over that year. I suspect for some that is a daily or weekly average. It’s just Facebook status updates without all the drunken photographs. I admit it can be mildly useful for following, say, a news site. Usually when I hop on my twitter (once every two weeks??) it reminds me that I should read The Onion more often. That’s about it.

    Let’s see… looking at the actual humans I follow, um… Wil Wheaton is happy that the LA Kings have won 9 games in a row, my sister-in-law thought our dinner tonight was “delicious,” and Kevin Smith’s batteries are recharged … or something.

    Wow, my life is already getting better!

    p.s.  <—– Gen Y'er (can we call ourselves that?) and proud that when I Google my own name a real estate company pops up.

  • Fraser

    Twitter is exactly as useless as the person who’s writing it. If someone is telling you boring shit over Twitter, it’s the person wasting your time, not the delivery channel.

    MySpace is the same, but it seems more intrinsically garbage because for some reason almost everyone who used it was an intellectual embryo with a fetish for unreadable hyperneon text on top of garish uninteresting photos. Facebook’s great trick is that it prevents you from realising that most of your friends would make a brutally hideous homepage for themselves if they could.

    That’s the argument against the whole of this post: the internet isn’t evil, but the people who use it might be. It’s people who make business models successful; people who make money flow to advertisers instead of artists, by buying into the advertising.

    This has been a pretty didactic post, so let me compensate by saying VIDEOGAMES WOOOOOOO!!!

  • Gregg B

    Good point about not blaming the delivery channel Fraser. I seem to recall Lanier saying that he preferred the personality that MySpace has over Facebook despite its Craptastic Pages of Illegibility. I’m trying to think of something intelligent to follow that up with but my brain is failing me at the moment, so…

    VIDEOGAMES WOOOOOO!!!

  • Jason Venter

    Fraser, I really loved your following comment:

    “Facebook’s great trick is that it prevents you from realising that most of your friends would make a brutally hideous homepage for themselves if they could.”

    I think that may just be one of the most hilariously true comments I’ve read in a comments area on any video game web site ever.  That sounds overly dramatic, I know, but I actually mean it.  Kudos to you!

  • Mike "Scout" Gust

    Yeah but don’t you miss all the ugliness of MySpace? All those hideous pages at least had personality or what Lanier called the “strangeness of the person” to them.

    I actually don’t agree with a lot of what Lanier says esp “the hive mind must die” stuff. But I do think he is right about the spirit shriveling blandness of Facebook.

    I also suspect that Twitter is going to be around for a while. It will be more and more influential. People are simply not as willing to ingest huge amounts of information in the form of pages of text anymore. The delivery systems that succeed will be those that can communicate a lot of information in a short amount of time. Most days we want “glimpses” or “snapshots” not total immersion. Lewis, Toger and Fraser are correct in that you get out of it what you decide to follow.

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