Evil Genius Review

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            Evil Genius

Review by SteerpikeOctober 2004

Mediocrity: A History

I want so badly to give this game a good review, but it commits the one crime I cannot forgive: for lack of testing, for clumsiness and laziness on the part of its designers, it is but a glimmer of what it could be. Evil Genius is the well-intentioned but desperately flawed sophomore offering from Elixir Studios, the British developer responsible for 2003’s well-intentioned but desperately flawed Republic: The Revolution. In this its second game, Elixir channels the spirit of Dungeon Keeper 2, inviting us to play as a wicked mastermind in the campy world of sixties-ish spy movies. You will build an underground lair, conduct criminal activities across the globe, construct a doomsday device, and ultimately bring all the world under your megalomaniacal control. But where Dungeon Keeper 2 was graceful, elegant, superbly tuned—possibly the perfect RTS—Evil Genius is clumsy, boorish, frustrating, and frankly not worth the price of admission.

Any game that has the audacity to compare itself to both X-Com and Dungeon Keeper 2 on its box cover has some serious shoes to fill. Holding it to that quote, I find it sorely lacking, especially in the areas of interface design, play balance, and AI.  It is worth noting, however, that the major flaws in this game are patchable (though it would take one hell of a patch to cover everything), so it’s possible that Elixir is just guilty of unleashing a flawed release candidate on the public. The game itself, the concept, is just fine.

You play as one of three criminal masterminds just starting their careers in world domination. The proud owner of a Volcanic Island of Undisclosed Location, you must use your seed capital to get an underground lair going, staff it with assorted functionaries, and then get to the serious business of trying to take over the world.  This is the Dungeon Keeper 2 portion of the game: dig out and build rooms, manage money, hire people, supervise evil activities, and so forth.

The X-Com portion—and that comparison is on the same level as comparing onions and oranges—takes place on the World Domination Map, where you place minions for the purpose of stealing cash, perform acts of infamy to increase your evil standing, steal unique treasures, and generally do your best to upset the delicate balance of world order. So far as I can tell, the only thing that Evil Genius has in common with X-Com is that both games have a world map.

I’ve been told that I compare games to other games too much, so if this is a quirk that bugs you, it might be best if you stop here.  Evil Genius is all the Dungeon Keeper 2 crowd has had to look forward to since that franchise came to an undeserved end, and it’s on that great game that this mediocre one is based.  Pretty much everything that Dungeon Keeper 2 did right, Evil Genius does wrong. But there are also some things it did do right, so we’ll talk about them too.

Evil 101

You can’t just be evil willy-nilly, of course; if you go too far, the forces of good will come to teach you a lesson. The world is divided into five regions, each with its own anti-evil organization: S.M.A.S.H., P.A.T.R.I.O.T., S.A.B.R.E., and so forth. It’s a prerequisite of crime-fighting that your outfit be an acronym.

As you conduct your evil operations, you gain heat and notoriety.  The former is the amount of attention that your criminal activities are garnering by region; get too much heat and some people will be dispatched to your evil island to deal with you. Heat goes down if you stay out of trouble. Notoriety, meanwhile, increases as you commit nefarious deeds. You need notoriety to get the respect of other evil people and to succeed at certain mission objectives.

The forces of good have two methods of dealing with your evil self.  They’ll send out standard agents pretty regularly, to stalk the sunny shores of your island, snooping for evil activity. Should they locate the evil door to your base, they’ll jimmy the lock and poke around inside—if they find nothing, they’ll eventually go away and you’ll lose some heat. But if they see something untoward, they’ll race back to HQ and soon the island will be swarming with do-gooders, so it’s often best to just drop them in your evil prison.  Problem is, though the game insists that heat is the mechanism by which opponents attack you, in truth it seems more random to me.  There was always a pretty significant presence on my evil island, and after a certain point they attacked relentlessly and with such overwhelming force that I couldn’t use the World Domination Map anymore, because I literally needed all of my human assets to protect my little volcanic island.

The other method that the good guys use is the Super Agents. Super Agents are the James Bond/Cate Archer/Maxwell Smart kinds of people who can seriously disrupt your evil plans, both on the World Domination Map and if (God forbid) they ever come to your island. This would be a better mechanism for game challenge if they hadn’t made the Super Agents hypersentient and nearly impossible to kill. Even imprisoning one is ridiculously dangerous. One time, Super Agent Mariana Mamba (bikini and butcher knife; think Ursula Andress from Dr. No) burst into my evil lair and proceeded to slaughter literally every minion I had at my command—about 75 people—before packing up one of the priceless treasures I’d stolen and leaving me alone on my island (I had hidden my Genius in the safety of the inner sanctum).

You have your own form of Super Agents, called henchmen. These are supercriminals like yourself, but (presumably) they lack the brainpower to be evil geniuses. So they hire themselves out to you.  More become available as your notoriety rises. Only Super Agents can permanently kill a henchman, but Super Agents are so vastly more powerful than henchmen that combat between the two is kind of a joke.

Generally speaking, henchmen are among the most useless units in the game. They wander randomly, usually to the most remote and irrelevant evil locations on your island. You can control their movement, but they pick up their meanderings again unless you maneuver them all the time—while Mariana Mamba was butchering my people, my two henchmen were having a smoke in the freezer, totally ignoring the howling alarms and the shrieks of the dying. Their pathing is abominable, they get stuck on things, their “special abilities” generally wind up killing more of your people than enemies, and their verbal responses are flat-out racist. Their flaws bring into sharp relief that this game is a great idea with very poor execution.

Witness the Power of this Fully Operational Battle Station

One of the most fun and challenging aspects of Dungeon Keeper 2 was the amount of precision required to dig out and build a functional lair. The game’s true masters turned their dungeons into objets d’art, beautifully ticking crystalline lattices of efficiency and design. It was deeply satisfying to watch a perfectly conceived dungeon humming away as creatures went about their daily lives. Lair-building in Evil Genius is also fun, but it includes some bizarre flaws that really hurt the overall effect—due in part to the fact that lair efficiency appears to be of no importance whatsoever, and there’s no need to display the level of care and exactitude so necessary in the game’s spiritual predecessor.

If you decide you don’t like a room and delete it, for example, the area fills up with evil dirt again. You can completely rearrange your base whenever you like. It’s an underground lair. The whole point of it should be that you have to be careful, because once the dirt is out you can’t put it back in. Furthermore, there are clumsy bugs in the system: connecting rooms with corridors should be a snap, but the game simply refuses to build corridors sometimes, saying they’re too narrow when they’re not.

Evil Genius offers a nice variety of rooms (though who ever heard of an underground lair with no guard post?) and is more forgiving than Dungeon Keeper 2 when it comes to the efficiency of nonsquare areas. This is because the efficiency of a room in this game is dependent not on position on the map or proximity to other rooms, but on the furniture you place inside, so you can build to whatever specification you like and stock the place with the furniture you’ll need. However, furniture is stupidly restrictive when it comes to placement and access. Items block each other, people get trapped behind stuff, and the limitations are absurd. For example, you can’t put an evil fire extinguisher on the same section of wall as an evil security camera. Why? A genius might know; I do not.

You control access using evil security doors, which are also flawed.  Doors have four completely useless lock levels that ten minutes of playtesting could have improved. Why can’t you set doors so that only certain minion types are allowed through? Why can’t you order doors to be guarded but still open for your people? Why can’t doors be set to only open when approached from one side? And why on Earth can’t you designate certain areas of your base off-limits, so your personnel aren’t constantly wandering there to sneak cigarettes instead of doing work?

Another great thing about the doors is that they’re useless as security devices. Agents will try to pick the locks to gain access to your base, an activity they could easily dispense with since your minions are constantly walking through the doors, which open for them automatically. Door opens, agent runs through. Security bypassed. If only Bond had it so easy.

You have access to a wide variety of nefarious traps with which to protect your island, but in the end they, too, have too many problems to be valuable. A new and unnecessarily boorish linking system allows you to set up extremely complicated trap scenarios using pressure pads, but in my experience traps killed my people far more often than they killed—or even fooled—the enemy.  The Dungeon Keeper 2 strategy of putting traps at breach points or entrances to offset minor invasions just doesn’t work in Evil Genius, because the traffic of your own minions through those points means that they’ll be the likely victims every time a trap fires.

One section that should have been dispensed with entirely is the hotel-building. Despite the fact that you lair is housed inside an evil volcano on a remote and desolate island, gaggles of tourists inexplicably show up and roam the beaches. If they wander into your base and see something nasty in the proverbial woodshed, they’ll return home and tell the agents of justice, and your heat will increase.  Thus, you must build and maintain a hotel to corral the tourists and keep them away from your lair. This would be okay if the hotels worked—which they don’t—or if you didn’t need to staff the place with crucial Valet minions, meaning they’re not available to do other work. I wound up using automated sentry guns, not hotels, to deal with tourists. They tried to throw everything including the kitchen sink into Evil Genius, and the result is an overly complicated morass of frustration and poor interface design.

The World Domination screen is equally clunky. There are two preset zoom levels—one is too far out, the other is too far in. Movement of your minions, represented by little game piece–looking icons, is unintuitive. You receive no warning when an enemy agent or Super Agent appears in an area where your operatives are committing evil acts, so oftentimes you visit the screen only to find that someone has wiped out a gang of your followers. Finally, the World Domination Map is the only place where you can review your heat levels, and there’s no simple way to view your heat for each of the five do-gooder alliances at once.

Frankly, I could have done without the World Domination section.  It seems tacked on and runs poorly. Its chief purpose is to display the hundreds of acts of infamy you’ll want to commit, both as mission objectives and to increase your notoriety. And, of course, it’s where you get your money—but money is a fickle thing in Evil Genius. You don’t pay your minions or henchmen (!) and pay no cash upkeep for your island or its facilities. You just pay for rooms and furniture, so once your base is “done,” there’s little reason to spend more money.

There Is Still Good in You, I Can Sense It

It’s fairly obvious why Evil Genius is so clumsy a game.  Pretty much all of the creative calories that Elixir has seem to have gone into some really top-notch graphics (for a strategy game)—it sports vivid colors, superb animations, and a level of detail that’s frankly beyond belief. Every evil action your minions perform has a unique and often hilarious set of animations associated with it; it’s fun to just zoom in and watch your people going about their evil daily business.

Reflections, shadows, and similar 3D candy are used to great effect in shiny tile floors, beeping and whirring machinery, and various outdoor effects. This game has really excellent graphics, and the attention to detail is stunning, right down to the logos on the security cameras. Elixir worked its evil tail off making this game as pretty, and as funny, as possible.

And it is funny. It’s so funny that even Dungeon Keeper 2 seems a little dull, humorwise. Evil criminal masterminds are gut-busters when you think about it. Giant lasers, doomsday devices, cunningly disguised traps, goofball henchmen—it’s all there, ripe for mockery. And they didn’t stop at the obvious stuff: If you don’t feel like torturing imprisoned agents in your standard issue interrogation chair, no problem! Pop them in the giant electric mixer in the kitchen or squash them between the moving shelves in your archive room and see how fast they talk. There are, however, no traps or rooms that sport dangerous marine life like sharks or electric eels. You can’t really be an evil madman if you don’t have a shark tank.

The opening score is beautifully evocative of every Bond film ever made, and the in-game music exhibits the same flavor. Voice acting, especially from the Evil Geniuses, is tuned for humor and delivered with great accents and superb comic timing. Generally speaking, if sound and humor were all that made a game good, we’d be bandying phrases like “game of the year” around. But it’s not.

Evil Genius is reasonably stable; I experienced a few crashes but suspect they’re more the result of my system than the game.

You Have Failed Me for the Last Time

You have two types of evil followers: the aforementioned henchmen, who you can control directly but who ignore those orders and are almost entirely useless due to rotten AI and bad pathing; and minions, who you cannot control directly. Minions do the basic menial stuff in the base: tidy up, handle construction, move body bags, guard the place, and so forth. Theoretically, they’re supposed to go about their activities without any but the most macro-scale input from you.

But as usual, the system is flawed. To secure your base, you set up evil security networks composed of cameras and loudspeakers.  When you hit the panic button, intruders (again, in theory) are to be gunned down by all of your menials as they race to the enemy’s location.

But most of them don’t race to the enemy’s location. Most just stand there. You must keep your base on constant amber alert in order to get your people to carry guns; otherwise, they’ll fight with their fists (and they generally fight with their fists anyway).  Worse, opponents are dealt with through a system called tagging, which is both clumsy and incomplete. You can tag anyone: ignore, kill, imprison, or weaken. If someone has a kill tag and a minion wanders by, that minion will try to kill him.

Tagging is a big problem. You have to manually tag every enemy who enters your base, or your people will ignore them utterly. Why the vaunted security networks can’t be set to automatically tag anyone who, say, goes beyond a certain point inside the base is anyone’s guess. But since your people and automated defenses won’t attack someone that’s not tagged, and only you can tag opponents, the system requires constant supervision.

The inability to tell minions where to go and not go is where combat in the game breaks down. I can’t count the number of times I sat there watching as agents blew up parts of my base while minions ignored evil alarms and went about their daily business. Your minions are stupid, and they’re stupid in ways they shouldn’t be. The Valet minion, for example, essentially fills the shoes of Dungeon Keeper 2’s Imp during combat: he picks up body bags and moves them to the freezer, puts out fires, stuff like that. Like Imps, Valets are all but defenseless. Unlike Imps, who run away from dangerous areas, returning only when they get an all-clear, Valets cheerfully walk right into the middle of a firefight and get gunned down. Bad-AI frustrations like this abound.

Each minion has stats that decrease over time and must be replenished using assorted rooms and evil items in your base. But stats decrease far too quickly, and minions aren’t too good at recognizing when they need to, say, head to the archives to brush up on their Smarts stat or visit the pharmacy to boost their Life stat. The result is minions who spend a lot of time staring blankly at the wall because their Smarts have reached zero or, worse, just dropping dead.

Minions turn into other minions: the basic Worker is your primary drone, recruited on a time schedule. Workers can do everything, but not as well as their upgraded counterparts. If you want to train Valets, you need to go out into the world, kidnap a hotel maid, and torture her into giving up her wisdom. The torturer then turns into a Valet and can train others in the Training Room. Valets, in turn, can be upgraded to Spin Doctors and other, more skilled social minions, whose primary duty is to keep the base tidy and reduce heat. Same goes for guards, technicians, and so forth. It’s a good system, but limitations on the number of people you can have working for you mean that you never have quite enough minions to do what you want. Also, if all of an advanced minion type get killed, you have to go out into the world, kidnap another representative of that type, and go through the whole process again. When taken in conjunction with the suicidal Valet example above, it can get damned annoying.

There’s also no comprehensive system of tracking or cataloguing your minions, finding out who they are, where they are, and what they’re up to. Sure, you can double-click one and get the evil gist, along with an unhelpful rundown of activity like “Working for you,” or “Standing there.” But this info should be available as a mouse-over, not a double click, and there should be some way to track all of your minions at once.

Evil Always Prevails, Because Good Is Dumb

It all comes down to control and pacing. Control in the sense that you don’t have enough; minion AI is insufficiently tuned to trust that they’ll do the right, or even the wise, thing. Control is also bad in the areas of pathing, because minions and henchmen alike try to make it to their destination in a straight line. If there is no straight line, they get stuck.

Pacing is the final critical flaw in Evil Genius. You spend a lot of time waiting, either for more minions to train up or for your heat to go down, or for something else beyond your control to happen or stop happening. A lot of time is spent staring at the screen, waiting. And that gets boring.

Sculptors often say that the piece inside the marble block is already there; they’re just freeing it from the excess. Dungeon Keeper 2 was similar in many ways—the game is designed in such a way that there are clear right and wrong ways to do things. And yet you never felt that the game was heavy-handed or dull, and you never sat around and waited. There was always something to do or supervise. Evil Genius aims for the Dungeon Keeper 2 paradigm but misses the evil mark due to sheer awkwardness of interface, design, and AI. That’s a pity, because as great as Dungeon Keeper 2 is, there are only so many times you can make the perfect dungeon. I was hoping that Evil Genius would be a followup we could enjoy for years. Ultimately, Evil Genius wasn’t tested enough, and it shows.

That said, you’ll note that it escapes the evil Rotten Egg award, and it makes that escape for just one reason: despite my myriad and valid complaints about the game, I spent hours and hours playing Evil Genius and had fun for most of that time. Rome: Total War, a title that’s certainly a contender for game of the year and a triumph in every respect, sat idle while I cajoled Evil Genius into being a good game. That I failed is not my fault (it’s never the mastermind’s fault) … personally, I blame the ineptitude of my subordinates. The End

The Verdict

The Lowdown

Developer: Elixir Studios Publisher: Vivendi Universal Release Date: September 28, 2004

Available for: Windows

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System Requirements

Windows 98SE/Me/2000/XP PIII 800 MHz or higher (P4 1.5 GHz recommended) DirectX 9.0b 128 MB RAM (98SE/Me), 256 MB RAM (2000/XP) GeForce2 MX 16 MB or equivalent DirectX® 9 compatible video card (64 MB Geforce 3 recommended) 300 MB free hard drive space 16x CD-ROM drive (24x recommended) DirectX® 9.0b compatible sound card MS compatible mouse Keyboard

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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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