Painkiller Review

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            Painkiller

Review by SteerpikeJune 2004

Depth Perception

I was a bit leery about Painkiller when we saw the first ads a few months ago. Aside from the inclusion of a weapon that flings sharpened wooden stakes, it didn’t really seem to bring much that was new or innovative to the FPS world. But I downloaded the demo because I wanted to see the new engine, and within two minutes I was hooked—it’s that good. If video games got drunk and had one-night stands that resulted in pregnancy, Painkiller would be the product of the frenzied, S&M-laden coupling of DOOM and Serious Sam.

This is the first game from the folks at the new Polish studio People Can Fly. Much of the team worked at Metropolis in 1999, creating a well-intentioned flop called Odium—a game that came this close to being a worthy successor to the small-squad combat of X-Com (actually, if X-Com and Fallout got drunk and made a baby, it would be Odium). Called Gorky-17 everywhere but here in the States, it was saddled with a clumsy and oftentimes nonsensical movement interface that pretty much ruined the game. Still, its repellently violent gameplay dripped with atmosphere, and it was a pretty unique and original narrative idea.

But Odium bombed and Metropolis sank and the developers moved on to start People Can Fly—and if Painkiller is any indication of the general quality we can expect from this studio, we’re going to be hearing about them for a long, long time. It has the gore of a snuff film and the frantic intensity of a war zone, and it is quite frankly one of the most beautiful and satisfying shooters I have ever played.

By distilling the FPS rulebook down to the most basic essentials (move and shoot), Painkiller wipes away the patina of complexity that so burdens, and sometimes so overwhelms, modern first-person action games. There are times when you just want to kill and kill, without restrictions or addendums, and that’s what this game is about.

Which is not to say it’s lacking in depth. Painkiller’s art direction and thematic intent is intricate and powerful. What would appear to the casual observer to be a string of meaningless, logically disconnected killing fields is in fact a stirring artistic reflection on the nature of the afterlife, specifically the madness-gripped waiting room that some believe stands between this mortal coil and Heaven. It is only when all the pieces have come together, when you play the kaleidoscope of horror that is the game’s perspective-shattering final confrontation, that you realize the philosophical scope of this casual shooter. To stand bewildered in that final level, to spend a good two or three minutes wondering what it is you’re looking at before the light bulb pops and you whisper, “oh my God …  they’re right. This is exactly what Hell would be like”—it’s quite an experience.

Don’t Hate Me, Jen

We have a simple rule at Four Fat Chicks: the games we review have to be story-driven. As rules go, it’s not really unjust or difficult to follow, but for some reason I take a sadistic glee in pushing it to the very limit. My coda of reviews, while containing a nice crop of very story-intensive games, does reveal the occasional, shall we say, somewhat out-of-scope title that could arguably be called less than narrative.

I’m saying this in the review rather than in a conversation with the boss because by the time Jen learns of my most recent and egregious crime, the work will be done, and her heart is too big and too good to refuse something that one of her people has worked on, even if it doesn’t quite follow The Rule. To call Painkiller story-driven is reaching. It has a story, the same way as, say, a porn movie has a story, but that story is strictly confined to the back seat.  Honestly, why they tolerate my presence around here is beyond me.

Here’s the story: you’re a nice fellow named Daniel who is married to a nice woman named Catherine. It’s Catherine’s birthday, so Daniel stuffs her in the car and whisks her off to a fancy dinner despite the wrath-of-God thunderstorm roiling around them. In a cinematic moment as sweet-hearted as it is tragic, Daniel reaches across to take her hand and give her one of those “what a great wife I’ve got” smiles, thereby taking his eyes off the road just long enough to plow into an eighteen-wheeler that pulverizes the car and its occupants.

Catherine gets into Heaven. Daniel does not. For reasons totally inexplicable to him, he’s stuck waiting in an in-between world while his wife plays her harp without him. Along comes a surprisingly creepy angel named Sammael, who offers to move Daniel to the front of the line if he’ll do God the teeny favor of killing Lucifer’s four generals. They, along with an army of demons, have invaded this limbo and are preparing to launch an all-out assault on Heaven—an assault that, given their numbers and Heaven’s apparent France-in-the-1930s military preparedness, they’ll almost certainly win. Daniel, lacking anything else to do that day, agrees.

Though Sammael warns Daniel that killing these generals may not be very easy, he neglects to mention that they’re about three hundred feet tall and so well protected that even getting near them is a labor worthy of Hercules. (Sammael’s actually kind of a jerk.) As Daniel makes his way toward his goal, he enlists the help of Eve—of Adam-and- fame—who offers advice only slightly less nebulous than Sammael’s but seems to genuinely want to see him succeed. Unfortunately, People Can Fly fell into the usual video game trap of making this one female character an implausibly stacked, shirtless woman dressed only in a translucent linen sarong—an ensemble that doesn’t make much sense considering all the claw-festooned demons running around. Plus, there are places in Purgatory that look cold.

Daniel has access to the Black Tarot board, which is Painkiller’s one and only nod to anything other than splatterfest violence.  Each level has an objective that, if met, unlocks one Black Tarot card. These cards can be “played” on the board between each level to provide you with various advantages—some are permanent, some can only be activated once per mission. Playing these cards costs gold coins, which you’ll find in nearly every destroyable object in the game. These cards are sufficiently varied to add real spice, and the objectives to unlock them are at times so incredibly challenging (and at other times so laughably easy) as to significantly increase Painkiller’s replay value. Maintaining your card collection is a lot of fun; the only problem is that you have to play your cards prior to each level, before you really know what sort of challenges you’ll be facing. The trick, therefore, is to play cards that will help you meet the objective necessary to get another card.

Painkiller presents Purgatory in a very unique and compelling way: an unsettling, dreamlike landscape where your location, and the geography, seems to vary depending on your state of mind. Thus a posh opera house could be next door to a collapsing factory; a throat-lumpingly beautiful Venetian city could stand inches from the very gates of Hell, and so forth. Despite an initial sense of unrelation, the levels in each of Painkiller’s five episodes exhibit a common thread, however subtle, that ties the otherwise disconnected locales together.

Where you are ain’t no good unless you can get out: Purgatory is a bad place to be for two reasons. One, it’s not Heaven, and two, it’s swarming with demons because of the big war that Lucifer’s plotting. And if one of those demons kills you while you’re there, you go to Hell.

Max Pain

Painkiller employs a completely new codebase to handle rendering tasks. Called the Pain Engine, it’s easily competitive with Lithtech, Crytek, Gamebryo, and Unreal 2.0, the four major licensable engine properties on the market today. Indeed, I can only assume that People Can Fly plans to market this bad boy as a standalone game engine; if it’s easy to develop for, they’ll make mad money.

Within three months we’ll be seeing the next holy trinity of game engines to beat: Source will power Half-Life 2, and Serious 2.0 will hum underneath Serious Sam 2. But it’s the long-awaited DOOM 3 engine that represents the biggest wildcard in FPS today; if DOOM 3 runs smoothly with moderate hardware (which I highly doubt), nothing will have a chance against it.

It’s unheard of to have eight standalone engines available for game development, but it looks poised to happen by the end of the year. Lithtech, Crytek, Source, Gamebryo, Pain, Serious 2.0, Unreal 2.0, and DOOM 3 will all vie for attention over the next eighteen months. Amazingly, the virginal People Can Fly has developed a game engine that is easily powerful enough to swim with the big fish.

Pain has the lighting and texture prowess of Unreal 2.0 and Gamebryo, the vivid palette and stunning water effects of Lithtech, and the obscene draw distance of Crytek. Better still, it runs like butter on machines only nominally within its recommended specifications.  We pay a price for that—level load times exceed five minutes—but further optimization may even grind that complaint down.

Painkiller is, quite simply, gorgeous. My screen caps do not, cannot, do it justice; the Pain Engine’s magic is only visible when it’s in motion. The flapping of a demon’s paisley robe (yes, demons do wear paisley—who’d have thunk it?), the subtle flicker of a torch against a blood-spattered brick wall, the sudden crumbling of a towering Doric column—not to mention the holy-crap enormity of the game’s five boss monsters, creatures so huge that you literally don’t reach their ankle; Painkiller is graphic splendor pure and simple.

The Havok floodgates are wide open now, and the lapdance of Painkiller’s graphics is made all the more arousing by the addition of this mighty middleware physics engine. People Can Fly dodged the usual problems we see in Havok by limiting it to explosions, flying bodies (and body parts), and scripted crumbling of buildings. The game doesn’t bother with chairs and wastebaskets you can knock over, so none of the bizarre mass problems of Invisible War or Deadly Shadows exist here.

The aforementioned stake gun hurls sharpened wooden shafts the size of telephone poles into your enemies, and there is little more satisfying than watching an opponent transfixed on the end of a stake, picked up by its force, hurled back into a wall, and stapled there, twitching. Until developers really master the complexities of working with Havok, they’d be well advised to employ it for effects like this rather than more easily botched “realistic” weights and measures.

A couple of patches are available for Painkiller, and it’s in your best interest to download the latest. It improves stability and load times, corrects some weird texture problems with the GeForce 4 4200, and gives the overall game a general spit and polish. The multiplayer element is also patched, though frankly I don’t see anyone playing Painkiller online much. It’s pure run-and-gun deathmatch, so fast and so furious that only the most Quake-d gamers will be able to keep track of the action. This is a single-player game and is probably best when viewed as that alone.

Welcome to Limbo, Here’s Your Atlas

Gameplay in Painkiller is almost painfully linear. There are no mazes or wrong turns; what appear at first to be satisfyingly open levels are compartmented killing boxes. You enter an area and all points of egress seal. Kill everything in that area and the exits open up again, usually leaving behind a game-saving checkpoint that, on some difficulty levels, also tosses you a bit of health.  You can also save at any time throughout.

Now, normally there would be points off for this compartmentalization, because in a way it’s a sign of clumsy level design. But even a casual glance at Painkiller’s levels is proof that they’re not clumsy—they’re designed very specifically and very intentionally to work the way they do. Painkiller is not about exploration, or locating an exit or a specific item, it’s not about the stuff that normal FPS games are about. It’s about entering a room, killing everything there, and moving on to the next room. What seems like heavy-handed game control is in fact just good organization. One drawback to the system is that it is possible, on occasion, to inadvertently escape the region you’re in and enter the next one before the game is expecting it. If you manage this, chances are you’ll be stuck there, so you’re better off following the path that it sets for you.

On the subject of control, those in Painkiller are among the most mappable and friendly you’ll find in a shooter. Each of the game’s five weapons has a primary and alternate fire mode, and you can even switch one for the other. Pretty much every key on the board can be mapped, but since the gameplay is so straightforward it’s not like you’ll have a lot to remember. You can’t even crouch in this game. When I say they stripped out everything that makes FPS games overburdened with complexity, I mean it. Yet that doesn’t make Painkiller simplistic—far from it.

When monsters die, they leave their souls behind. In addition to being a good way to minimize memory clutter by vanishing the 3D models of corpses in the level, each soul returns one hit point to Daniel’s pool. Collect sixty-six and you morph into an invulnerable demonic form for twenty seconds or so. If you time your collection right, you can take this form when you’re literally swarmed by enemies and then really clean up.

Painkiller has five episodes, each with four or five levels apiece. Its bestiary is so huge that you’ll never feel as though the game overuses its monsters. Better yet, the monsters themselves—and even, to a degree, the locations—are tied to the particular general they serve. This consistency is limited, but in a general sort of way you’ll find medieval/gothic architecture, gritty urban nightmare, wide-open spaces, nature gone horribly wrong, and so forth grouped logically.

Monsters demonstrate admirable AI, at times using one another as shields and certainly appearing to learn your stratagems. They generally make it a point to approach with vastly superior numbers and firepower, so it can be tough to decide whether they’re getting smarter or whether there are just more of them about, but you’ll find the game challenging from many perspectives. As is the trend in today’s games, some difficulty levels only unlock once you’ve completed the game or some other objective, and I’m told that a secret ending awaits those who manage to finish Painkiller on its highest level.

Paradise Lost (and Regained)

The game is not entirely perfect. Though the levels are extraordinarily compartmentalized, there are times when it’s not clear where you’re supposed to go next. A compass that points you in the right direction is provided to offset this difficulty, but at times it seems to freeze up for no good reason. On a few rare occasions, I found myself wandering through an area I’d cleared out for the better part of ten minutes, wondering where I was supposed to go and why the compass wasn’t moving. Areas only reopen when you’ve killed every opponent in them, so sometimes you think you’re trapped when really there’s just a tiny monster high up on a balcony or something.

The arsenal, while excellent in the extreme, could be a little more numerous. I applaud the inclusion of some entirely unique weapons—stake gun, shuriken cannon, and my personal favorite, the eponymous painkiller weapon, add flavor alongside the shotgun and minigun/rocket launcher.  These weapons are wonderfully balanced, all have a distinct purpose, and all are deeply satisfying on an ass-kicking front. It’s just that five isn’t many, and I wouldn’t have said no to a few more.

The acting is bad. Especially, and as usual, from the protagonist.  Why studios always choose to give the worst actor the biggest part is beyond me. Eve is okay, but she’s so offensively drawn that the words coming out of her mouth are less important than what’s scarcely concealed by her flowing tresses and naught else. The rest are mediocre to sucky, with the single exception of the charming demon lord Alastor, who sounded like a good actor, but his voice was so distorted that it’s hard to tell.

The difficulty levels could also use a bit of a tweak. Daydream (read: “easy”) is far too dreamy; Insomnia is still pretty dreamy, and Nightmare is, well, a nightmare. Also, there are secret items and areas lurking throughout each level, and in most cases they’re just ridiculously hard to find. One of the best ways to “break” the linear pathing system is to wander into the wrong place while exploring for secret areas.

None of these are dealbreakers. Heck, none of them are that serious.  Painkiller is the most fulfilling ultraviolent experience I’ve had on a computer in ages, and anyone looking for a good, straightforward shooter could do a lot worse.

This game is the sort of which I’d like to see more: breathtaking attention to detail, deeply satisfying gameplay, and a focus on pure, simple fun that doesn’t in any way defeat or diminish a richly powerful thematic narrative. My own review can now be added to the pile of glowing kudos from all walks of the industry. Far Cry, though popular and successful, was so shackled to its crushing system requirements and moronic save interface that we had little choice but to focus on the negatives of what would be an otherwise excellent game. Painkiller, meanwhile, never deviated from its original concept and goal. It is relentless in its focus on being exactly what it is intended to be, and the result is a colossal achievement in gaming, and one that I suspect will be thought of highly for many years to come. The End

The Verdict

The Lowdown

Developer: People Can Fly Publisher: Dreamcatcher Release Date: April 2004

Available for: Windows Xbox

Four Fat Chicks Links

Player FeedbackPainkiller: Battle out of Hell Review

Screenshots

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System Requirements

Windows 98/ME/2000/XP 1.5 GHz Intel Pentium III or AMD Athlon processor 384 MB RAM 4x CD-ROM 1.2 GB free hard disk space 64 MB DirectX 8.1 compatible video card (NVIDIA GeForce 3 or better) DirectX 8.1b or better compatible sound card Keyboard and mouse

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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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