Prince of Persia: Warrior Within Review

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            Prince of Persia: Warrior Within

Review by SteerpikeJanuary 2005

Joking Aside, We Actually Are Quite Close

Like me, my older brother is a writer, and a gamer. Together we’re getting our father into the hobby, but I’m concerned, because so far Dad has been taking after my brother Marcus in matters of taste, and when it comes to gaming, Marcus is much more curmudgeonly than I. He didn’t like Knights of the Old Republic (“too much moving around”).  Or Thief (“too dark”). Or System Shock 2 (“too many monkeys”). Or Morrowind (“too much foliage collection”). Or Far Cry (“eh”).  He is a joyless shell of a human, bereft of brightness and glee, churning with subsurface wrath. He has my pity.

However, his gloweringly lemonish surl, in addition to being endearing, does have one side benefit: when he recommends a game, it’s a safe bet that you won’t be disappointed. And so when he emailed me and said in no uncertain terms that I should pick up Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time, I did so, and I was suitably impressed. Sands of Time is an amazing game. It is beautiful, hugely entertaining, and stuffed to the proverbial gills with thrilling play, snappy writing, and excellent voice work. Indeed, even on the PC with a mouse/keyboard combo—a control scheme for which it is not ideally suited—it managed to be one of the best PC games of 2003, selling nearly two million copies across all major platforms and very nearly toppling Knights of the Old Republic for the IGDA’s Game of the Year award. As one can imagine, a sequel was in the cards.

However, in a maneuver of astounding dimwittedness, Ubisoft pretty much disbanded the PoPTeam studio responsible for Sands of Time and shifted the entire writing staff from the original over to work on the upcoming Prince of Persia movie. The new team totally rewrote the protagonist, recast the talented voice lead with a monotonous hack, cut a beloved supporting character entirely, and announced that, unlike the soft-edged dreaminess of its predecessor, Prince of Persia: Warrior Within would narrate like an action movie directed by Ingmar Bergman—that is, bloody and depressing.  And rather than focus on the fiendish jumping puzzles that have been a Prince of Persia standby since Jordan Mechner originated the series for Broderbund in 1990, Warrior Within, while including the acrobatic conundra, would tilt the scales much more aggressively toward complex, combo-driven swordfighting.

Amazingly, these enormous foundational changes have resulted in a game that plays as well as, if not better than, The Sands of Time. It’s nowhere near as original, clever, or well-written, nor is it remotely faithful to the Prince of Persia franchise; but the surprisingly elegant new combat system, rich graphics, action-packed pacing, and control improvements on the PC platform are without peer. Though Ubi made a heroic attempt to ruin it, Warrior Within manages to transcend more than a year of incompetence on the part of nearly everyone involved with its production. So despite the fact that I had serious doubts about this one, I’m no longer at all hesitant to award it our highest honor. Warrior Within is vastly different from Sands of Time, but it’s still a great, great game.

The Dahaka. The What? The Dahaka. The What? The—

The Prince, as fans will recall, allowed himself to be tricked into unleashing the Sands of Time in the previous game by a Jafar-like vizier with dreams of controlling a world populated by sand-filled time zombies. Fortunately for us, though, a contrite Prince and his new girlfriend Farah managed to stuff the Sands back into the big magic hourglass where they belonged. The Prince also used his Sand-filled dagger to rewind the whole grubby affair and undo lots of damage that his actions had caused. Then he kissed Farah and went home to continue his princely activities.

Unfortunately, screwing around with time gets the attention of a huge black tentacle-horn-thing called the Dahaka, a sort of chronological library cop. It’s dispatched to give the Prince some what-for, and our hero has to skip town before this new nemesis can eat him up.  Thus begins the Prince’s life on the lam, and by all accounts it’s been a pretty unpleasant experience: every now and then the Dahaka will turn up and hurtle after him, getting a little closer every time. It would seem that only the Prince’s death will bring normalcy back to the timeline.

Finally, weary of the chase, the Prince seeks advice from a smelly old man who lives in a tent, knowing that unhygienic desert hermits are full of oracular knowledge. Old Man tells him that his fate is preordained: the Dahaka will kill him, and nothing can change that. Thus the Prince conceives of a new plan. He’ll travel to the source of all time, return to the past, and stop the creation of the Sands. If the Sands of Time never existed, he reasons, he won’t have been able to use them to mess up the timeline, so the Dahaka will have no beef with him and will go home.

Problem is, the Dahaka’s home is the Castle of Time on the Island of Time with the Empress of Time (yeah, I was serious when I said the game was written by talentless amateurs), so the Prince isn’t there for much … time before he hears familiar pounding footsteps behind him.

Being chased by a Dahaka makes you grumpy. At some point during his flight, the Prince managed to get some henna tattoos and a gothy new wardrobe. He also has blue eyes and an American accent now, like all Middle Easterners. He spouts moronic bad-dialogueisms like, “You will soon feel the edge of my blade!” Compare this to the wit of the admittedly somewhat foppish—but in a good way—Prince from Sands of Time and you’ll see how brutally the new writers raped this character. Indeed, to call the writers of this game one-lobed idiots gives a bad name to one-lobed idiots; considering that Ubisoft basically terminated the extremely gifted original writing team, it says something about how much value the company places on fiction.

This says more. One of Ubi’s head writers—uninvolved with Warrior Within—was recently asked if quality script writing was a fundamental part of elevating the art form of game development. His answer: “No.”

You don’t say.

In another move of staggering brilliance, the writers cut Farah from the story. The hilarious verbal repartee that these two bickering quasi-heroes shared (“I’ve never told that to anyone before,” “I’m not surprised; it’s the most childish thing I’ve ever heard”) was one of the especially bright points in Sands of Time. It was pretty clear that the original writers intended both to be present in any sequels. Plus, Farah was one of the better-written female characters in gaming.

Instead, they introduced two of the most offensively drawn and poorly written new female characters ever conceived by male game developers who can’t get laid. Doubt me? Check it. That costuming is pretty much accurate. Your new female nemesis Shahdee is even more shockingly uninspired than the rest of the story. In fact, I have little doubt that the small … minded jackass responsible for Warrior Within’s characters described Shahdee in one line in the design doc: “Shahdee is angry and wears a steel bikini cuz steel bikinis are sexy. And she’s, like, hot, because hot chix totally dig my mad phat skillz.” Kaileena, your mysterious seminude maybe-ally, another Middle Easterner with milky skin and green eyes, harbors her own share of poorly written malcontent. And of course the Empress of Time is a hot, barely clothed woman, perhaps intended as a personification of the proverbial hourglass figure (get it?). Warrior Within seriously exhibits some of the most offensively sexist portrayals of women in gaming that I’ve ever seen. I, a guy who is pro–hot woman, was offended.  Ubi set the games biz back again by hiring Cro-Magnon retards to write the sequel to a hugely selling franchise resurrection. The player will not care at all about any of these “important” new characters.

Moreover, the Prince, a returning hero who was much-loved, is simply not a likable character in Warrior Within. He was a bit of a ponce in Sands of Time, sure, but let’s remember that the man was also so genial he somehow managed to inspire Farah—who originally wanted to watch him die screaming—to fall in love with him. He also inspired players to like and identify with his character, a special challenge considering the setting of Sands of Time. Recall that it was the Prince’s hubris that unleashed the Sands in the first place; that and his obsession with pleasing a father who was already quite obviously pleased with him. That would have destroyed the world had the Prince not been given the opportunity to temporally undo his own blunder. Arrogance is very difficult for an audience to forgive, and yet we did, because the Prince was likable. In Warrior Within, he is a sullen, spoiled, obnoxious, bullying caricature, and you won’t give a damn if he lives or dies.

The acting, too, is godawful. The Prince sounds like he’s from Wisconsin and delivers his lines with Award-of-Suck–winning blandness. Shahdee, Kaileena, even the grunt-intensive Dahaka are equally uninspired. Warrior Within pretty much screams “we were too cheap to hire good writers and actors, so we had Raoul from Accounting (the team is French-Canadian) write the script, and the guys who fill our Coke machines said the lines.”

So the story is badly conceived and the characters are hideously written. Still, when it comes to a game, the gameplay is the really important factor, and Warrior Within has plenty of excellent gameplay.

It’s a Reverse Swirl

I played the PC version of Warrior Within, so I can’t really speak to any camera or control improvements among the assorted console versions. But my persistent gripes with Sands of Time for the PC were the clumsy perspectives and control issues that would so often cause me to fling myself into the void. While not eliminated altogether in Warrior Within, the keyboard and mouse controls are drastically improved.

The trick is that in most third-person games, the camera is locked to the character’s back. That wouldn’t work in PoP, where the camera needs freedom to wander, since you depend on its subjective field of view to see solutions to the diabolical jumping puzzles.  However, an unlocked camera by nature introduces control issues, since the position of the camera—your perspective on the game world—is not a constant as relates to the position of your character. In a nutshell, “W” does not always mean forward.

The problem is all but fixed in Warrior Within. “W” means forward from the perspective of the camera, not the perspective of the Prince. Same with “A” and “S” and “D.”  Furthermore, the irritating “swoosh return” blocked-camera effect is gone from Warrior Within—the camera, controlled by the mouse, will simply not go to places where it would be blocked.  While occasionally frustrating in tight spaces, it’s much less vexing than the vertigo of a constantly realigning camera position.

I cannot say enough about the new and incredibly more complex combat system, for which I originally had very low hopes. I suck at Killer Instinct, and my brain is too small and stunted to remember or execute in a timely manner combos of the Up-Up-Left-Up-Left-Kick-Left-Left-Kick-Right-Up-Punch-Kick-Left-Duck-Kick-Left-Right-Left-Up-Kick-Left-Jump variety, and I feared Warrior Within would play like that: the demo certainly led me to believe it would. Yet Warrior Within allows you to carry out insanely complex fighting combos with a minimum of effort.

You could quite easily clamber over an enemy, breaking his neck as you go, snatch his dropped sword, run up the wall, flip backward, land in a blades-out helicopter twirl to lop off some heads, then somersault away from any retaliation and hurl your secondary weapon into an oncoming menace. Most importantly, you could do all that in a preplanned manner; the fighting system is so fluid and so easy to execute that you can carry out extraordinarily complex assaults against multiple targets with only a handful of well-timed clicks.  It’s because just a couple of buttons do a lot of stuff, depending on the context—where you are, where you’re facing, what you’ve got, what’s around, and so forth. Never will you feel so cool fighting hand to hand as when you’re doing it in Warrior Within. You will need a responsive mouse with at least four comfortably placed buttons, but most gamers have that already.

Secondary weapons are a new addition, and one that I’d originally thought would add too much complexity to the fighting controls.  But the elegance of the system overcomes that. Possession of a #2 weapon is quite unnecessary. Many gamers may avoid them, opting instead for the Prince’s devastating strangulation and fatality maneuvers that can only be accomplished when he has a hand free.  Others may snatch them up for use as long-range ordnance but not employ them much in close combat. Fighting in Warrior Within is so flat-out awesome that I wish they’d included an arena style of gameplay, with customizable environments and enemies.

Speaking as a person who hates jumping puzzles, it’s odd that I love them so much in the Prince of Persia games. My grumbly brother, once a 3D animator, was originally drawn to Sands of Time because of the beautiful animations of the lead character when he executes solutions to these puzzles; the Prince has even more unique animations in this game. And though Warrior Within is much more combat-oriented and doesn’t offer dilemmas even remotely as baffling as Sands of Time, they’re still fun and engaging and make great use of the game engine’s skeletal animation.  Each animation is drawn by hand; there is no motion capture in Warrior Within. You’ll run along walls, swing on ropes, slide pirate-style down curtains, and basically use everything in the environment as your own personal jungle gym. They’ve also integrated combat into the environment to a slightly greater degree, though puzzles and fighting are still kept largely separate.

Making a triumphant return are the Prince’s powers of time control.  Originally available through the auspices of his stolen dagger, apparently the Prince can now rewind and rework time just because he’s so damn dark and grim and cool. He’s like a chroniscient ancient Middle Eastern Trent Reznor. As usual, you need to have some Sand in your possession to make even the most basic Rewind powers work, though in Warrior Within, it’s easier to get Sand—you’re in the Castle of Time, after all. It seeps out of dying enemies and can be found in many pieces of crockery that inexplicably clutter the halls of the palace. Generally the time powers are modified and polished, but in truth they haven’t changed much. It’s amazing, though, how necessary to the franchise they have become after just two games: should the next PoP title leave out the time control, I think gamers would abandon it in droves.

They’ve also tweaked the save system. Warrior Within is still very much a console port, so you cannot save whenever you like. Save points are much more common, however, and you’ll generally find a new one after ever major puzzle or combat sequence. You’ll certainly find one before and after every Dahaka event, during which the Dahaka turns up and chases after you for a while. These instances allow approximately zero margin for error, usually involving jumping puzzles that would be quite simple if time weren’t a factor. It’s nice that you can start over at the beginning of the chase sequence rather than enduring a long build-up every time. All in all, save points—which are represented by healing fountains rather than sand whorls in Warrior Within—are about three times as frequent. While I generally prefer the freedom to save whenever I like, in games like PoP it just wouldn’t work, and save points are common enough that it’s no big deal. One thing I do miss is that saving no longer affords you a glimpse into the future.  This was necessary in SoT because the puzzles were so incredibly difficult, but it was also a neat effect and I’m sorry it’s gone.

Finally, it’s considerably longer than its predecessor. Sands of Time was a 12-hour experience, give or take; they claim that Warrior Within is 24-plus hours, though my own experience was closer to 20. Still, it’s nice that they extended the play length from the original, which was too short, though I suspect that extension was easy to accomplish since Warrior Within makes no effort to be even remotely as complex as Sands of Time.

Attach Camera Lens. Add Vaseline.

Warrior Within’s visuals bring back the beautiful muzzy blur. This effect reminds me most of the film Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow, an experience that was to me like watching a dream. But Warrior Within, though it has its share of somnescence and general fuzziness, looks more like the video game version of Roman Polanski’s Repulsion. This is mostly because of the setting.

Whereas the Maharaja’s palace in Sands of Time was a colorful, luxurious artifice, in Warrior Within you’re visiting a place that has long since gone to seed. The vast majority of the game is spent in the Castle of Time, which looked great back in the day but looks like Fallujah in the present. Fortunately, you spend a lot of the game in the past, and it’s fun to see how the moss-covered ruins transform into a lavish golden pleasure garden when you are transported to the days of yore.

Most of your jaw-dropping on the Warrior Within graphics front will be related to the animations of the Prince, who looks even more amazing in this sequel. Though reskinned with his stupid tattoos and “I’m an angry goth rich kid” clothing, he is breathtakingly fluid and lifelike. His acrobatics and combat moves are astounding. One day they’ll find a way to combine the elegant fighting system and gorgeous protag animations of Warrior Within with the quality writing and terrifyingly good gameplay of Half Life 2, and we’ll have the perfect action game.

Ultimately, the graphics in Warrior Within are stellar and smooth at high resolution; I played through at 1600×1200 with everything and it was buttah, and my machine is definitely getting long in the proverbial tooth. There’s nothing to complain about here, and the developers did great work with a year-old graphic engine. Colors are far more muted and drab, but of course you spend most of your time in a ruined castle, so that’s to be expected.

Audio, however, is kind of a mixed bag. The clanks and clinks of swordplay, the soft ripple of a curtain as wind passes through it, the whoosh of drifting sand or the spatter of running water, and the mechanical clockwork of the game’s devious traps all sound excellent.  Alas, then, that the voice acting is so dreadfully bad and the musical score is a totally out of place hard rock thumpfest, complete with roaring guitars and drum solos. It’s as though Ministry were hired to design the soundtrack of the next Super Mario Brothers; the music and the game exist in totally different worlds.

One of the great strengths of Sands of Time is the way it is narrated, as a flashback a la Sacrifice.  Though you had to finish the game to see the clever intricacy and structure of the story, the writers and artists made clear that you are playing the game inside the corridors of the Prince’s memory.  Time, he says, is not a river flowing swift and true in one direction; Time is a torrent in a storm. SoT made it clear that the same is true for memory, which isn’t organized in a crisp linear fashion. That game was designed to look and sound and feel like … well, not to beat a dead horse, but like you’re playing a dream.  They cut a lot of that from Warrior Within. Not exactly a capital offense, but jarring all the same.

Warrior Without

Warrior Within is not a perfect game. But many—most—of its flaws are based in the inaccuracies associated with its absolute failure to remain faithful to its immediate predecessor. If it weren’t a Prince of Persia game, I’d probably be raving even more, and though the tone of this review may not seem ravey (maybe I take after my brother), despite its failings, Warrior Within deserves raves.

I just came off a review of Half Life 2, which received a superb score despite a story I considered so riddled with holes as to be utterly nonsensical. At the end of the day, though, Half Life 2’s gameplay, that evanescent “fun factor,” was off the charts. And in a game, gameplay is the most important part of the equation. We see this again and again: games are games. They mean something, but they have to be fun. I’ll take a badly written but fun game over a brilliantly written but flawed game any day.

Warrior Within’s script feels like it was written by a fourteen-year-old whose most advanced sexual experience was sneaking looks at his dad’s Playboys. A fourteen-year-old whose most complex imaginings involve being killed just after rescuing the prettiest girl in school from some terrible danger—dying at the moment he and the girl whisper blood-bubbled protestations of love for one another. A fourteen-year-old who never matured, who resents women, who devalues powerful narrative in favor of masturbatory adolescent fantasy, and who has never, ever, had an emotion beyond puddle depth. The writing is vomitous, the acting nauseating, the characters vile.

Warrior Within’s gameplay feels like it was tuned by industry luminaries of whom no more than a handful exist. Industry luminaries who recognized the need to sell games and tweaked the jumping puzzles to attract more potential purchasers while still respecting that portion of the franchise history. Industry luminaries who also saw the flaws in SoT—the redundancy in combat, the inordinate cruelty of some puzzles, the shortage of save points—and fixed them. The gameplay is without peer, the combat aorta-thrumming, the environments breathtaking.

Warrior Within is not a perfect game. In many ways, it stands as a badly written testament to exactly what is wrong with video games: sexism, teenage hormones, amateurish writing, clumsy franchise handling. But it’s entertaining. It’s incredibly entertaining. Oftentimes we game scholars, myself included (or especially), get lost in what the games need to mean. What they need to do. How they need to affect us. And we get lost in that for a good reason: games are still looked down on, held in contempt. They’re not viewed as the world’s first interactive art form; they’re viewed as a child’s playthings—something of which grownups who play should be ashamed. And so we are defensive of the medium we love.  But in so doing, we often lose sight of the fact that, as important as all that is, they are still games.

And Warrior Within is a great game. The End

The Verdict

The Lowdown

Developer: Ubisoft’s Montreal Studio Publisher: Ubisoft Release Date: December 2, 2004

Available for: Game Cube PlayStation Windows XboxPlayStation 2 

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System Requirements

Windows 98SE/2000/XP (only) PIII 1 GHz or AMD Athlon 1 GHz 256 MB RAM DirectX® 9-compliant graphics card (supported cards are NVIDIA GeForce 3/4/FX series (including 4MX) or ATI Radeon 7500/8500/9000 families or newer) DirectX 8-compliant sound card DirectX 9.0c (included on disc) 16X CD-ROM or 4X DVD-ROM drive 2 GB free hard disk space

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      Copyright © Electric Eye Productions.  All rights reserved.  No reproduction in whole or in part without express written permission.

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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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