SWAT 4 Review

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            SWAT 4

Review by SteerpikeApril 2005

Fun with Advertising

I worked in advertising for many years before moving on to my current career. In addition to utterly crushing my soul, it taught me discernment in the matter of quality creative across all media. While there’s no doubt that a healthy dollop of luck is involved, a game studio’s ability to reliably and consistently produce good creative is a major factor in its survival probability. This is why Irrational Games is in high summer while studio after studio goes gentle into the good night.

An ignorant person might accuse Irrational of creative retardation, because it has become well-known for gobbling up existing franchises and releasing new sequels. This started with System Shock 2 and will carry on with the upcoming Bioshock. Tribes Vengeance is another example. The trend continues here in SWAT 4—these games spun off from the Police Quest franchise, owned by Sierra.  But Irrational has also demonstrated its ability to produce excellent original creative with Freedom Force. Even so, the grouchy might claim that Irrational needs someone else’s cleverness before they can produce.

The grouchy are in error.

I was enjoying SWAT 4—the first of the franchise that I’ve ever played—but it wasn’t until the middle of the game that I came to really admire it. This is due not so much to how good it is, though it’s quite good; it’s because one of the best print ad campaigns I’ve ever seen appears during a mission in a dot.com office. Here is a campaign that will never run, created for a fictional company, used as nominal window dressing for a mission so lengthy and so complex that I suspect 93% of gamers won’t even notice it … and yet there it is. Irrational is not lacking in the creative department, licensed franchises or no.

The nation’s Special Weapons and Tactics units are the ones who deal with truly deadly police encounters, and in SWAT 4 you get to command a team (called an element) of the best, making the city safe for taxpayers one barricaded psycho at a time. SWAT 4 does a very good job of making you think and act like a SWAT cop—working in extraordinarily dangerous conditions with highly unpredictable opponents, helpless innocents, and exactly zero margin for error. Overall, this is another success for Irrational, with just a few problems marring an otherwise top-notch shooter.

Keepin’ it Real

SWAT 4 and Tribes Vengeance both use versions of the Unreal engine, apparently sufficiently modified by Irrational to warrant a new “Vengeance Technology” moniker. Unreal is an amazingly versatile engine—actually it’s more of a complete game-development environment than a 3D renderer—but it may not have been the best choice for SWAT 4.

The fact is Unreal 2.0 is getting a bit long in the tooth. Graphics in SWAT 4 aren’t exactly subpar, but they’re noticeably inferior to some alternatives. Minor tearing, seaming, and collision problems plus modest polygon counts contribute to the vague but persistent sense that SWAT 4 would have been a lot better if it had used Half Life 2‘s Source engine. Add to this the very peculiar decision to implement only token Havok physics and you have a game that manages to simultaneously seem both modern and dated.

Meanwhile, the sound is awesome, and the chief reason for its awesomeness is the extraordinary talent of Eric Brosius, who joined Irrational after Looking Glass fell apart in 2000. Brosius is one of the most incredibly gifted sound designers ever to grace gaming, able to manipulate player emotions like so much Silly Putty. His sound design is responsible for the choking suspense of the Thief games, the desperate terror and loneliness of System Shock 2, the operatic melodrama of Tribes Vengeance, the goofball cheer of Freedom Force, and now the gritty urban intensity of SWAT 4. The trick with this game’s audio is the fine line between enough and too much, and as usual Brosius hit it on the nose.

Like a Heavily Armed Village Person

SWAT 4 doesn’t follow a linear storyline (sorry, Jen); each mission is a vignette, a sort of Cop-land novella with no bearing on the others. It’s not the SWAT team’s role to investigate crimes or close cases. They go where other cops fear to tread, pummel the bad guys, and then it’s Miller time, so a multimission narrative would have been contrived. These ministories also allowed the developers to throw in an assortment of environments and mission types without the extreme variance jarring us out of the game.

You get a basic overview from Dispatch prior to each mission, then the element leader (that’s you) gives the team a more detailed briefing on the situation. If there is corollary intel such as a 911 call, you can play that as well. Clues are very subtly embedded in the briefings, so it’s imperative that you listen carefully. Planning is an important part of SWAT 4, though not to the level of Ghost Recon or Rainbow Six. Here you listen to the briefing, decide on an entry strategy, select equipment for the team and go.

The equipment list is varied enough to give plenty of options without being ridiculously huge. Element members carry a primary and secondary firearm, some tactical equipment, and breaching tools for getting past recalcitrant doors. You can equip each officer individually, load one of several presets, or create and save your own. Equipment loadout is a major contributing factor to success. If Dispatch happens to mention that the suspects are wearing gas masks, for example, there’s little reason to burden your element with teargas, while armored suspects will just chuckle at hollow-point rounds.

Depending on the level of difficulty you’ve chosen, you must achieve a minimum score in order to proceed to the next mission. Points are awarded for following procedure and achieving objectives. They’re subtracted for un-SWATish acts such as failing to report an injured civilian or shooting a fellow officer. The nice thing is that you can choose the difficulty prior to each mission, and the “easy” level has no minimum score—you’ll definitely be allowed to proceed unless you or a hostage gets killed during the mission, though that happens a lot even on the easy level.

There is no in-mission save, but in SWAT 4 it’s really okay.  Allowing you to save within a mission would screw up the game. And though I can guarantee that you’ll be playing some missions over and over again, it’s just … not irritating. Perps and hostages are placed randomly but logically inside each mission, and honestly the game manages to stay fun no matter how many times you’ve done a level.

SWAT is the neurosurgeon of law enforcement: a single tiny error triggers the nightmare scenario. The death of a hostage means automatic failure, even if it’s only indirectly your fault, so naturally you have to be very careful about using force. The game gives you an enormous appreciation of how hard this job is, how careful SWAT needs to be, weighing each pull of the trigger even when time is a factor. When SWAT makes a mistake, people die. SWAT is therefore not allowed to make mistakes. Ever.

Which is part of the savor of this game, and what makes it so challenging—there’s a huge dichotomy of intent in that you control a team of deadly force warriors who have to be very, very careful about using deadly force. To reduce the likelihood of accidents, SWAT teams must cuff and report everyone they encounter, even the innocent. Bystanders don’t always get that “on the ground, hands in the air” applies to them as well, but it’s your job to restrain them, even if it means using a taser to do it. You’re also supposed to arrest suspects, not kill them. To aid you in these tasks, the game offers an assortment of nonlethal weapons designed to hurt or disorient.  But there’s that dichotomy again: using them over real guns is tantamount to playing Go Fish with your element’s lives.

Criminals don’t generally employ beanbag ammunition and don’t need to follow police procedure. Pointing a can of pepper spray at a felon armed with an AK-47 is a huge risk. Perps are rarely in a hurry to surrender if it’s a choice between killing a cop or going to prison. Points are deducted if you kill without provocation, because you’re only allowed to use lethal force if you believe lives are in danger—but you usually have less than a second to make that decision, and it’s easy to get it wrong. It’s also easy, very easy, to mistake a bystander waving his arms in terror for a suspect brandishing a pistol. So the less-lethal versus regular-guns dilemma is a major issue.

Less-lethal solutions are really not very effective, and flaws in the positional damage system make using live ammo to incapacitate rather than kill very difficult. In the real world, SWAT teams will cheerfully shoot a suspect in the leg to disable him. You can theoretically do the same in SWAT 4, usually without penalty. But suspects often won’t surrender after being shot, even multiple times, and many manage to sprint away with a bullet lodged in their knee. Worse still, shooting a suspect in the leg or shoulder is almost as likely to kill him as a shot to the head, which is pretty ridiculous. I once shot a suspect in the leg four times, shouting for him to surrender throughout, and he still didn’t; the fifth bullet killed him. I guess in SWAT 4 many humans keep vital organs in their femurs.

Of course, positional damage works brilliantly for your character.  If you get shot in the leg, you hobble around for the rest of the mission; take one in the arm and you can’t aim for anything. I have no doubt that Irrational tried to implement positional damage on suspects, but they didn’t go far enough. If this is a realistic simulation of SWAT activity, then that realism should extend to the fact that shooting a suspect in the foot is always a nonlethal attack and that a seriously injured suspect is almost certain to surrender when ordered.

Zipcuffs: Not Just for Kinky People

You’d think that controlling a squad of four guys plus yourself in real time with no margin for error would be a logistical nightmare of hot keys and wild clicking. Luckily, Irrational came up with a graceful, elegant system that makes element control easy and pleasurable.  They also included a bunch of interface paradigms from old SWAT games in case you like those better.

Your five-man element is broken into two teams of two plus yourself and color-coded accordingly. You can switch between colors with the touch of a button. Even very complex orders can be managed with just one or two clicks thanks to a command menu whose options vary based on where your crosshair is pointed. Also, the most logical command for any given context is just a spacebar away, meaning you don’t have to conjure the command menu to give quick orders. Robust key-mapping aids the process, but even so I recommend a good five-button mouse, because things happen fast in SWAT 4 and it helps to consolidate your buttons. The game has a nice tutorial that guides you through the basics, though I wish it had included more on SWAT procedure.

You can open view ports to the helmet camera of any officer, effectively letting you see what they see. You can also issue commands through these ports, though you don’t directly control any officer other than yourself. In some missions, snipers will position themselves at strategic locations and radio in if they see a suspect—then it’s up to you whether to take the shot.

The element’s AI is pretty solid and their aim is incredible, befitting a SWAT team. They do ignore commands sometimes, and they have difficulty executing a series of unrelated instructions. Also, they occasionally don’t take the most expeditious route to their intended destination.  Overall, though, you can trust your element to do its job and keep you safe. More than once they popped a guy who was about to kill me, often dropping him before I even realized I was in danger. The one thing they don’t seem to do is use their secondary weapons, and you can’t tell them to switch.

It’s harder to judge the quality of enemy AI, because encounters in SWAT 4 tend to be extremely fast and involve a lot of shouting but very little gunfire—your element understands that killing is a last resort. Most of your time is spent locking down cleared areas and scouting your next move, knowing that multiple suspects could be lurking behind any door. I’ve observed suspects do a lot of realistic stuff when they see the element—run away, seek cover and return fire, shout to their friends, even shoot at hostages. There are no glaring failures in AI, and more than once perps exhibited problem-solving intelligence like getting the drop on the element by circling around and sneaking up behind us, so overall I’ll say it’s solid.

Levels were designed in consultation with a former SWAT commander and show excellent attention to detail. The environments and objectives are well thought out, and the specifics of the mission rightly impact your strategy. You can just crash right into a serial killer’s appropriately Silence of the Lambs-ish house because he’s busy torturing a victim and wasn’t expecting you anyway. Meanwhile, a botched robbery at a diamond wholesaler is a nightmare of metal detectors, locked vaults and labyrinthine cube farms, not to mention heavily armed and armored suspects very much aware of your presence. Overall level design is superb, varied, and very challenging. The one common thread in all of the missions is that if you ever get complacent and start treating the game like a normal shooter, you’ve already failed.

SWAT 4 includes tools to make your own missions by altering the specifics and objectives of existing maps. I think there’s also an editor buried somewhere in the file system—there usually is in Unreal-powered games—but I couldn’t find it. Once you wrap up the game, it’s fun to try the various missions at different difficulties and with different criteria for success.

Finally, SWAT 4 also includes a multiplayer component through GameSpy. If you loathe the obnoxious and intrusive GameSpy Arcade utility as much as I do, you may not find this feature particularly tantalizing. Still, multiplayer games are available and very well-executed.  Multiplay in SWAT 4 is a cooperative team effort not dissimilar to Counterstrike. I don’t believe we’ll see a huge SWAT 4 community online, because it will be unable to compete with UT2K4 and other games more well-known for multiplay. It certainly deserves more attention that it’s likely to get. Hopefully Irrational will release some additional single-player levels to keep the game fresh.

No, It’s Not Like the Movie

Personally, I tend to like the idea of games like SWAT 4 more than the actual execution. I lack the patience for overly tactical shooters and find most team command tools obtuse and frustrating.  Not so in SWAT 4—it has probably the best interface I’ve seen for controlling a team of AI-driven cohorts. Perhaps by the time SWAT 5 turns up, we’ll have a really good mechanism for issuing verbal commands via headset. Even without such frosting, SWAT 4 is very immersive and an elegant play experience.

This game should resonate with a very wide audience, and it deserves the widespread praise it’s enjoying. SWAT 4 is tactical enough that your play style will be drastically different from a normal shooter, but it’s not so ridiculously tactical that they forgot to include a game with the game. You will repeat missions many, many times, but, as I’ve already said, it somehow isn’t frustrating—and it makes the 14-mission single-player campaign seem longer. In many ways, SWAT 4 strikes the perfect balance between action, tactics, and challenge.

There’s a one-level demo floating around out there, and I advise you to try it out before buying this game, just to make sure that this is the sort of thing you like to play. The demo mission is a barricade-hostage situation at an auto shop, and it’s probably the worst and clumsiest mission in the game, so bear that in mind while you play and don’t judge too harshly. Still, it’ll give you an idea of what to expect from the whole package.

I really liked SWAT 4. This is a solid offering that should appeal to a wide audience. I’m playing Stolen at the same time, and though both are tactical action games, Stolen is riddled with flaws while SWAT 4 delivers the goods. I’m taking points off for so-so graphics, problems with positional damage, and a very weak Havok implementation, but the truth is these flaws can’t seriously tarnish what’s destined to be remembered as one of the best tactical shooters yet. The End

The Verdict

The Lowdown

Developer: Irrational Games Publisher: Vivendi Universal Release Date: April 5, 2005

Available for: Windows

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System Requirements

Windows 98/ME/2000/XP (Windows 2000 with Service Pack 3, Windows XP with Service Pack 1 or later) Celeron 1.2 GHz or AMD Athlon 1.2 GHz 256 MB RAM 2 GB free hard disk space DirectX 8.1 compatible audio support nVidia GeForce 2 (MX 200/400 not supported) with 32 MB or ATI Radeon 8500 with 64 MB, with Microsoft DirectX 9 driver installed (nVidia GeForce 4 Ti (not MX) with 128 MB, ATI Radeon 9500 with 128 MB, with Microsoft DirectX 9 driver installed recommended)

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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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