Fuck the Internet

Okay… the irony of saying “fuck the Internet” on a blog post isn’t lost on me, but bear with me. There’s a rant and a half coming your way right about now about, paradoxically enough, people moaning. However, I feel rather more justified in my meta-moaning than the whiny little sods I will be discussing throughout the next few paragraphs.

But first, a little history lesson, if you’ll indulge me for a sec.

My family had been online junkies since before the Internet was a widespread global phenomenon. An irregular “treat” for us was to be able to use our Atari with its mighty 300bps modem to dial up to a local bulletin board system, read some messages and maybe download some BASIC games to play. At the time, I thought this was incredily cool. Looking back, at the time, it was incredibly cool. I mean, being able to use your telephone line to dial into someone else’s computer and do stuff with it? Neat.

A few years later came CompuServe, which was a step closer to the “real” Internet, at the time still very much in its infancy for consumers. CompuServe offered a service that was essentially hundreds of these bulletin board services, called “forums” along with news, entertainment and real-time chat services. Again, it was something of a “treat” to be able to go online and look at stuff and to actually be able to communicate with other people. As a matter of fact, as a result of a message exchange between myself and another chap on the CompuServe Gamers’ Forum, ten levels that I had created for Wolfenstein 3D made their way onto the official Apogee “Super Upgrades” expansion pack for Wolf3D, netting me a cool $200. I still have a (now very faded) photocopy of the cheque as I thought that was so awesome.

A while into the “CompuServe Age”, I read an article in PC Format magazine discussing this new and interesting-sounding thing called the Internet. The article was awash with buzzwords like “telnet”, “FTP” and curious sounding things with lots of dots and coms in them. But it was still quite some time before CompuServe actually offered full Internet access.

Now here we are, some ten-to-fifteen years later. Web 2.0 in all its self-publishing, self-expressing, lower-case logo glory is upon us offering anyone with a pulse the opportunity to spill their guts on the Internet and share their innermost thoughts and feelings on a whole variety of topics.

This, on the surface, is a great thing. Never before have people had such an opportunity to self-publish anything they like – be it creative writing, academic research, odes to the fit girl in class 3B or simply waffly old bollocks like this place. Why, then, do so many people feel the need to use this great medium to batter down anything around them?

I have two recent examples of this, though these are by no means isolated examples. They are merely the most recent things where this issue has cropped up. Firstly, we have the “new Facebook”. Secondly, we have EA’s new game Spore. Let’s take these two things in turn.

First up is Facebook. Facebook is such a global phenomenon that I heard on the news this week (on the radio, how old-school of me) that they’re planning on making a movie (presumably of the docu-drama variety) on the site’s rise to success.

For the unfamiliar… actually, balls to that, even my Mum has a Facebook account. You all know what Facebook is. Let’s not forget that it’s a free service supported almost entirely by ads that anyone can sign up for and use and never have to pay a penny. It’s a social tool that’s allowed millions of people across the world to connect with one another and rediscover old friendships after many years, in some cases. In short, it’s a pretty marvellous thing that both Facebook themselves and numerous third parties keep adding new features to.

So recently Facebook redesigned their site, changing the way the functionality of the site works and, to me, making it rather more streamlined and clean. It also uses more of the browser window which, when you’re working on a 1920×1200 screen, is most welcome. They’ve obviously worked hard on this site redesign and are still tweaking things even as we speak – each time I log on I see some new little feature that makes navigation and use of the site even easier.

So how does the community at large respond? By creating “OMG 1 MILLION PEOPLE MUST JOIN THIS GROUP AND STAND UP FOR OUR RIGHTS! NEW FACEBOOK SUCKS!”. You’d think that Facebook had summoned the spirit of Hitler and then allowed it to rape all the world’s children before taking a chainsaw to them, while the shareholders sat in the background wanking and laughing. But no – they’ve done what any good website does every few years, they’ve had a refresh and a redesign – and, compared to many websites’ complete overhauls that I’ve seen over the years, this has been a fairly minor one in the grand scheme of things. You can still do everything you used to be able to, and more so in many cases.

So why bitch and moan? It escapes me. Do these people seriously think that getting a million people together in a group that is HOSTED ON THE FUCKING SITE THEY ARE COMPLAINING ABOUT – the site they aren’t paying a penny to support yet are happily cluttering up bandwidth with their photos and videos – is going to achieve jack shit? Why bother? Fuck the Internet.

Why bother complaining about the complainers? It makes me feel better. One may argue that all these people are doing is “making themselves feel better” also, but the fact is, it is Facebook’s prerogative to change their site as and when they want to – whether it is from the perspective of improving the users’ experience (they must be sitting around thinking “Those ungrateful bastards” right now) or from the perspective of increasing advertising revenue (which for a site that doesn’t make much money from its users is perfectly reasonable).

Next rant. Spore.

Spore’s a great game that came out this week. From Will Wright, creator of the Sim games (and the The Sims games, natch) it allows you to… again, I’m sure you all know about Spore already, so I’ll cut to the chase.

Spore ships with some security software by Sony called SecuROM. SecuROM is a system that is designed to protect discs against being copied and installed by hundreds of people… i.e. piracy. As such, it limits a purchaser of a copy of Spore to installing it on three separate machines. That’s not, as many people have assumed, three installations and then it’s all over… that’s three machines.

Who has three machines? How many people, apart from people with more money than sense, buy a new PC gaming rig often enough to make this an issue? I buy a computer roughly once every five to seven years and it serves me fine in that time, unless I want to run something like Crysis – which fortunately I have no interest in whatsoever.

EA released a statement quoting usage and activation statistics from the Spore Creature Creator, released some months prior to the full game. While Creature Creator’s stats may not necessarily reflect exactly the same userbase as Spore, the figures were telling. Most users activated the product on one computer. A few did it on two. And about 1% tried to activate on more than three. I’m often loathe to believe company hyperbole, but in this case those figures certainly seem a reasonable assumption in my experience at least. I don’t think I know anyone who has more than one computer for gaming purposes. Sure, I know some guys who have PCs for gaming and Macs for professional/creative work, but even then, that’s still only two computers.

The nonsense with Spore went way overboard. Amazon.com was bombarded with over 1700 one-star reviews of the game, very few of which commented on the game at all. Several users bandied the word “draconian” around and many promising to go and pirate the game rather than purchase it – indeed, the main argument that many people were throwing around was the fact that somehow Spore had been leaked, cracked and torrented even before the game’s street date, thereby, to these people, making the DRM pointless.

The fact is, were there not such wanton levels of piracy on the Internet today, these measures wouldn’t be necessary – and the people on Amazon who claimed that pirating the game was “making a stand” are simply adding to the problem, not making a point. EA’s a big company and they have to be seen to be doing something more than plugging their fingers in their ears and going “lalalala” on the subject of piracy. While DRM clearly doesn’t work as it should at present, at least it represents a symbolic gesture on EA’s part to help tackle the problem.

The fact is that Spore’s actually a great game, but all this nonsense has put lots of people off playing it, for completely unjustified and ill-informed reasons. It’d be lovely if just, for once, people on the Internet could sit down, appreciate what someone else has done for them, pay for it if it’s a paid-for service (like Spore) and appreciate it being free if it’s a free service (like Facebook) without bitching and moaning any time some tiny little change to the “norm” comes along. I’m sure there’s something Orwellian in there somewhere…

Anyway. Rant over. Assuming no-one else pisses me off my next few posts will be about Spore and other games I’m playing at the moment!