Boot up your computer, power up your dial-up modem and get ready to become a Faceminer in an alternative-history’s dotcom boom.
Ah, 1999. Existentialism flooding the cinemas, the UK introducing a minimum wage, a fear of the millennium bug rampaging the newspapers and Steps in the UK music charts. Simpler times. Back then we only thought that capitalism and computers were going to destroy society, but now I think we’ve all come to acknowledge that it’s the course we’re on. Faceminer looks back at that odd time with the cynical eyes that most of us have donned, it takes Bostrum’s Paperclip Problem and applies it to something more topical than ever: Facial Recognition.
Obviously, I’m going to touch on a couple of spoilers here, although nothing that you won’t have already cracked open within an hour or so of having Faceminer running on your computer. However, it is more than was apparent to me when I was simply cruising around the recent Develop: Brighton Indie Expo where I simply, briefly played it as a humble idle/automation title.
In its purest, simplest, starting form it all starts off with a faux-desktop complete with a couple of desktop icons. You’ll open up your Faceminer software, which’ll offer up a tutorial and also open a few other windows. These windows show your budget, your upcoming bills and your computer’s resources (such as its memory use). You’ll have access to an upgrade storefront and there’s also the interface you’ll use for picking clear images of faces in exchange for funds. The idea here is simple, you go through bundles of pictures that are taken from CCTV, criminal records, employee databases and more, and click on the ones with the clearest imagery. It’s simple and effective, and the idea is that you’re training a machine with simple human actions, that happen to pay out incredibly well.
As I said earlier though, this is an automation game. You’ll very quickly gain the ability to automate a program which can click the faces for you, but, computers weren’t built like they are now… so you’ll need to plug in more RAM, get more computing power and then… well, you’ll need to cool the computer so it doesn’t overheat. Add to that your climbing power bill, requiring you to correctly identify even more faces and… well, you can see where this is going. Soon enough the scaling becomes so fast that you’re not even thinking about clicking faces anymore. About 2-3 hours later you’re, as you might expect, at either the end of time or the premature heat-death of the universe, and your run is complete.
Faceminer does a couple of things different to its contemporaries. For a start, you receive goofy emails and it has an amazing soundtrack, however, critically, it comes with both story mode and infinite mode, which gives you a few dozen hours more gameplay than your run of the mill incremental experience.
Faceminer is available now for PC, via Steam.
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