Someone might want to place a call to former Senator George Mitchell, so he can get a jump on this before this little substance from Germany becomes as ubiquitous among gamers as steroids are among baseball players. After all, performance- enhancing drugs have permeated just about every sport, so why wouldn’t video games be next? To some people, Halo isn’t just a game, it’s a way to make a living. Heck, some people are even pushing to get competitive gaming into the 2008 Beijing Olympics. Clearly to some, gaming is serious business, and anything that can give players enough of an edge to wrack up a few more frags is worth looking in to. That’s where German company Tomarni stepped in, offering up “FpsBrain,” a pill they claim offers a “remarkable increase in perception and reaction capacities.” Meaning you twitch faster, and wrack up more kills. or so the company seems to claim.

But is this pill a slickly packaged snake-oil placebo, a safe way to win the day, or a potentially dangerous drug that’ll have gamers dropping like flies in the midst of heated LAN battle? MTV’s Multiplayer gaming blog seemed to think the question was worth a little digging. Aside from contacting the company’s CEO, the post’s author also brought in the expertise of a registered dietitian. This was all done via email, because, you know, us bloggers don’t know how to use a phone, or actually interact with another human being.

The findings?

“The ingredients in this product include amino acids, vitamins, minerals and caffeine,” she wrote in an e-mail yesterday. “[L-tyrosine] is also a precursory of several neurotransmitters, including dopamine, norepinephrine, and epinenphrine (also known as adrenaline), which are the body’s main stress related hormones. These hormones signal the heart to pump harder, increasing blood pressure, opening airways in the lungs, narrowing blood vessels in the skin and intestine to increase blood flow to major muscle groups. Vitamin B6 is a certain vitamin that is necessary for the conversion of L-tyrosine into neurotransmitters,” according to the emailed dietitian.

Funny thing is, what neither the dietitian nor the writer here seem to notice is the word “precursory.” Now, prehistoric plant and animal matter are precursors to oil, but the last time I tried shoving a bunch of ferns into the gas tank of my Nissan Sentra, I didn’t exactly make it to the local 7-11. Other obviousness oddly overlooked by MTV’s blogger include the fact that, because Tomarni is a computer case manufacturor, the likelihood of their employees concocting a new substance that significantly tweaks perception and reaction times with no ill affects on the user is somewhere just a hair this side of zero. It borders on comic-book logic: Sure, a teenage boy could create chemical webbing in his own home that rivals the tensile strength of steel while still remaining flexible and elastic. Right. It’s a wonder Stan Lee didn’t sell someone the Brooklyn bridge in the 1960’s. Yeesh.

The good news is that the pills don’t seem to contain much in the way of potentially harmful substances, either. Apparently, they only contain about 1/16 the caffeine of an average energy drink. Still, the pills seem to be a hit with gamers, at least in Germany, where they are currently sold. The company says they are in talks with the FDA to release sell FpsBrain in the US. Are gamers the nation over about to get a noticeable edge by popping a few of these pills? Not likely, even if they do work as advertised:

“Supplementing a diet with these products can lead to peaks and valleys of energy levels, which defeats the original purpose,” she said. “Generally, people who watch a lot of television and play video games may have a sedentary lifestyle. In addition to diet, exercise should be incorporated into one’s lifestyle to increase energy levels as well,” wrote the dietitian, via email.

I might add that for a quick caffeine and sugar high when your gaming needs it most, a Bawls will do the trick. Sure, it’ll leave you crashing a half-hour later, but at least tastes refreshing and has a snazzy blue bottle. You aren’t going to get that from a pill.

To many in the record business, the October 8 announcement that Nine Inch Nails mastermind Trent Reznor had ditched his record label, Interscope, may have come as a shock. After all, the industry was still reeling from Radiohead’s announcement, just a week before, that it would release its album, In Rainbows, online for a price to be determined by individual fans. But Reznor’s desire to be “free of any recording contract,” and “have a direct relationship with the audience,” should come as no surprise to anyone who has followed his actions for the last several months.

Last spring, Reznor released the “master tracks,” or the separate musical parts from many of his recent songs on his website, nin.com. He put up the master tracks for free, without any legal fine print about how they could be used or distributed. Since then, high quality fan-generated remixes have been appearing online on fan sites both new and old. In early September, the web master of one fan site decided to compile some of the better remixes into something resembling an album.

Dubbed The Limitless Potential, the 21-track collection of remixes was released for free at 9inchnails.com, and through the file sharing software BitTorrent, complete with printable artwork. The tracks were selected from over 200 fan-generated submissions, as part of a contest run through 9inchnails.com.

Matt Brink, the site’s 34-year-old webmaster, says he thought of the idea in March, after completing a redesign of 9inchnails.com, and realizing he was running a music fan site without any music on it. After listening to the innumerable fan mixes on another site, NINRemixes.com, he decided to solicit his own.

“I came up with the idea of a contest and just collecting the best [remixes],” said Brink. “So people don’t have to sift through all the mediocre and less than mediocre, just to get to the good ones.”

Brink says he and a handful of other fans from the 9inchnails.com forum listened to all the songs submitted, and voted for their favorites. The winner received a package of Nine Inch Nails merchandise from Hot Topic, while the runner up received a similar package from FactionNation.com, which until recently sold unofficial Nine Inch Nails shirts and stickers.

There has been no word from Reznor about whether he approves of this type of fan-generated content. But in a sense, by releasing master tracks without any restrictions, Reznor solicited these remixes as much as the webmaster that ran the contest.

For his part, Ben Youngs, winner of the fan-remix contest, who has two of his remixes on The Limitless Potential, thinks that fan remixes, no matter how good they are, won’t hurt sales of the official Nine Inch Nails remix CD.

“The Limitless Potential was popular because it was free,” said Youngs. “The official remix album will sell just fine because NIN fans are avid collectors, regardless of the content.”

But selling records might not be high on the list of Trent Reznor’s concerns. On-stage in September at a sold-out concert in Australia, he told fans to steal his records, because of frustrations over the high price of his albums in the country.

“Steal and steal and steal some more and give it to all your friends and keep on stealing,” said Reznor to thousands of screaming fans. “One way or another, these mother fuckers will get it through their heads that they’re ripping people off, and that’s not right.”

Regardless of how the record industry is affected by the recent wave of major artists leaving major labels, Youngs, who prefers remixing other artists to making his own music, thinks allowing fans a greater level of interactivity with the art they admire and enjoy can only mean good things for both artists and labels.

“Letting fans remix your music won’t make you any cash, but I think doing so is a wonderful way for a fan to really interact with the music,” said Youngs. “And if you don’t have fans, you won’t sell any CDs.”

Reznor’s last release for Interscope Records, scheduled for release in November, is an official remix album entitled Y34RZ3R0R3MIX3D. Thirteen of the 14 tracks will be mixed by professional musicians, but one, the third track, will be a fan-generated remix.

“The Pirate Robot Midget mix is a fan’s work,” wrote Reznor on nin.com. “I thought it was great, it filled a need and I asked permission to use it.”

Clearly Reznor is banking on fan-generated content to promote the next stage of his career, sans-record label. But it seems he still craves some control over content what fans do with his songs. According to Reznor’s latest post on nin.com, he will soon launch a Nine Inch Nails remix site of his own, at remix.nin.com.

***

Next up: Enough of this music shit. Onward and upward to a look at the cultural relevance of video games.

2007 is turning out to be a hell of an eventful year for the record industry. In April, EMI announced a deal with Apple to sell music without copy protection software, otherwise known as DRM, allowing iTunes users to port their purchases to other players. In August, another major record label, Universal, announced its own plans to sell music without the constraints of copy protection, with the help of Google. Finally, last month, Amazon announced a public beta of its Amazonmp3.com store, which sells 2 million songs, from 180,000 artists, all without copy protection as well.

It seemed like the record industry was finally hearing the message that placing restrictive software on purchased music does little or nothing to hinder piracy, while it goes a long way to alienate and otherwise annoy the people who are still happy to pay for music. But with Radiohead’s announcement last week that the band would release their next album digitally,without a record label or a fixed price, threw established notions about music distribution and sales right out the window, garnering the band a hell of a lot of press in the process.

As long as Radiohead’s In Rainbows isn’t completely awful, it’ll likely be a huge success as a marketing tool for their next tour, which is where all the money is really made these days anyway. And for fans who really want to hold music product in their hands, the band promises a deluxe box set of In Rainbows, early next year, for a whopping $82. Clearly the band is still interested in pushing product. But they do deserve credit for trying something new in an industry that’s been in sore need of innovation since well before the days of Napster.

But the smaller labels that have been doing smart things with the Internet and music for years deserve an equal amount of credit, if not more, for putting fresh ideas in the minds of both corporate-types and consumers, years before any band the size of Radiohead thought to take the plunge and try something “new.” Oregon-based Positron! Records is one such label, which years ago devised a simple and smart way to sell both downloads and traditional CDs. And by releasing all its music under Creative Commons, and embracing file sharing, Positron! has opened its arms to the traditional enemies of the music biz.

Founded in 1998 by musician Chris Randall of the band Sister Machine Gun and his wife Lisa,Positron! Records sells music on traditional CD, and
electronically through online stores such as iTunes, as well as directly from the label’s web site. The novelty? When a customer purchases a CD from positronrectords.com for $15, they can instantly download a copy of the album –DRM-free– to listen to while their CD is shipped to them.

“You have the instant gratification of actually having the album and not having to rip it,” says Randall. “All you have to do is download it, and then a few days later you get your backup copy with the cover art and the liner notes and all that.”

Sounds simple and smart, right, so why isn’t every other label on the planet doing the same thing? After all, the common lament in the record biz is that CD sales are falling, while download sales are selling well, but not enough to make up for slipping sales of the CD. The Positron! method would be a great stopgap, enticing more people to purchase a physical CD, while digital sales (hopefully) catch up. And labels (justifiably) worried about young music fans increasing finding physical media (like a CD) irrelevant would do well to adopt a method like this. The more discs they can sell now, the more likely physical media will survive into the future. Because if an entire generation of fans grow up without the CD, its likely any form of physical media, and therefore any label’s ability to sell it, will go the way of the dinosaur.

Positron! may not have size and strength of the larger labels. But its quickness and intelligence allows it to adapt to the changing music industry faster than the lumbering industry giants. And those predatory music pirates lurking on the wilds of the Internet? You know, the big, mean, nasty song stealers that the RIAA is constantly going after? Randall isn’t too worried about them.

“There are people in this world that pay for things and people that try to get over. And the people of this world that try to get over are gonna get over no matter what you do,” said Randall. “So why fight it, you know?”

If there’s one thing that’s remained constant over the fifteen years or so that I’ve been wasting time on the Internet, it’s the over hyped notion that the medium would change the way we live for the better. And in a lot of ways, it has. But the big online advancements and advantages are always just over the horizon, while the crap on the web gets deeper every day we slog through it. At no time in my life was this more apparent than this summer, while I was interning at Ziff Davis Media, publishers of, among other things, PC Magazine.

Don’t get me wrong. I had a blast there; the people were great. In fact, I’m still freelancing for them. But when you become a tech journalist, particularly in the consumer field, you get sucked in to press events that on some level are meant to be entertaining, but often tend to be more frightening than funny. And the worst part is, corporations now seem to think everyone should be in on this consumerism-masquerading-as-entertainment bandwagon, and have taken to hocking their wares via web-based reality shows that are really nothing more than one giant commercial.

Panasonic’s “Living in HD” campaign kicked off this summer. You can read about how frighteningly ridiculous the press event was here, or click that obnoxious picture. But essentially, the idea is that Panasonic will be giving away $20,000 in Panasonic HD equipment, including TV’s, cameras, computers and the like, to as many as 100 families. They’re going to film these families, and have them film themselves “living in HD,” and eventually have none other than Brett Ratner, of X-Men 3/Rush Hour fame shame, to edit it all into a “film” that will no doubt make it look like Panasonic’s expensive HD equipment will solve all the world’s problems. The company has even gone so far as to hire on a couple of college professors to study how its products affect the families and surrounding communities. Are you nauseous yet? If not, go check out the footage of families already up at livinginhd.com. Almost every single person seems to be white, and they’re all middle class. But I guess that makes sense, because according to Panasonic’s VP, this utopia-ushering tech that will solve all your problems can be had for “as little as $3,000.” The revolution will, it seems, be monetized.

Not to be outdone in bad taste, clothing retailer J.C. Penney produced a series of web-based reality programs for their back-to-school campaign dubbed “Flip TV.” Hiring the most annoying pair of blond twin hosts/designers this side of Nelson wasn’t bad enough, apparently. The premise: Kids from different generic cliques, like “Ballers” and “skaters,” are forced to spend a week hanging out with and dressing like their polar opposites. Aside from being a thinly veiled showcase for J.C. Penney’s fall teen line, the show also assumes all teens fall into one of four categories, and that they all hate each other. Forced integration aside, the episodes perpetuate stereotypes. All the kids in the show fall cleanly into a specific, predetermined niche, and the fact that the different groups dislike each other simply because they are different is hyped up and seems to be wholly acceptable behavior. J.C. Penney: Bringing the causes of Civil Rights abuses and the wars in the Middle East to a whole new generation, just to sell some jeans.

Thankfully, there are still interesting non-corporate things happening on the Web. A good example is the new search engine Antstorm. Now before you get your nipples twisted over how the last thing we need is another search engine, shut up and keep reading for a few seconds. The idea behind Antstorm is to make it easy for people to save their “tracks,” while researching complicated subjects. So instead of searching sites, at Antstorm you’ll be searching other people’s (hopefully fruitful) searches on complicated subjects. Antstorm puts Google ads on your track pages, and lets you donate the generated revenue to the charity of your choice. That’s only a few pennies here and there, but if the site takes off, it’ll generate millions of dollars to the charities its users designate. I’ve certainly heard worse ideas. Will it take off? The odds are certainly against it, considering the amount of Internet ventures that launch and flop every day. But there’s a small chance, a hope that something of substance can survive and thrive on an Internet increasingly commercialized into inanity. As always, the promise of the ‘net is that it allows people with little or no money the opportunity to be heard as loudly as corporate giants. So long as net neutrality legislation isn’t completely shot down, that hope will remain.

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Over the coming weeks, I’ll continue to bring you the best and worst of the web, and the larger world of technology that’s forcing its way into every crevice of our lives, like it or not. I may be a tech junkie, but I’m also a natural cynic, so expect a (hopefully) intelligent examination of the political and social implications of the ones and zeros invading our politics, our culture, and our economy. Next on the Beyond Wires agenda will likely be a look at how the US Government may now classify you as a “hacker,” for simply using a peer-to-peer file sharing program like Limewire or Kazaa.