Futurismic have my twenty fifth Blasphemous Geometries column entitled “Mass Effect 2 and Racial Essentialism”.
It’s quite a long piece as it is looking at, in my opinion, quite a broad problem with the way that works of genre engage with race and racism. Namely that by using relationships between different species to represent relationships between [...]
Entries Tagged as ‘Video Games’
March 3, 2010
BG 25 – Mass Effect 2 and Racial Essentialism
January 6, 2010
BG 23 – Redefining friendship: Facebook, MMORPGs and Dragon Age Origins
Futurismic have my twenty third (!) Blasphemous Geometries column entitled Redefining Friendship : Facebook, MMORPGs and Dragon Age : Origins. It deals with the capacity for well written computer characters to effectively stand-in for human players in what were once considered group activities and in particular how console RPGs like Dragon Age : Origins seem [...]
December 9, 2009
BG 22 – The Future is the Past : Assassin’s Creed II
Futurismic have my 22nd Blasphemous Geometries Column entitled “The Future is the Past”.
It’s kind of a thematic overview of the game Assassin’s Creed II and how that game relates not only to history but also to the concept of Sacred History via the use of prophecies and apocalyptic symbolism. It was a lot of fun [...]
October 14, 2009
BG 20 – Images of Heroic Slavery
Futurismic have my 20th Blasphemous Geometries Column.
One of the reasons why my column has shifted to a more wide-angled approach is because, while I have played a number of games recently that I’ve enjoyed (NHL 10, for example, is superb, as is Patapon), none of them have really been meaty enough to support a column. [...]
September 16, 2009
BG19 – Fear of a Transhuman Future : Zombies and Resident Evil
Futurismic have my nineteenth Blasphemous Geometries column.
It deals partly with the Resident Evil games but mostly with the evolution of the zombie genre. Originally, I was planning a much more expansive piece that also took in the games Dead Space and Prototype – as they also have a rather reactionary attitude towards the shifting conceptions [...]
August 19, 2009
BG 18 – The Iron Cage of Fantasy : World of Warcraft, City of Heroes, Fable II
Futurismic have the 18th edition of my Blasphemous Geometries video game column.
It was an interesting column to write as it marks the first piece of sustained thinking I have done on the Fantasy genre in a little while. I was pleased to note that while my politics seem to be drifting leftwards, my attitude towards [...]
July 22, 2009
BG 17 – Red Faction : Guerilla
Futurismic have my Blasphemous Geometries column about Red Faction : Guerilla.
This piece was slightly wild. I initially took as my inspiration Greil Marcus’ Lipstick Traces : A Secret History of the 20th Century (1989), one of my favourite pieces of writing about music. the first chapter of the book begins with a song-by-song and almost [...]
June 24, 2009
BG 16 – Mirror’s Edge : The Emptiness of the Short-distance Runner
Futurismic have my 16th Blasphemous Geometries column.
As a piece, it is a lot closer in style to the kind of criticism I have been producing for this blog. Hence the use of YouTube videos and a viewpoint that is a lot closer to the text of the game, rather than standing outside that text and [...]
