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 to be trying to do to MMORPGs what a previous generation of video games did to real-world sports.
Category / Video Games
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 to write but not nearly as much fun as playing Assassin’s Creed II, which is easily one of my games of the year. Particularly impressive is the way that the game’s Renaissance Venice manages to capture the same duality as classic Horror film Don’t Look Back. Go one way and it’s towering churches and magnificent palazzos. Turn another and it’s sordid and cramped little streets.
BG 21 – Why Moral Choices in Video Games Are No Longer Fun
Another pair of fortnights, another new column! Futurismic have my 21st Blasphemous Geometries column entitled “The Mechanics of Morality : Why Moral Choices In Video Games Are No Longer Fun”.
It is a little bit longer than my usual BG columns but I felt that I had quite a bit to say about this issue. I am particularly proud of what I am calling The Clarkson Effect :
In order to be fun, transgressive behaviour requires the existence of a strong moral code to transgress against. However, when the transgressive opinions and behaviour become an accepted and recognised way of being, the behaviour ceases to be transgressive and thereby ceases to be fun.
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. So, in search of greener critical pastures I’ve been playing more Big Action games than I normally would and I was struck by how utterly unsympathetic the characters all are. This is something that also occurred to Charlie Brooker in his recent Gameswipe programme. As a result, I decided to try and work out why it was that these characters were so profoundly unlikeable and I discovered certain similarities with the real world…
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 of identity found in transhumanism – but I decided instead to focus my analysis a bit more.
District 9 (2009) – Stand By For Level 3
Summer 2009 saw the birth of an interesting piece of terminology. Reflecting the success of titles such as Iron Man (2008), Terminator Salvation (2009) and the Transformers series, “robots hitting each other” has become a short-hand way of referring to the kind of shallow and crassly commercial genre film-making that is currently dominating Hollywood release schedules. Films not merely unintelligent but actually hostile to thought. Films designed to eliminate critical distance through the sensorial onslaught of bloated running times packed with explosions, violence and spectacle. Films that are the cinematic equivalent to the US using loud music to drive Manuel Noriega out of the Vatican embassy during the invasion of Panama. Given a cultural climate in which Hollywood is essentially using psychological warfare against its own customers, it is only natural that many of us should yearn for something more. Ever since the first trailers dropped, Neil Blomkamp’s District 9 has presented itself as a summer film with that little something extra : Science fiction that rises above robots hitting each other to become genuinely thought provoking and intelligent. However, the reality of District 9 is that what ideas it has are used up in the first twenty minutes, after which the film collapses into a mire of clumsy metaphors, poorly written characters and the kind of plot you would find only in the most hollow-skulled of video games.
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 escapism has mellowed hugely. There was a time when I considered escapism to be a cowardly and childish retreat from the real world, but my views on it have changed markedly.
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 line-by-line examination of the music of the Sex Pistols and I was struck, as Marcus was, by the enduring power of the opening line of Anarchy in The UK : I am an Antichrist, I am an Anarchist. That desire to destroy and reject everything struck me as central to a proper understanding of Red Faction : Guerilla. But then I came up with the idea of the idea of a suicide bombing simulator and was amused by the similarities and I let that Idea simply carry me home.
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 using it to illustrate more abstract ideas. I’m not sure if I’ll be sticking to this style for Blasphemous Geometries in future. I’ve decided to focus on a game per column but quite how each game will take me is difficult to predict.
BG 15 – GTA IV : Exploring the Mundane
Futurismic have my fifteenth Blasphemous Geometries column.
It is not only the first of the columns to appear under the new direction the column has taken, it is also my first piece of video game criticism. I had been looking forward to writing this piece for a little while and when I finally got round to writing it, I was surprised at how pleasant and natural an experience it was to play a game and think about it critically. The more I played the more aware I became of where Grand Theft Auto IV fits into the history of game design.
Having filed the column it occured to me that I had left out one very obvious example of the mundane in video games… Shenmue.
Ruthless Culture 