Category / Blasphemous Geometries

by Jonathan M

BG 27 – Fantasies of Mere Competence : Football Manager 2010

Futurismic have my latest Blasphemous Geometries column.

It is a development of some of the idea expressed in this column from a few months ago but rather than looking at Fantasy as an avenue for escapism, I decided to look at the more modest and mundane ways in which people aspire and escape.  A trend embodied in TV programmes like Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares and games like Football Manager 2010.

I’ve also decided to take a slightly different approach with next month’s column.  Recently, I have been using games as springboards to look at wider issues.  This is partly a result of my own game-laying experience of late which has seen me bouncing out of new games and returning again and again to games I have already written about like GTA IV, Mass Effect 2 and Dragon Age.  However, I think that it would be good for me to keep my feet on the ground with regards to writing about games so I have decided that next month at least will herald a return to a closer examination of one particular game.

by Jonathan M

BG 26 – The Changing Face of the American Apocalypse : The Modern Warfare and Bad Company Series

Futurismic have my twenty sixth Blasphemous Geometries column entitled “The Changing Face of the American Apocalypse : Modern Warfare and Bad Company”.

The column looks at the plots of the Call of Duty : Modern Warfare and Battlefield : Bad Company series and finds not only some interesting similarities but also a question that will be familiar to science fiction fans, namely how far can you go before lapsing into the fantastical?  The column considers how SFnal thinking is now absolutely central to the output of Western political think tanks.

by Jonathan M

BG 25 – Mass Effect 2 and Racial Essentialism

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 different races, religions, cultures and nationalities, works of genre are legitimising not only the idea that there are real differences between these social groups, but also the idea that it makes sense to infer something about someone based upon the colour of their skin or the kind of religious service they choose to attend.

by Jonathan M

BG 24 – We Are All Sheep : Avatar, Bayonetta and the Hypnosis of Low-Brow culture

Futurismic have my twenty fourth Blasphemous Geometries column entitled We Are All Sheep : Avatar, Bayonetta and the Hypnosis of Low-Brow Culture.  The column draws partly on some of the thinking I did for my recent Ozu piece and partly on some of the things I said about the Hugo awards last summer.

The piece was motivated by the intense and viscerally negative reaction I had to Bayonetta.  I hated it.  I hated it more than any game I have played in recent memory.  In fact, I hated it more than any cultural artifact I have recently rubbed my brain up against.  I was going to put together a hatchet job but then I took a step back and realised that my reaction to Bayonetta was no different to the one film critics have had against Avatar, and that my tendency to explain away the opinions of people who enjoy games like Bayonetta is disingenuous.  So, instead of saying that Bayonetta is low-brow or stupid, I thought I would put forward a way of looking at the process through which opinions are formed in the first place.

by Jonathan M

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 to be trying to do to MMORPGs what a previous generation of video games did to real-world sports.

by Jonathan M

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.

by Jonathan M

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.

by Jonathan M

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…

by Jonathan M

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.

by Jonathan M

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.