Category / Series

by Jonathan M

BG 39 – Don’t Take It Personally, Babe, It Just Ain’t Your Story: High School, Privacy and Blended Identity

Futurismic have my latest Blasphemous Geometries column.

This month’s column is about Christina Love’s latest indie game Don’t Take it Personally, Babe, It Just Ain’t Your Story, which can be downloaded for free on a variety of platforms.

Set in a weirdly Japan-ised American Highschool in 2027, the game explores issues of identity and social media.  As I suggest in the column, the game is best played as a companion piece to Love’s previous game, the equally excellent Digital: A Love Story, which I wrote about a little while ago. Together, the two games tackle the process of putting oneself online and interacting with other online souls from quite starkly diffing perspectives.

PS: In the article, I mention a paper by Andrea Baker called “Mick or Keith: blended identity of online rock fans”, it can be downloaded (for free) HERE.

by Jonathan M

BG 38 – Sucker Punch: Video Games and The Future of the Blockbuster

Futurismic have my 38th Blasphemous Geometries column.

The column is one part review of Zack Snyder’s Sucker Punch to one part examination of the nature of blockbusters to one part analysis of trends in popular culture and the way in which video games are coming to replace super heroes as the blockbuster genre medium of choice (hence the length):

Sucker Punch mirrors the growing intertextuality of the video game experience by having Baby Doll shift seamlessly between the reality of the game, the reality of the brothel and the reality of the insane asylum. However, what makes Sucker Punch such an interesting film is not the fact that it displays an impressively detailed understanding of video game aesthetics, but rather the way in which it uses these images and techniques to attempt to create a cinematic effect.

by Jonathan M

BG 37 – The American Dream is SPENT

Futurismic have my thirty seventh Blasphemous Geometries column.

Entitled “The American Dream is SPENT: Two Visions of Contemporary Capitalism”, the column looks at two different browser-based business simulation games and shows how, despite both operating on the assumption that capitalism is a functional rules-based system, the games use their different depictions of that system to produce withering critiques of contemporary capitalism.

by Jonathan M

The Chimpanzee Complex… Stripp’d

Gestalt Mash have the first issue of my new column Stripp’d!

Stripp’d is devoted to independent and/or translated series of comics and graphic novels.  The aim is to celebrate the diverse ways in which different comics, manga, graphic novels and sequential art approach ideas from the genres of science fiction, fantasy and horror in an attempt to help open the field up to influences from other cultures and other forms of media.

For my first column, I decided to take a look at Richard Marazano and Jean-Michel Ponzio’s trilogy of science fiction graphic novels The Chimpanzee Complex. Originally published in French and translated by Cinebook, The Chimpanzee Complex is about the search for consolation in narratives of conspiracy.

by Jonathan M

Ooku: The Inner Chambers – Volume 5

Gestalt Mash have my fifth piece on Fumi Yoshinaga’s excellent Ooku: The Inner Chambers.

The fifth volume (the last one translated to date) of the series slows the pace down after the brisk historical jaunting of the previous volume. Again, the primary concern is the failure of the Shogun to provide the sort of leadership required to steer Japan through troubled times but Yoshinaga subtly shifts the emphasis of the book opening up whole new vistas. Indeed, while the previous volumes have been all about the need for the Japanese ruling elite to reflect the changed demographics of Japanese society, enough time has now passed that we are on (at least) the second generation of female rule. In Yoshinaga’s alternative Edo period Japan, women now have exclusive control over all aspects of society. This changes the power dynamic between the sexes and so presents Japanese culture with another ‘fact’ that it needs to reflect.

by Jonathan M

Ooku: The Inner Chambers – Volume 4

Gestalt Mash have my fourth piece on Fumi Yoshinaga’s alt-historical manga epic Ooku: The Inner Chambers.

Volume 4 shifts the timeline forward in order to see how later Shoguns fare with the task of managing a changing Japan.  By allowing us to see the ways in which these later Shoguns struggle to fill the first female Shogun’s sandles, Yoshinaga not only invites a more generous appraisal of the first Shogun, she also shifts the series register away from an explicitly feminist analysis of gender differences and towards a more general political analysis of the responsibilities that accompany power.

Oh… and the book ends on a spectacular cliffhanger!

by Jonathan M

BG 36 – Why Strategy Games Make Us Think and Behave Like Brutal Psychopaths

Futurismic have my thirty sixth Blasphemous Geometries column.

The column argues that the reason why we tend to swing to the right when we play games is because the video game interface changes the way we perceive the world.  Strategy games effectively make us see like a state and when we see like a state certain human values (like the cost of grand strategies in individual human lives) and concerns disappear but other values and concerns (such as stability of the international system and efficiency of government) appear to take their place.

The column draws quite heavily on the work of James C. Scott’s book Seeing Like A State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (1998) but I am much more willing to lend the state an agency of its own than Scott was in the context of that book.  One reason why I did this is because I read and wrote about Scott’s more recent book The Art of Not Being Governed (2010), which really does present the state as a class of  entity in its own right.

by Jonathan M

Ooku: The Inner Chambers – Volume 3

Gestalt Mash has my third piece on Fumi Yoshinaga’s alternate history manga Ooku: The Inner Chambers.

Following hot on the heels of the second volume in the series, volume three teases out a political conflict at the heart of the Shogun’s court.  A conflict in which the forces of conservatism battle the forces of social progress for control of both Japan and the mind of the Shogun.  Beautifully drawn, exquisitely written and awesome in the power of its insights into contemporary attitudes towards gender and sexuality, Ooku continues to be a fantastic piece of sequential art.

by Jonathan M

Ooku: The Inner Chambers – Volume 2

Gestalt Mash has the second of my pieces about Fumi Yoshinaga’s excellent Ooku: The Inner Chambers.

Having introduced us, in the first volume, to an alternative history of Edo-period Japan in which 75% of the male population has been killed off by disease, Yoshinaga goes about trying to explain why it is that this culture allows women to rule while also paying lip service to the idea of masculine superiority.  Intelligent, insightful and quite moving, Ooku: The Inner Chambers continues to be a very rewarding read.

by Jonathan M

Ooku: The Inner Chambers – Volume 1

Gestalt Mash has recently relaunched itself and it brings with it the first in a series of posts about Fumi Yoshinaga’s Tiptree Award-winning manga series Ooku: The Inner Chambers.

Set in an alternate Edo-period Japan in which the male population has been decimated by a terrible disease, the series is an examination of why it is that old values (in particular the myth of masculine supremacy) outlive their utility in the face of social and demographic change.