Category / Series

by Jonathan M

BG 35 – Heavy Rain: Free Will and Quick Time Events

Futurismic have my thirty fifth Blasphemous Geometries column entitled “Heavy Rain: Free Will and Quick Time Events”.

Evidently, I am absolutely terrible at Quick Time events as I managed to achieve what is evidently the most downbeat ending that Heavy Rain has to offer (killer goes free, everyone else dies in misery), but despite my lack of basic competence at… well… video games in general, I nonetheless saw in Heavy Rain a quite revolutionary approach to gaming.  An approach that restricts interactivity whilst also managing to make what little interaction the game allows seem so much more important and meaningful.  A brilliant game and an enjoyable column to write.

by Jonathan M

BG 34 – Digital: A Love Story; Nostalgia, Irony and Cyberpunk

After a month’s break, Futurismic have my thirty fourth Blasphemous Geometries column.

The subject of this month’s column is Christine Love’s amazing indie (and freely downloadable!) game Digital: A Love Story and how some video games deploy nostalgia in a decidedly ironic register in order to both revisit the past and deconstruct our desire for a non-existent idyll.

by Jonathan M

Robinson in Space (1997) – Ghosts of Albion plc

The ending of Patrick Keiller’s London (1994) saw the fictional academic Robinson and his loyal but un-named narrator (voiced by Paul Scofield) drowning in a sea of absence.  Having criss-crossed the city of London in a desperate search for its hidden nature, the pair eventually collapse.  Exhausted, deflated and defeated.  London, they announce, is a city without essence.  Devoid of any underlying meaning or fundamental essence, Britain’s capital is a hermeneutic desert.  A space in which no meaning can grow and into which visitors are forced to carry any truths they may need in order to keep themselves alive.

Robinson in Space marks the return of London’s intrepid duo.  This time the pair are hired by an un-named international advertising agency to produce a similar report on the unspecified ‘problem of England’.  However, despite travelling further and further across the country, Robinson’s initial romanticism about England proves to be just as deluded as his romanticism about London.  Indeed, neither an enchanted kingdom full of art and fellowship nor a gothic landscape full of dread and oppression, England reveals itself as a land of facts.  Tedious, maddening, preposterous facts.

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by Jonathan M

London (1994) – Squabbling Hegemonies

It is difficult enough to try and capture the meaning of a book or a film, but how about attempting to distill the essence of a particular time or a particular place?  How about an entire city?  Travel writing is an attempt to do exactly this.  To take the experience of a particular place at a particular time and distill it down into the collection of sounds and symbols that make up the written word.  Thought of in these terms, the task seems onerous. After all… books are creatures of words.  Even films are beings of language once you bear in mind their scripts, their budget meetings and the attempts by directors to tell actors and technicians alike exactly what they want from a particular scene.  To write about the meaning of words is one thing but to write about something bigger than language is another.  Something like the city of London.

Patrick Keiller’s London is a combination of documentary film and extended essay.  Its un-named narrator (voiced by Paul Scofield) tells of his cross-London walks and expeditions in the company of a quixotic academic known only as Robinson.  Robinson has a very particular vision of London.  A vision he desperately wants to be true, and if it cannot be true then it must be about to come true.  But as the pair cross and re-cross the city of London along with its suburbs, financial districts, parks and run-down estates, it soon becomes clear that London will not conform to any single vision and that this refusal to conform is the very essence of the Mother of All Cities.

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by Jonathan M

BG 33 – Tell Your Own Damn Stories! Games, Overreading and Emergent Narrative

One of the most startling things about the opening to Grand Theft Auto – San Andreas is that the cut scenes are well-written.  Their characters are well drawn, their dialogue is consistently funny and their narrative arcs are drawn boldly and with a real grasp of human psychology.  In the world of video-game cut scenes such artistry is practically unheard of.  In fact, by and large, you are far more likely to remember a cut scene for its terrible dialogue or woeful translation than you are for its aesthetic quality.  Unfortunately, as far as most video-games are concerned, the problem stretches beyond a few laughable cut scenes and into the realms of systemic narrative failure: Like operas and porn films, video-games are universally badly written.

And yet games are more than capable of telling great stories.

My solution?  Hang all video-game writers and Tell Your Own Damn Stories!

My thirty third Blasphemous Geometries column over at Futurismic explains how.

by Jonathan M

Sherlock’s Little Mistakes 3 – The Great Game

The excellent Gestalt Mash have my third TV Mystery column Sherlock’s Little Mistakes 3 – The Great Game.

This time, the column considers not only Holmes’ Christ-like desire to impose order upon the world but also what might happen if God’s motives were not Lovecraftian in their impenetrable Otherness.

by Jonathan M

Sherlock’s Little Mistakes 2 – The Blind Banker

Gestalt Mash have just put up my second column providing alternative solutions to the mysteries in the BBC’s Holmes-inspired TV series Sherlock.

The column considers the possibility that dear old Sherlock may have fallen into the trap of Sinomania: Assuming that Chinese people possess super-human levels of competence.  The concept of Sinomania draws upon this excellent article from the London Review of Books.

by Jonathan M

Sherlock’s Little Mistakes 1 – A Study in Pink

New website Gestalt Mash have just put up the first in a series of pieces I shall be writing for them entitled Sherlock’s Little Mistakes.

The piece is a commentary on the BBC’s recent Sherlock TV series and the idea behind it is to speculate ways in which Holmes might have been mistaken.  In looking at the first episode in the series ‘A Study in Pink’ I considered the possibility that sometimes a suicide is just a suicide.

by Jonathan M

BG 31 – Paying Attention is Not Fun : Crackdown 2

Futurismic have just put up my latest (and somewhat delayed) Blasphemous Geometries column.

The column looks at Crackdown 2 and wonders why its main narrative is so utterly incapable of maintaining our interest.  Is the problem bad writing?  Have our brains been re-wired by the internet as suggested by Susan Greenfield and Nicholas Carr?  And if it has, should we care?