Tag / Blasphemous Geometries

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

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.

by Jonathan M

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.

by Jonathan M

BG 14 – The Criticism of Video Games

Futurismic now have my fourteenth Blasphemous Geometries column.

It is quite a bit shorter than my usual BG columns but this is because it is kind of a meta-column.  Instead of grappling with a substantive issue, this month’s column announces (and explains) my decision to re-orient Blasphemous Geometries away from being about genre criticism and towards becoming a platform for video game criticism.  My views on the state of video game writing and the challenges facing all decent criticism has already prompted a typically spirited response from John Scalzi whose interesting take on the subject of video game criticism can be found here.

I have been toying with the idea of  writing about video games for a while now (it has, in fact, already inspired a BG column) and am quite excited at the prospect.

by Jonathan M

Blasphemous Geometries 13

Futurismic have just put up my thirteenth Blasphemous Geometries column entitled “The Alternative Hugo for Best Dramatic Presentation, Long Form”.

Unsurprisingly, given that title, it is an alternative shortlist of five works of genre cinema that push the envelope a little furthers than the very mainstream indeed hugo shortlist.  I’ll also take the opportunity to link to Mark Kermode’s discussion of Martyrs, which he agrees is an almost unwatchable film redeemed by its transcendental themes.

by Jonathan M

Blasphemous Geometries 12

My latest Blasphemous Geometries column has gone up over at Futurismic.

It’s an attempt to lay down some thoughts on a different way of looking at story-telling in video games, but it’s also an excuse for me to make wise-arse comments about a number of different games I’ve played over the years.  Speaking of being a wise-arse I was intriged to discover a YouTube pilot for an Australian TV programme called Game Damage.  Starring The Escapist‘s answer to Charlie Brooker, Yahtzee Croshaw.  It will be interesting to see whether the show will be picked up because I think it highlights the problem with game commentary in a nut shell.  If you watch the pilot you’ll see Yahtzee pouring scorn on what is evidently the contents of a press release while the other two scramble to say something positive.  One the one hand, everyone who plays games knows by now that games companies are entirely self-serving massively dishonest and mostly incompetent.  On the other hand, ‘Yay! New games!’.

VideoGaiden came close to solving this problems by being mostly weird and curmudgeonly with interludes of interest and enthusiasm but I think the problem is that gamers and TV people have tended to be on different pages.  Gamers want to express their culture and that culture involves a good deal of snark and cynicism to counter-act the heavy handed and manipulative marketing techniques used to ensnare them.  TV people, want something that taps into the popularity of games and you generally do this by being up-beat about the thing you’re covering.  Result = generation upon generation of games-related TV that genuinely struggles to move past reading out press releases and playing game trailers.