Futurismic

Does Not Equal is a webcomic by Sarah Ennals – check out the pre-Futurismic archives, and the strips that have been published here previously.

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Keeping to the gaming theme, here’s Aleks Krotoski at The Guardian asking a very valid question: where are all the sex-based computer games?

It’s not for want of trying. Brathwaite says that when she landed a job as producer on Playboy: The Mansion, in 2005, she found there were countless games developers building titles around love, intimacy and, well, hanky-panky, but they were lost in an ocean of family values propriety, wandering souls buried under regulations and smothered by distributor blacklists, treated as “specialists” whose products only saw the light in extremely independent competitions. And so, with only the odd interruption of a virtual carnal nature, game controversies are dominated by violence. Depravity just isn’t on the regulator’s radar.

And can you imagine what would happen if it were? Just look at the furore over the scenes uncovered in the code of GTA: San Andreas. For heaven’s sake, they were two consenting (digital) adults in an 18-rated game: why did it end up such an issue that the then senator Hillary Rodham Clinton tried to get it banned? Such top-down puritanism forces creative conformity in games for fear that explicitly including sex scenes would lead to a loss of filthy lucre – when on earth has that been the case?

It does seem odd, but then computer games are a comparatively young medium by comparison to film or literature – perhaps the form just isn’t mature enough to carry it off? If that’s the case, though, developments like the interactive software/hardware combinations that run Lionhead’s virtual boy Milo suggest that the technical capability to make a sex-based game that’s going to inspire more than adolescent sniggering may finally be here. How long it will take someone to think of a genuinely engaging set of game mechanics to go with it is anyone’s guess… but I doubt it’ll be too long, despite the puritanical hand-wringing of career demagogues.

Blasphemous Geometries sees Jonathan McCalmont taking a run with Mirror’s Edge, a game whose hipster near-future dystopian stylings fail to disguise its underlying theme – freedom is illusory.

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After reading my previous column, you could be mistaken for thinking that only great games have themes and subtexts, and that those themes and subtexts only emerge when designers manage to work together and combine the various elements that make up a game into one shining image such as GTA IV’s initial depiction of the isolation and alienation that pervade 21st Century life. This is not in the least bit true.

Many crap games have themes, too. They have themes because every line of stilted absurd dialogue, every frustrating control mechanism, every poorly-designed level and every generic character all support one idea – an idea that the game designers almost certainly never had in mind when they started work on the title. Mirror’s Edge – from EA Design Illusions CE – is not only a terrible game, it is also a game with a clear thematic message: Freedom is an illusion, and all those who would claim to champion it are hypocritical and deluded fools. Continue reading “Mirror’s Edge – The Emptiness of the Short-distance Runner”

No, seriously. The UN invited some of the cast and crew behind successful TV sf series Battlestar Galactica to the United Nations Economic and Social Council to discuss the similarities between the show’s storylines and real-life politics in a changing world:

Some of the thematic parallels seemed a bit forced, but the show’s scenes about human rights and terrorism fit particularly well. UN officials continually mentioned eerie echoes of the real world in “Battlestar.”

“I’ve heard these words from people before, and they weren’t actors,” said Robert Orr, a UN assistant secretary-general for policy planning. He singled out the “Battlestar” story arc on New Caprica that deals with issues of insurgency and terrorism, and thanked Moore and Eick for creating a show which gave people cause to think about such issues.

Moore said that he continually tried to use “Battlestar” to flip familiar situations and put the audience in uncomfortable spots — such as creating situations where humans resorted to suicide bombings and torture against the Cylons, the supposed “villains” at the start of the show who gradually become more sympathetic.

Quite how much impact this will have on UN policy (if any) remains to be seen, but it’s refreshing to see people taking science fiction seriously for its deep themes rather than snarking about its surface tropes. [image by chanchan222]