All posts by Jonathan McCalmont

Blasphemous Geometries

The Mechanics of Morality: Why Moral Choices in Video Games Are No Longer Fun

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Moral ambiguity is an increasingly ubiquitous part of modern computer game character mechanics – so why are the moral elements to gameplay increasingly less enjoyable?

Blasphemous Geometries by Jonathan McCalmont

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I remember when having a game take into account the morality of your character was something of an innovation. I remember banging my head against the Eye of the Beholder Dungeons and Dragons games appalled at the fact that something as complex as tabletop role-playing had been reduced to throwing knives at spiders in someone’s basement. The Baldur’s Gate games changed this. Suddenly, if you played an evil character good characters refused to join up with you and if you played a good character then certain solutions to problems were denied you. It was a revelation. Now it all tastes like ashes. Continue reading The Mechanics of Morality: Why Moral Choices in Video Games Are No Longer Fun →

Blasphemous Geometries

Images of Heroic Slavery – Gears of War, God of War and Prototype

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The third-person shooter genre of video games is largely populated by lead characters for whom violence and aggressive self-interest is both a means and an end – but are they heroic individuals, or slaves to a system?

Blasphemous Geometries by Jonathan McCalmont

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It may not be obvious from reading them, but there is a process behind the writing of these columns.  Every month, I comb review websites searching out games which, though I might not necessarily enjoy playing them, I know I will be able to write about.  This month this process has taken me into a realm I seldom explore, that of third-person shooters.  Third-person shooters tend to differ from first person shooters in so far as their protagonists are usually more fleshed out.  They are on-screen the entire time and so game designers feel obligated to give them a personality.  Somewhere between Batman : Arkham Asylum (2009) and Gears of War (2006) I realised that I felt quite intensely alienated from the characters I was supposed to be controlling.  We had nothing in common.  We simply were not clicking.  There was no spark.  There would not be a second date.

I am not a furiously intense and brooding tough-guy filled with rage and driven to eye-popping bouts of gut-wrenching violence by an all-consuming desire for revenge [O RLY? 😉 – Ed.].  In fact, I don’t know anyone who is.  Then it occurred to me, what kind of image of humanity do these games contain?  Why is that image so popular?  Who, if anyone, benefits from it? Continue reading Images of Heroic Slavery – Gears of War, God of War and Prototype →

Blasphemous Geometries

Fear of a Transhuman Future – Zombies and Resident Evil

Much like the vampire, the zombie is a long-lived trope of the horror genre whose subtext has mutated alongside the contemporary fears of the audience. So what do current zombie movies and games say about our modern metaphysical boogie-men?

Blasphemous Geometries by Jonathan McCalmont

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The Horror genre is a profoundly parasitical creature. Not only is it endlessly adaptable to cultural changes, but it also has a rare capacity to track sources of social anxiety and attach itself to them, mining our deepest fears and presenting them back to us in the shape of art – a cathartic form of art that helps us to overcome our fears by making us confront them in safe environments such as cinemas and comfy chairs [Cinemas are a safe environment? Not in this town, man. – Ed.]. Indeed, Joss Whedon owes much of his fame and following to the fact that Buffy the Vampire Slayer helped millions of TV viewers to overcome the traumas born of attending high school – traumas transformed by Whedon and his staff of writers into monsters physical enough to be defeated week in and week out by a small blonde woman and a gang of geeky side-kicks. Continue reading Fear of a Transhuman Future – Zombies and Resident Evil →

Blasphemous Geometries

The Iron Cage of Fantasy: World of Warcraft, City of Heroes and Fable II

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If modern gaming is all about escapism, why do we choose to escape to virtual worlds that contain so many of the negative pressures of the world we’re trying to leave behind?

Blasphemous Geometries by Jonathan McCalmont

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I’d like to begin this column by discussing escapism. Describing something as “escapist” has always struck me as something of a back-handed compliment. A tacit (and sometimes dismissive) acknowledgement of a work’s lack of topicality or verisimilitude coupled to an attempt to shift the critical yardstick from the aesthetic to the psychological : Yes, we know that this film/game/book is all about giant stompy robots hitting each other but it scratches an itch that we, the audience, need scratching.

The itch in question is the need to escape from an increasingly inhospitable 21st Century existence; an existence filled with long commutes, unpaid mandatory overtime, credit card bills, mortgage foreclosures, unemployment, failed relationships and the plethora of modern-day worries, problems and fears that many choose to medicate with alcohol. People justifiably want to escape to a world that is less oppressive and miserable. This explains why the grand-father of escapist fiction is J.R.R. Tolkien and not Jean-Paul Sartre. Continue reading The Iron Cage of Fantasy: World of Warcraft, City of Heroes and Fable II →

Blasphemous Geometries

Red Faction: Guerilla

Political theatre and sock-puppet ideologies take centre stage on the dusty red plains of Mars, as Blasphemous Geometries examines the latest instalment in the Red Faction franchise.

Blasphemous Geometries by Jonathan McCalmont

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Somewhere, out in the mists of possibility that exist between universes and states of being, there is a game that begins in this fashion :

Your character is sitting in a cramped bedroom in front of a computer. Behind him, on the wall, is the green flag of Hamas (provided by someone down at the mosque, it serves both as a political statement and as a way of covering up an old poster of Ronaldinho. Your character clicks the mouse button and the webcam starts recording.  He reads a prepared speech about Gaza and the West Bank and concentrates upon keeping any signs of emotion from his voice. Martyrs, he has been told, must be proud. He has to stop and start again when his voice cracks into an embarrassing squeak on the word ‘Jihad’. He rides his bike to a lock up on the other side of town.  A van has been packed with explosives and a primitive trigger that appears to be a wiimote.  You snort your amusement at the in-joke. Continue reading Red Faction: Guerilla →