Tag Archives: Jonathan McCalmont

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

Mirror’s Edge – The Emptiness of the Short-distance Runner

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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.

Blasphemous Geometries by Jonathan McCalmont

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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 →

Blasphemous Geometries

Grand Theft Auto IV – Exploring the Mundane

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Blasphemous Geometries has turned its attention to computer games, and for its first foray into that sphere Jonathan McCalmont takes a look at the hugely popular Grand Theft Auto IV. How does its reproduction of life’s bitter mundanities strengthen its appeal, and what does that say about the reality it reflects?

Blasphemous Geometries by Jonathan McCalmont

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As the first Blasphemous Geometries column to look at an individual video game, it makes sense for me to start at the top with one of the fastest-selling games of all time. Grand Theft Auto IV is, paradoxically, the sixth game to appear in the series and the eleventh game to appear as a part of the wider GTA franchise. Since its release in April 2008 it has been festooned with awards and prizes and it remains one of the highest ranking games to feature on the net’s various review aggregation sites. It is not my intention today to toss another garland onto the already swollen heads of the GTA IV developers; instead, I want to use the game to demonstrate an idea. Continue reading Grand Theft Auto IV – Exploring the Mundane →

Blasphemous Geometries

The criticism of video games

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This month Blasphemous Geometries turns a conceptual corner, as Jonathan McCalmont decides to refocus the critical crosshairs on video games.

Blasphemous Geometries by Jonathan McCalmont

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Back in the 1930s, a number of physicists (including Einstein) argued that our universe is oscillatory. What this meant was that after the Big Bang, the universe expands until it reaches a certain level of density and gravitational pull, at which point it begins to contract until it ends with a Big Crunch. This idea still has some devotees. However, what made the Oscillatory Theorists interesting was the belief that after the universe had contracted back to its original singularity, it would then bounce back again; expanding until its physical limits were met and another Big Crunch was initiated. This meant that, according to the Oscillatory Theorists, the universe was stuck in a cycle of eternal destruction and rebirth. This has always struck me as a rather useful analogy for certain internet debates. “Is Science Fiction Dying?” is one such debate but another is “Where is the Lester Bangs of Video Games?”. Continue reading The criticism of video games →