Tag Archives: video-games

Blasphemous Geometries

Roleplaying Games and the Cluttered Self

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Blasphemous Geometries by Jonathan McCalmont

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0: Hume

Have you ever looked at an old photograph of yourself or read one of your old letters or emails and marvelled at the differences between the person you are now and the person you were then?  Getting older means falling into the habit of shrieking “what was I thinking?” whenever you stumble across some fragment of a former life.  But let us take this idea a little further: are you actually the same person that you were when you wrote that letter?  When you had that photograph taken?  When you decided to start dating that person who was obviously so ill suited to you?  Are you the same person you were yesterday?  Or five minutes ago?  Or when you started reading this sentence?  The 18th Century Scottish philosopher David Hume suggested that you might very well not be. Continue reading Roleplaying Games and the Cluttered Self →

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

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 →

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Sins of A Solar Empire game developer talks piracy

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Sins of a Solar Empire has an impressive scaling of graphics to suit your machine

Sins of A Solar Empire by small independent game company Stardock (and their developers Ironclad) is the biggest selling pc game of 2008 so far, despite a tiny budget and much less coverage by the gaming press.  Stardock owner Brad Wardell posted an excellent analysis of why their games are having success. (last year’s Galactic Civilisations II was another underground hit.)

He talks a lot about the bad policies taken by much of the PC game industry. For example, why bother targeting the Chinese market when piracy is so rife many people won’t purchase your game? His main point, and it’s a very good one, is that very few people upgrade their computer often so targeting the graphics of your game to only work for the ‘hardcore’ pc gamers is limiting your market. Rather than trying to break the latest processor if you just make a game that’s fun and works on most computers people will play it.

Sins is a fun game that combines the 4X ideas of ‘eXplore, eXpand, eXploit and eXterminate’ of games like Civilisation with Real Time Strategy elements of space games like Homeworld. I’ve enjoyed myself whenever I’ve played it but what’s even more impressive is the attitude of the people behind it – updates are frequent, there’s no DRM, the developers comment frequently on the game’s forum and they listen to requests from players about bugs and new features. In an industry full of high budget Hollywood games, it’s comforting to see that small companies can be a big success if they just concentrate on pleasing their audience.

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Space in video games

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Space combat in all its explosive glory in Sins Of A Solar Empire

Online video game magazine The Escapist, home to the hilariously funny animated review column Zero Punctuation, has the theme of space for its 136th issue. They talk about why the starfighter genre appears to have died down since the heyday of X-Wing vs Tie Fighter and Wing Commander and about how science fiction is, although often set in the future, a commentary about now.

Although the space combat genre is in a lull right now, space strategy and so called ‘4X’ civilisation games are enjoying some underground success thanks to the efforts of indie games publisher Stardock, which produced the critically acclaimed Galactic Civilisations II last year. Its latest release, Sins of a Solar Empire, came out this month and combines Real Time Strategy elements of controlling fleets of spacecraft as well as exploration and colonisation. Currently holding a very respectable 87% average on Metacritic and impressing this writer enough to squeeze it into my schedule, games like this and Will Wright’s forthcoming evolutionary Spore are showing that maybe there’s a future for space in video games after all.

[Sins Of A Solar Empire screenshot via IGN]