Tuesday, March 11, 2008

Carrying The Torch

Lately, I've been reading Manwatching: A Field Guide to Human Behavior by Desmond Morris where Morris attempts to categorize human actions, gestures, body language, verbal, nonverbal communication, etc, into a sort of human gesticulative glossary...

In particular, he writes about Relic Gestures which he defines as: "...a gesture that has outlived its original situation...gestures that have survived long after their primary contexts have vanished." He goes on to give the example of the telephone gesture where the person would act out the posture of holding the receiver to his ear and cranking it. Even today, this gesture is used in some parts of the world by people "who may never even have heard of a cranked telephone and who do not understand where the action stems from."

As a Combat Designer on God of War III, an inherent part of my job is to adhere to the groundwork laid out before me by the original God of War I and II combat designers and ensure the original contexts and philosophies survive and are translated into the God of War III combat/enemies. Although some of the core developers have left the God of War franchise, Adam Puhl and Jason McDonald remain as the surviving primary contextual guides for God of War combat.