All posts by iain

Globetrotting and Agri-mining

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Nearly a month ago now, I got on a plane and went to England. My destination was the Ludomusicology 2013 conference at the University of Liverpool, run by the Ludomusicology Research Group. The conference spanned two days and featured papers on everything from case studies of game music, to generative music practices and technology, to the intersection of ludomusicology and gender studies. The field, though still young, is definitely maturing. It maintains its strong links to the industry and its heavily interdisciplinary character, but it is wrestling with many complex philosophical and cultural ideas and is beginning to resolve itself as an independent discipline. I thoroughly enjoyed being part of it.

Having the opportunity to gather and share ideas with others working in my field has provoked me to engage more fervently with my own studies. There just aren’t as many opportunities for that in Australia yet, though I’m even more determined to change that than I was before. (If you or someone you know studies video game music academically in Australia or New Zealand, we should talk!) Nevertheless, I’m trying to tackle my own little task with alacrity. The next month contains an article deadline and another international conference, so I’m keeping myself rather busy. I’m a little ragged around the edges, and I feel like I’ve got so little time for gaming, but it is good to be getting into the swing of things.

I must confess, however, that my academic fervour fails dismally from time to time, and the culprit is usually Minecraft. I’ve recently learned how to farm and traverse oceans in my single player game, and have been building roads stretching for miles with my wife in our multi-player world. The farming experience has made me wonder what right a mining game has to be so damn cute. It’s not just that the baby animals are adorable, either. So many of the game’s mechanics—from crafting a sword from sticks and stones, to the way fish fly out of the water into your hands when you’re fishing—are done so simply that even when completely functional they’re playful. And when you’ve spent hours being distracted by Minecraft, it’s impossible to be angry at it for being so addictive because you’d feel like a big old meanie. Sneaky, sneaky game.

Fable 3 and the slow, painful death of interesting gameplay

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A few weeks ago I fired up Fable 3 for the first time. It came with the XBOX 360 my wife and I got for our wedding.* I’d not had any real desire to seek out a Fable game in the past, but since this one came for free I thought I’d give it a shot. I thought I might even give playing a game as an evil character a go. Fable, so I though, was all about good vs. evil and forging your own path.

Well, I might have discovered that I don’t really do evil characters all that well. Maybe. Truth be told, I got nowhere trying to answer that question. Fable 3, for all its self-proclaimed (assumed?) non-linearity and its posturing as a single-player steampunk Second Life, gives you only the most minuscule hints of power over your character’s fate. And then, like a crazy clown wielding a wet and slightly rancid fish, it hits you in the face with its linearity over and over again and begs you to like it. You choose your mission (if it’s not chosen for you) then you follow a line to your goal. You literally follow a line. It glows and you follow it, desperately hoping the corner of your eye distracts you towards some enthrallingly-growing grass or some paint you can watch dry.

Perhaps, despite not really expecting anything from this game, I was expecting too much. I understand that games aren’t just made for gamers these days, and that a growing industry can’t alienate its newest devotees. But I really feel like Fable 3 missed all possible targets. This is not a childrens’ game — it’s rated MA15+ in Australia for “strong sexual references and violence”. But you can’t view its goofiness and cartoon ambiance as a wholly aesthetic choice when the delivery lacks any maturity. The themes of civil unrest and the power over life and death are jarring in their disparity to the child-like initial game activities (getting dressed to go outside, shaking people’s hands, making friends); the disparity is so inelegant that it couldn’t be part of the conceit. This game feels clumsy, almost rude, as it asks you to make decisions over people’s lives before it’s finished introducing itself. Even more so as you realise the first few hours of gameplay are a drawn-out, potentially never-ending tutorial. You’re left feeling infantile and inept, following a stupid gold line, wearing a chicken suit and shouldering an unavoidable blood guilt.

A game for children with adult themes, or a game for adults with a child-like heart? Neither, just a game that failed. Is this the way the game industry is going? Is it going to become the game tutorial industry, churning out games which end at the precise moment you learn how to play them? Will challenging gameplay be dropped in favour of the boring-but-easy in the hope that numb time fillers net more revenue than games which are actually games? If so, count me out. I’ll go study something interesting like why “minim” is spelled with two i’s or why Bach wasn’t born in Venezuela. Speaking of which, Fable 3‘s music sucks. It has some orchestral panache but it’s excessively dramatic outside of fight scenes or main plot branches, crippling its narrative ability and making you wish it wasn’t there.

The one good thing I found about this game was that you can win fights using only magic at an early stage. Oh, and it has a bit of an all-star voice cast, with cool people like John Cleese, Zoë Wanamaker, Stephen Fry and Simon Pegg (I didn’t hear the last two but Wikipedia knows all)… though that kind of reminds me, yet again, of how cool people sometimes lend their awesome talents to truly unworthy creations.

(Ponderings on the theme of “pointing things out with music” will return once I’ve forgotten Fable 3 enough to want to play games again. Getting this off my chest should have helped.)

*Thanks all!

Pointing Things Out with Music 1: Left 4 Dead

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Left 4 Dead is the game that got me into the whole video game music thing. About the time I was first playing it I took a course at uni on film music, during which the lecturer took us through the music of Psycho. Pretty soon I realised that the tone clusters and the descending semitones Bernard Hermann used to freak people out in Psycho were also used in Left 4 Dead to the same effect. I started to listen a bit more closely to the music when I was playing games, and here we are.

I’m going to write a few posts about pointing things out with music, because the games I’ve been playing lately all seem to do this differently and I think that’s kinda cool.

Left 4 Dead almost smacks you in the face with its musical cues. It uses leitmotifs for each kind of zombie you fight, and even one for the zombie horde that comes to eat your brains if you noob it up too much. If you’re not familiar with the term “leitmotif”, listen to the music that comes into your head when you think of Darth Vader or Indiana Jones. That music comes to your mind because it’s repeated when those characters have important on-screen moments — they’re like musical name tags for those characters. John Williams, who wrote the music for Star Wars and Indiana Jones, apparently loves leitmotifs heaps, and I think he probably got pro tips on their use from Wagner or Strauss or someone.

Leitmotifs are a nice touch for a game like Left 4 Dead. It could have been a “shoot everything that moves” game like Quake or something, with a suitably “make all the noise” soundtrack. But a leitmotif-laden soundtrack gives Left 4 Dead a touch of cinematic panache and it gives you a heady dose of prescience, which is actually quite terrifying. If you can see a horde of zombies coming at you, you know where to aim. But musical information is not usually directional. If you only hear a bit of music that tells you they’re coming but not from where, you flail around nervously and fire off a few shots at anything that moves, less ignorant but powerless and scared because your impending death could come from anywhere. The focus turns from killing things to surviving. The game is better for it.

I also think Left 4 Dead deserves a bit of kudos for its musical tutorial slash intro movie. The intro plays all of the leitmotifs as it introduces the “special infected”. If you bother to watch it, you learn things. Learning is fun! And so is not having your brains eaten. Double win.

Intergalactic Solace

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A friend got me on to EVE Online a couple of years ago. Despite an apparently widespread opinion that it’s a spreadsheet simulator, I quite enjoy it for its Star Trek-on-nerd-steroids vibe. Outer space in RL is awesomely beautiful, and EVE has enough simulated space prettiness to satisfy APOD cravings while you go about your particular flavour of business. And whatever your business you need that eye candy to get you through it, because EVE is one of the most prolific learning curve generators I’ve ever encountered. There’s a steep learning curve to every action or profession you undertake in EVE; the game can be simultaneously tedious and engrossing, but the time in/knowledge out ratio is unparallelled.

Every six months or so, EVE is updated by an expansion. These usually include some kind of story-backed changes to the game world (read: different ways to kill other spaceships) along with various alterations to the mechanics of gameplay. One of these expansions came out in November 2012, just a couple of months ago. I didn’t get a chance to play EVE until after Christmas, but when I did I noticed quite a lot of things had changed, and I was pleasantly surprised that the dull and discordant theme music from the previous expansion had been replaced by a new theme with spirit. There’s a new main theme tune with every expansion, and sometimes they’re not so amazing.

EVE (like most MMOs I’m sure) serves you up enough hours of play to make the in-game music far more familiar to you than any of its title themes. Usually it’s the title theme which sets your emotional compass when you launch a game, and the title theme of a new game in an RPG series can put you right back in the world even before you’ve started playing. But in EVE the function of the title themes is almost cursory compared with the homeliness of the synth pad-driven background tunes. The vast majority of the visual elements in the game today have undergone some kind of change since I started playing two years ago, but the music has not. It welcomes you back into the universe while you’re adjusting to other things, subtly going about the business of holding the whole game together.

Strangely, there’s far less music fatigue than I’d expect. The tunes are full of melodies and harmonic variations, so the game’s creators seem not to have attempted to avoid fatigue too hard. Perhaps familiarity breeds contempt only to a certain point, beyond which familiarity is a comfortable state of equilibrium. I could never say the music doesn’t get boring, and it’s hardly mistakable for Koji Jondo or Jeremy Soule, but it accompanies you through tough learning curves and space battles and somehow earns its place. Though the universe of EVE can be a dangerous place to fly, it always sounds a little bit like home.

Halo 4 and the Cinematic Ideal

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I finished playing Halo 4 just before Christmas. I’ve clocked up quite a few hours playing multiplayer Halo 3 in share houses over the years, as well as playing through the various Halo campaigns from time to time, so I was looking forward to the new installment quite a lot. A new Halo game always brings mixed feelings because the gameplay changes, for better or worse or whatever. But Halo 4 brought a mix of feelings so complex I think I should probably call it a muddle. I honestly don’t know how to feel about it. The new developers have added a solid game to a classic series but the transition to a new order is easily apparent. Parts of the new game are regular old Halo, parts of it are exceptional improvements, and parts of it just don’t work. It’s a bit of an experiential mess. And I think the reason for this is that Halo 4 should have been a movie.

When you’re fighting your way through the Prometheans, you know you’re playing a Halo game. It has the same play style, the same controls and the same niggling sense of déjà vu we all know and love. Nearly. It’s Halo but it’s certainly new and different. The musical landscape has changed completely, and instead of the action-inducing, thoroughly theme-based music of the old games there’s an ever-present backdrop of unsettling sci-fi sound. It’s exquisite but it works completely differently. It doesn’t try to make you feel like the hero of the freakin’ galaxy; you’re one (artificial) girl’s hero, she’s in all kinds of trouble and neither of you is convinced you’ll make it home.

Wait a minute… Since when did anyone playing Halo care about, well, anything to do with the plot? Even in Halo 3 the plot was a convenient reason for such a fitting end to the trilogy (or so were my thoughts at the time) and a good excuse to go barreling over a geometric construction zone in a Warthog while some of the best action music ever put to game urged you on. But now Cortana’s wigging out and we’re on a first-name basis with the hero of the freakin’ galaxy and we have to feel slightly sorry for those creepy things shooting at us. Playing as the enemy in Halo 3 was quite a twist, but a twist does not a story make, and who didn’t just like being the Arbiter because you could be invisible and you had a sword? It’s fairly well-established that FPSs are about shooting things first, getting to the end second and any other things (including plots, stories, scores, etc.) last, but Halo 4 tries to alter that hierarchy. There is a plot, and it’s an important element — and almost tear-jerking at times, poor sweet Cortana — and you have annoyingly little control over it. Plot by cutscene isn’t abnormal in an FPS, but such games don’t usually expect you to take the plot so seriously. So when you think you’re about to save the freakin’ galaxy and the game snatches the glory away from you, you feel genuinely cheated.

Halo 4 should have been a movie. Its soundscape and effects are brilliant, but not tantalisingly interactive (except for the bass the assault rifle suddenly found – sweet, alien-exploding, neighbour-annoying bass). Its graphics are beautiful, its face animation technology (sadly limited to cutscenes) is excellent, and it has a plot you can care about. But each of these things makes the sameish Halo action sequences seem less necessary by degrees, because when you focus on the peripheral elements you lose sight of the main. I’m getting live coverage of my only friend losing her mind here, dammit — I don’t honestly care about fighting my way through aliens so I can push three separate buttons to move to the next room. And the problem is, of course, that the point of Halo 4 and its predecessors is to let me do just that. I would have thoroughly enjoyed this game’s plot in full cinematic glory, but as it is, I think Halo 4 illustrates a salient point about video games which numerous academic writers have made: it is exceptionally hard to deal with serious matters interactively.

Hello World

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Welcome to Eine kleine Pwnmusik.
This blog is about video games, music, and my frolicking between the two. I’m an Australian gamer and I’m studying a PhD in ludomusicology (the study of video game music). This basically means that in a couple of years I’ll have written around 80,000 stiff-yet-precise academic words about music, and that I’ll have spent many, many hours of playing games to get there. It’s a tough life.
My thesis will (probably) focus on the role music plays in helping players understand the gameplay space. This blog will focus on very little and should be a lot more fun to write. All the visceral and emotional and ridiculous things that don’t translate well into academese will go here, along with my general thoughts about the non-musical stuff of games.
I’ll start posting after Christmas, with the first few posts being about my recent experiences on Halo 4, L.A. Noire and whatever I play with the family over Christmas.