Cruise Elroy

I’m done with No More Heroes now, and since I wrote my last post just a third of the way into the game I thought I’d put it to bed with some final thoughts.

Links

As it turns out, No More Heroes has inspired a ton of critical discourse, so rather than rehashing what everyone has already said I’ll just link them up here. I’ve mentioned a few of these already, but it’ll be useful to collect all of them one place:

• “No More Heroes is not punk” by Schlaghund (if you only read one of these links, make it this one)
• “No More Complaints” by Leigh Alexander
• “Do you feel lucky, punk?” by Michael Abbott
• “Grasshopper” by Steve Gaynor
• “It’s just lines and colors” by Michael Clarkson
• “What ‘No More Heroes’ Really Means” by “Cowzilla3″
• “No more No More Heroes embargo” by Mitch Krpata
• Zero Punctuation video review by Ben “Yahtzee” Croshaw

Warning: choking hazard

One of the issues that comes up in several of those essays is the game’s low-fidelity aesthetic, especially the setting. Santa Destroy evokes the open-world environments of Grand Theft Auto but lacks any of the, well, fun. The city is drab and unremarkable, the people are wholly non-interactive, and the landmarks are few and far between. I actually spent the entire game using the mini-map to get around since there was nothing interesting or important to look at and never developed a mental map of the place. And why would I? There’s no there there.

With a game like No More Heroes, the obvious question is whether this is a flaw or an intentional part of the design. Here’s a snip from Yahtzee’s review:

The awkward thing about No More Heroes, or at least about reviewing it, is that like killer7 it’s intended to be satirical, and when there are problems with the gameplay I’m worried that it was intended to be that way as a satire of… I dunno, pretentious video games — and if I were to call it out on that, then I’d lose my credibility with the cool alternative crowd. But then I remember that any game designer who sacrifices fun to make an artistic statement is obviously stuck so far up his own ass that he’s in danger of choking on his own head.

I’ve been wrestling with that last claim ever since I watched Yahtzee’s video. Do video games need to be fun?

Practically speaking they probably do, if they want to sell copies. But what about something like Jason Rohrer’s Passage, an indie game which made waves last December for its emphasis on metaphor over gameplay? Isn’t the medium big enough to include fun but thematically vapid games like Unreal Tournament and games with higher aspirations like No More Heroes? (Hint: yes.)

In any case, here’s what Cowzilla3 had to say about Santa Destroy:

The entire world is based around what Travis has interest in, there is literally nothing else. What is Travis interested in? What most young male gamers are: obsessively collecting objects (in this case clothes and models), killing bad guys, movies, the gym, sports and gorgeous women. If it doesn’t have to do with these things then it isn’t important to Travis and it doesn’t deserve anything more then an ugly gray building. Santa Destroy is a literal recreation of the self-centered world of a 20-something male and a comment on how this gaming generation views what is important in life.

I’d buy that analysis. There’s an argument to be made here about whether authorial intent is relevant — if Santa Destroy is actually empty because Suda51 didn’t have the budget to fill it in, is Cowzilla3’s analysis still meaningful? — but we’ll save that for another day.

The dark side

No, this isn’t about those ridiculous dessert-themed special moves. I think there are more serious themes at play here than winking allusions and gleeful self-referentiality.

In my last post on No More Heroes I mentioned the game’s conflation of sex and violence vis-a-vis Travis’s beam sword. I thought it was a fairly light-hearted joke in the game — ha ha, you have to pretend to masturbate with the controller. Then Michael Clarkson had this to say in the comments:

I found it interesting that most of the sexual content has to do with sexual humiliation. I mean, without spoiling too much, Travis is deceived, used, and humiliated in nearly all his relationships with women, and then there’s the dialogue every time he goes to “train” with his “master”. Not to mention the regular calls he gets from the Beef Head video girl, which also have overtones of humiliation to them. Travis’s success with women usually involves killing them. Speaking of which, do you think the fight with Bad Girl might symbolize a confrontation with his sexual haplessness?

It’s a sobering analysis, and I was taken aback that anyone read the game on such a serious level. But when I used Michael’s comment as a jumping-off point to probe a bit deeper, I decided that the sex-violence conflation is perhaps less light-hearted than I thought. This was my eventual response:

Bad Girl is the most overtly sexual of Travis’s female targets — she exudes a mix of submissive innocence (her coy nickname, her Lolita-esque little girl outfit, her crying) and violent dominance (her baseball bat, her endless conveyor belt of cloned S&M-bound men). If we set aside the old woman Speed Buster, she’s also the only female target who Travis enjoys killing.

Significantly, the final blow isn’t just a straight-up decapitation. Travis impales her with his beam sword — which, I remind you, has been infused with phallic symbolism throughout the game — as she unsuccessfully tries to beat him away with her bat. “Naughty girls need spankings,” he mutters. After bleeding to death, Bad Girl goes limp lying on top of him with her legs spread, the sword still sticking through her body.

Now, what does that imagery remind you of?

No More Heroes is not a game about rape, but when we consider its conflation of violence and sex there’s an unmistakable edge to the sexual humiliation theme. In the end, Travis’s “revenge” goes beyond the hackneyed fights of destiny with Jeane and Henry. He’s trying to be something more than the loser otaku everyone takes him for and get back at them in the process.

Is it a stretch? Sure. Does it jibe with the vague uneasiness I felt after the Bad Girl fight? Absolutely.

For a game that ostensibly sacrifices fun for the sake of artistic merit, No More Heroes sure has a lot of both.

At the risk of turning this site into the Brainy Gamer Revue, I’m going to play around a bit with Michael Abbott’s “gaming tripod” theory discussed in this post and this podcast.

Michael outlines three broad categories of games that are currently “supporting” the industry, like the legs of a tripod: games that favor narrative elements, like Grand Theft Auto IV; games that favor ludic elements, like Mario Kart Wii; and ultra-accessible “lifestyle” games such as the upcoming Wii Fit (which doesn’t have a snappy term yet, as far as I know).

It’s an instructive metaphor, and I think that it can be taken even further. First, though, I want to talk about a fourth category of games that’s been getting attention recently, which I’ll call self-reflexive games.

Self-reflexive games are aware of their status as video games. They obliquely reference other titles, ironize the conventions of their genres, and riff on the culture that surrounds the industry. Like a jazz solo that quotes an old standard or a novel that satirizes a particular author’s style, self-reflexive games require a smart audience to get the references and fully appreciate their design. In short, they’re games made for gamers, and their existence is a reflection of the medium’s maturation.

The idea of self-reflexive games goes back to 1995 (at least) with EarthBound, still one of the best video game sendups I’ve seen.¹ While it’s absolutely hilarious, it’s also impossible to explain to people who don’t play games. More recently there’s No More Heroes, which irreverently juxtaposes two decades of gaming aesthetics (according to my reading of it, at least). There’s also the recent crop of indie games, such as Kian Bashiri’s You Have to Burn the Rope, that have played upon gaming conventions in a humorously referential way.²

So what does this self-reflexive category have to do with anything? If we graft it onto the categories that Michael came up with, we can create two continua which are useful for describing how video games work.

The first continuum has ludic elements on one and and narrative elements on the other, and measures a game’s dependence on storytelling. This is a familiar dichotomy to those who have studied games. Way at the ludic end might be a game like Tetris — no story, no characters, just pure unadulterated play. Way at the narrative end would be something like Shenmue, a game that can have its interactivity removed and lose almost nothing in the process. Other games, like Michael’s Mario Kart Wii and Grand Theft Auto IV suggestions, fall somewhere between those extremes.

The other continuum measures how “video-gamey” the game is. I think of the two ends of this one as “accessibility” and “self-reflexivity,” which are perhaps not ideal terms, but they’ll do for now. Way at the accessibility extreme are titles like Wii Fit and Brain Age, which use the language of video games but otherwise barely qualify as such. Next to them are games like Wii Play and Mario Party, which are more traditionally “video-gamey” but don’t require a deep familiarity with the medium to enjoy. Moving down the line we encounter genres that are increasingly built upon gaming expertise: real-time strategy games, tactical RPGs, 4X games, MMORPGs.³ Finally, on the self-reflexivity end is your No More Heroes and You Have to Burn the Rope. For these titles, the mechanics aren’t the issue — their very appeal is limited to those steeped in the culture.

One of the neat things about thinking of games this way is that it places them in a greater context. One can almost imagine the definition of “game” distorting at the edges of the graph. Go too far past Shenmue in the “narrative” direction, and you end up with a plain old movie; go too far towards “accessibility,” and you end up passing Wii Fit and finding…well, real life. It’s no wonder we’ve had trouble defining video games.

As you can probably tell, I’m still working this theory out. I’d love to hear your feedback.

1. If you’d like to give it a try, EarthBound is likely coming to the Wii Virtual Console soon.
2. For further reading on these games, I recommend Tim Rogers on EarthBound (known as Mother 2 in Japan), Schlaghund on No More Heroes, and IndieGames’s interview with the creator of You Have to Burn the Rope.
3. It seems that generally speaking, the more bizarre or unwieldy the acronym, the less accessible the genre. Funny how that works out.

Just as the discussion over the Resident Evil 5 trailer was winding down, Grand Theft Auto IV has helpfully provided us with a new controversy to froth over. While the GTA series has long been a lightning rod for video game critics, this time the controversy is coming from an unexpected source: IGN.

According to MTV Multiplayer’s Stephen Totilo, a video montage posted to the popular gaming site this week “exclusively featured clips of the game’s lead character having sex and shooting the women he had sex with.” After receiving a number of complaints, IGN decided they had “crossed a line” and removed the video.

Not everyone was upset at IGN. Much of the mainstream media, like the Boston Globe, was happy taking the game to task on its own merits; some bloggers, like Man Bytes Blog’s Corvus Elrod and Feministing’s Samhita Mukhopadhyay were more concerned with why something like Grand Theft Auto IV is popular at all. Susannah Breslin at The Reverse Cowgirl actually thought the video was funny.

On the gaming blogs I follow, though, the most common reaction was unbridled fury. Here’s Michael Abbott of The Brainy Gamer:

Removing the video and saying you “crossed a line” is a woefully inadequate response. You need to issue a formal public apology, and the people responsible for creating and posting this video must be held accountable. Jack Thompson is the least of your worries. You need to answer to us, the gamer community, many of whom resent the self-inflicted black eye you just gave us.

And here’s a more colorful response from Leigh Alexander of Sexy Videogameland:

What the fuck were you guys thinking? Do you really think so little of your audience? Worse, do you really think so little of the industry?

[…]

Lots of us really, really care about treating games and gamers with respect, and it’s like you just spit in our face. Are you really as stupid as this makes you look, or do you just totally not give a shit? Are you that desperate for traffic, or were you just angling to set up a new “horrors of GTA” story for your Fox parent? I completely cannot understand this.

Me either, to be honest. It was one thing for random commenters to spew ignorance and stupidity during the Resident Evil 5 trailer controversy, but having a community nexus like IGN reinforce negative gamer stereotypes seems almost like an act of betrayal. It helps undo the intelligent critical discussion that we foster on our blogs, and it cripples the public discourse about games. So yes, I can certainly sympathize, and I’m personally quite disappointed in IGN.

At the same time, though, I’m not convinced that they did anything “wrong,” in a moral or ethical sense.

The underlying assumption of these arguments is that IGN’s video montage somehow misrepresented the game. Here’s Michael again, elaborating in a later post:

Of course it’s possible to do all the things the video depicts while playing GTA4. It’s possible to do all sorts of ugly things in all sorts of media, as well as in real life. The fact that it’s possible doesn’t make it acceptable to do what IGN did. If you want to play GTA4 at home and kill as many prostitutes as you can, that’s your decision. It’s another thing entirely to make a compilation video featuring one killing after another, set to music, and post it on your website that receives over 20 million unique visitors per month.

While I share some of Michael’s outrage, I don’t think the “it’s possible to do all sorts of ugly things” argument holds up because of the nature of the video game medium.

Even in the most open-ended titles, you can never do “anything” you want; the game designers make the rules, and they get to determine which actions your character is capable of. In Oblivion you can wield a sword and be a great warrior, but you can’t wield a lute and be a great troubadour. In Shenmue you can go to the Suzuki dojo and practice martial arts, but you can’t go to Nozomi’s shop and practice floral arrangement. Infinite choice is not just unfeasible for the designer but paralyzing for the player; in a way, video games are defined by what you can’t do in them.

Let’s revisit Corvus’s post, which posits a list of questions about sex in GTA IV:

Do i have the option of using a condom?

Do they, or you, run the risk of contracting a venereal diseases?

Or AIDS?

Could I take a prostitute out to dinner at a nice restaurant?

Or pay for her to go to school?

Could I help her kick her drug habit? [And so on.]

I haven’t played GTA IV yet, but I have a pretty good idea about the answers to those questions.

The fact is, Rockstar specifically chose to include the option to have sex with prostitutes and kill them, as opposed to the infinite other mechanics they could have chosen instead (and the “balancing” mechanics that Corvus is suggesting). Whether it’s the whole game, or even a major or necessary part of it, is irrelevant — the inclusion itself reveals what sort of game they were trying to create. (I’m sure I don’t need to point out that you couldn’t hire prostitutes in Oblivion and Shenmue.)

So although Michael is right that the player ultimately decides to, say, kill as many prostitutes as she can, that choice is directly enabled by the game’s design. IGN’s video may have been sensationalist nonsense, but I’m having a hard time seeing it as misrepresentative, disingenuous, or unethical.

I’ll be in Cambridge, MA at ROFLCon this weekend, rubbing elbows with the rich and famous (or at least the solvent and Internet-famous). If you see a bewildered-looking guy with a mess of black hair and a nametag that says “Dan Bruno,” come say hi.

In other news, I’m about to graduate from college so the end-of-semester crunch is a bit more intense than usual. I also have three concerts to play in over the next week — one of which, you might like to know, includes Super Mario 64’s Bob-omb Battlefield theme. That oughta go over well at my jazz performance jury!

Anyway, the upshot is that posting may be light for a bit; stay tuned.

I started No More Heroes over the weekend. There’s not much to add to the excellent critiques from Leigh Alexander, Michael Abbott, and Steve Gaynor — among others — but I thought I’d offer up my first impressions anyway.

In a word, it’s hilarious. The essays I linked above all talked about how No More Heroes is a gamer’s game, chock full of inside jokes and self-parody, and they’re spot on. I especially love how it simultaneously references new and old video games: the pixelated graphical interface superimposed on the Grand Theft Auto-like city, the 8-bit sound effects with the modern J-Pop soundtrack, the 3D cel-shaded boss fights giving way to a 1980s arcade-style high score board. It grabs disparate elements and recombines them in a postmodern mash-up, sending it all up but also paying tribute in a great gaming roast. It’s like a gruesome, black-humored EarthBound, and I love it.

You play the ludicrously named Travis Touchdown, who hails from the equally ludicrously named Santa Destroy. Travis is a shiftless game- and porn-addicted otaku who decides to become the best professional assassin in the world on the offhand suggestion of a girl he doesn’t know. And that’s probably the least absurd part of the game.

Travis fights with a “beam sword,” a battery-powered weapon that seems to be a cross between a lightsaber and a fluorescent light bulb, but it’s clear from the beginning that there will be no sterilized Star Wars swordfighting. In the intro cinematic, Travis crashes through the gate of a mansion on his giant motorbike, soars through the air, and messily decapitates the guards while yelling “Fuckhead!” over a screaming distorted guitar riff. The game never looks back from there.

Designer Goichi “Suda51″ Suda had the stated intention of making No More Heroes more violent than the grisly Manhunt 2, but the fetishization of violence here is so cartoonish and over the top that it crosses over into comedy. The amount of blood that spouts from fallen enemies makes Mortal Kombat’s fatalities look like paper cuts. Amusingly, the enemies also spew gold coins from their wounds, which pour right into Travis’ pockets in a parodic simplification of the grinding process.

Even more telling is the game’s conflation of violence with sex. There’s Silvia Christel, the femme fatale who gets Travis into the assassination game in the first place, hypersexualized as per the long tradition of female game characters.

But then there’s Travis’ weapon.

The jaded English major in me rolls his eyes whenever some random cylindrical object is designated “phallic,” but even I have to concede this one: When the beam sword runs out of energy, the player mimics masturbation with the Wii remote to recharge it, and Travis responds by sticking the beam sword between his legs and literally jerking it up and down. No More Heroes bluntly reminds us that for all the artistic pretensions of video games, present company included, in the end we’re just fucking around.

So far I’ve had a lot of fun with No More Heroes, although I worry that a lot of my enjoyment doesn’t stem directly from the gameplay. Hopefully its thematic strength is enough to overcome the admittedly repetitive mechanics and niggling problems so I can see it through to the end.

[Part one | Part two | Part three | Part four]

This post, the last in the current series, comes in two parts.

First, some trends I’ve found while analyzing the twelve ocarina songs, along with a few miscellaneous observations that didn’t fit in anywhere else:

• Seven of the twelve songs use D as their tonic — “Epona’s Song” and “Prelude of Light” are in D major, while “Song of Storms,” “Song of Time,” “Serenade of Water,” “Requiem of Spirit,” and “Bolero of Fire” are all in D minor or D Dorian.
• Three songs use tonics that are not part of the five-note trigger motive palette (D, F, A, B, D): “Zelda’s Lullaby” (G major), “Saria’s Song” (C major), and “Minuet of Forest” (E minor).
• The other two songs are special cases. “Nocturne of Shadow” has no functional triadic harmony until the end, when it suddenly cadences in D♭ major. “Sun’s Song” is never harmonized and has no obvious tonic.
• All six of the warp songs end on major chords, despite the fact that only one of them (”Prelude of Light”) is actually in a major key. The others use what’s called a Picardy third to create a major ending to a minor piece.
• “Prelude of Light” is the only song that doesn’t end on a triad. (It ends on a major seventh chord.)
• Five songs have trigger motives consisting entirely of the pitches in a D minor triad (D-F-A): “Sun’s Song,” “Song of Storms,” “Song of Time,” “Requiem of Spirit,” and “Bolero of Fire.” Of these, “Sun’s Song” is the only one that isn’t actually harmonized in a D minor mode (owing to the fact that it’s not harmonized at all).
• The Lon Lon Ranch theme and the Hyrule Castle Courtyard theme, based on “Epona’s Song” and “Zelda’s Lullaby” respectively, are the only pieces of the twelve that modulate.
• The guitar part in the Lon Lon Ranch theme is swung but the vocal part is not, so the two don’t quite match up. This sort of rhythmic clash has occasionally been exploited in popular music; see, for example, “Girl” by The Beatles. Also, the Lon Lon Ranch theme is the only place swung eighth notes are found in the entire game.
• Even though it’s in the key of G major, the Hyrule Castle Courtyard theme only actually has one G major chord — and even then it’s during the modulatory C major section, so it’s functioning as a dominant. The piece therefore has the odd distinction of never using its tonic chord “normally.”

Second, a bit about the in-game ocarina as an instrument.

As you’ve probably noticed, the music in Ocarina of Time is all synthesized, meaning that the sounds are all generated by the game and not recordings of actual musicians. (If you haven’t noticed, go back and listen to the “voice” in the Lon Lon Ranch theme again.) As it turns out, whoever designed the in-game ocarina had a little fun blurring the line between electronic and real instruments.

Below is a picture of the joystick on my Korg DW-6000 analog snythesizer:

Moving this joystick left or right bends the pitch of the note(s) you’re playing; moving it up triggers an oscillator, and moving it down triggers a filter.

Flip the x and y axes and you’re pretty close to the in-game ocarina’s “secret” controls. While playing the ocarina, up and down gives you pitch bend, while side to side gives you a vibrato-like oscillator. Both, to my ear, sound hilariously exaggerated and inappropriate for an ocarina. It’s a great Easter egg, and even better when one considers the software synthesizer that’s actually creating the sound.

The addition of pitch bend, of course, has another implication — even though I’ve made a big deal out of the five notes that correspond to the controller buttons, it’s actually possible to play other ones. The joystick can raise or lower the pitch by a whole step;¹ similarly, the Z and R buttons, respectively, will raise or lower the pitch by a half step. Combining these two features gives you all the notes in between the five default ones, for a total of one and a half octaves:

There’s not any practical use for this, of course. To be honest, it’s tedious enough that there’s barely an impractical use for it either, but that hasn’t stopped anyone…

I hope you’ve all enjoyed this series. I’ll be back with more music analysis soon.

1. Actually, it doesn’t quite go a full whole step, so the pitch bend will always put you slightly out of tune. C’est la vie.

When I was ten years old my VideoGames magazine subscription was suddenly replaced with Electronic Gaming Monthly. It was, as I recall, sudden and unexplained — one month VideoGames simply didn’t come, and EGM took over as though nothing had happened.¹ I distinctly remember it happening, too; the first issue I got was #89, and Street Fighter III was the cover story. Immediately I fell in love, and for years I read EGM religiously.

My favorite reviewer back then was was Dan “Shoe” Hsu. I’ve tried to keep up with his work over the years through 1UP, and have been happy to see that he’s been quite successful; he’s worked his way up from associate editor to editor-in-chief. I was therefore a bit shocked to see the Kotaku post last week about him stepping down.

On some level, it’s a personal thing — this is a guy who I’ve been reading for literally half of my life, and now he’s gone. (For now, anyway.) But it got me thinking about something.

With all the thousands of bloggers, reviewers, and journalists that cover video games, it’s hard to find a gaming personality with a truly far-reaching influence. Shoe was a popular and well-respected reviewer, but I wouldn’t call him famous, even in the gaming community. Who, I started to wonder, is our Roger Ebert — our universally known and widely respected critic whose very popularity demands that we dialogue with his opinions? Who is our tastemaker?

The first person that came to mind was Jerry “Tycho” Holkins, the writer behind the comic strip Penny Arcade. By the estimation of Holkins and his cohort Mike “Gabe” Krahulik, they have a readership of three million, so the “universally known” criterion is certainly met. But what about the critical role?

Every Penny Arcade strip is accompanied by a long screed from Holkins, which covers the gaming news du jour with his trademark wryness and prolixity. Over time, this has become just as much of a draw as the strip itself; it’s telling that the home page actually displays the latest news post and not the latest comic.

While Holkins’ posts are entertaining and insightful, one side effect of Penny Arcade’s popularity is that he’s become increasingly reflexive. We still get discussion about video games, to be sure, but it’s hidden among personal anecdotes, reports from conventions, and other stories from the lives of the PA crew. Add in announcements of new merchandise, updates on the annual expo they host in Seattle, and news about their charity, and Penny Arcade is as much about Penny Arcade as anything else. Of course, there’s nothing wrong with that — I just think Holkins and Krahulik are best understood as gaming celebrities, not as critics.

After thinking about it some more, I’ve decided that the real tastemaker is Ben Croshaw.

Croshaw, who goes by the name “Yahtzee,” is the man behind the Zero Punctuation video reviews. “Review” is probably too kind a word, actually; they’re usually more like eviscerations. The quick-witted Croshaw uses his biting sarcasm to ridicule games — even ones that he likes — while speaking at top speed over subtle visual gags. It’s a lot like watching His Girl Friday — you have to force yourself not to laugh too hard if you don’t want to miss the next three jokes.

Like Penny Arcade, Zero Punctuation strikes that balance between erudition and vulgarity which seems to ignite the community. The Escapist first picked up the series in July of last year, and since then their traffic has quadrupled. The videos average over a million views apiece, get hundreds of comments, and are discussed across the blogosphere. The television network G4 is even getting in on the action. In short, Zero Punctuation’s popularity and influence have already hit critical mass, and they’re still growing.

Give him another year or two, and Yahtzee might be the most important critic in the industry.

1. As it turns out, Ziff-Davis bought VideoGames from Larry Flynt Publications and then folded the brand.

[Part one | Part two | Part three | Part four]

All right, back into the fray! It’s time to finish off the analysis of the twelve ocarina songs. We’re down to the last six.

As fans of the game will remember, adult Link learns six “warp songs” from Sheik. From a gameplay perspective, these songs work the same way as the earlier ones — the player must perform a trigger motive using the controller buttons, and then the game takes over and finishes the song. There are a few important differences, though.

First, the warp songs are orchestrated as soon as you trigger them. With the child songs I had to dig into Ocarina of Time’s background music to find chords to analyze; thankfully, the adult songs are harmonized right away.

Second, the trigger motives themselves are more varied. You might have noticed that all of the child songs feature a six-note motive, and that each of those motives is made up of a three-note idea, repeated twice. By contrast, the warp song trigger motives vary in length from five to eight notes.

Third, the warp songs all have the same call-and-response structure. Sheik states the trigger motive melody on the harp, and Link repeats it on the ocarina. The piece then quickly moves to a cadence, often with both instruments in unison. One whole piece is only six or eight bars long.

Fourth, the warp songs actually stop. Video game background music, like the pieces we’ve analyzed so far, loops indefinitely. This structure requires that they be harmonically open — in other words, they end on a dominant chord (or something similarly unresolved) so that the harmonic progression can cycle back to the beginning. The warp songs, by contrast, are self-contained and have full cadences at the end.

There’s a lot of fun music theory nuggets in here, so let’s move on to the specific examples. Head past the jump for the goods.

Read more »

While I’ve been blathering on about Zelda music, MTV Multiplayer’s Tracey John has been posting a series of fascinating interviews with black professionals in games. The interviews cover a broad range of topics, from affirmative action to industry discrimination to the presentation of blacks in video games themselves, and I highly recommend them.

There’s one post in particular that I need to talk about, though, and that’s the one with Newsweek journalist N’Gai Croal’s thoughts on the trailer for Resident Evil 5. (We’re going to get a little NSFW from here on out; you have been warned.)

You can watch the trailer here. It features protagonist Chris Redfield gunning down an African village full of zombies.

I’ve excerpted some of Croal’s argument below, though I strongly encourage you to read the whole post to put it in context.

I looked at the “Resident Evil 5″ trailer and I was like, “Wow, clearly no one black worked on this game.” Because I wonder, and I haven’t sort of really dug into it that much, but I wonder what sort of advice Capcom gave them. The point isn’t that you can’t have black zombies. There was a lot of imagery in that trailer that dovetailed with classic racist imagery.

There was stuff like even before the point in the trailer where the crowd turned into zombies. There [sic] sort of being, in sort of post-modern parlance, they’re sort of “othered.” They’re hidden in shadows, you can barely see their eyes, and the perspective of the trailer is not even someone who’s coming to help the people. It’s like they’re all dangerous; they all need to be killed.

[…]

It’s like when you engage that kind of imagery you have to be careful with it. It would be like saying you were going to do some sort of zombie movie that appeared to be set in Europe in the 1940’s with skinny, emaciated, Hasidic-looking people. If you put up that imagery people would be saying, “Are you crazy?” Well, that’s what this stuff looks like. This imagery has a history. It has a history and you can’t pretend otherwise. That imagery still has a history that has to be engaged, that has to be understood.

Now, Croal is a smart guy, as fans of his blog Level Up are aware. I’m sure he was fully aware that his comments would ruffle the feathers of Resident Evil fans. (That, at least, explains the abundance of weasel words — “I haven’t sort of really dug into it that much,” “sort of being, in sort of post-modern parlance,” etc.) But the cards are stacked against him from the beginning because he has the audacity to try to make a nuanced point.

If you read his argument carefully — and I again encourage you to look at the whole thing — it’s obvious that his beef is not with Capcom, or even with Resident Evil 5. He’s specifically concerned with the trailer’s usage of a particular kind of imagery (racial othering) as seen through the lens of a particular discipline (postmodernism). He also clearly doesn’t want to stop the game from being released; he is suggesting that more care ought to be taken with its use of racially charged images. In short, it’s not the kind of argument that can be easily distilled.

Naturally, that hasn’t stopped anyone from trying. Here are a couple of comments from the discussion of Croal’s comments on Joystiq.

“xFenixKnightx”:

Im so pumped for this game and if they ban it or something I will be pissed. I already didnt liek N’gay Troll and now he wants to do this to me =(

“KurtM”:

This is so gay. No one is going to buy this game for the sole purpose of offin’ some brothers…even if they did who cares? Its not like the rest of us are. Those same people will go around killing black random people in GTA IV, or any other game allowing such play. The rest of us just want a bad ass game thats fun to play. If its set in Africa, who gives a damn? The main character has been around and was already white. No matter what color he is people will always have a problem. game on, bitches.

And here’s a couple from Kotaku’s 1000+ comment snafu.

“naught”:

This is PC bullshite. By throwing a fit and claiming that black people should be treated different than white people, YOU are perpetuating racism, N’Gai. Disagree? Try looking up the definition of racism first. Heck, I’ll do it for you:

“a policy, system of government, etc., based upon or fostering such a doctrine; discrimination.”

Sorry, N’Gai, you’re racist.

If the people in the game were white, there would be NO discussion.

“Zenocide”:

N’Gai Croal = Whining punk bitch.

Sorry we cant kill white zombies exclusively Mr.Croal. Do we really have to cater to this generation of black people just because white cops hosed down their great grandparents during the Civil Rights movement?

Well, that about speaks for itself, doesn’t it?

To be fair, there are a few intelligent, well-reasoned comments here and there. But there are many, many more that are as bad as, or worse than, the ones I’ve selected. Kotaku editor Brian Crecente even took the opportunity to reflect on the viability of his site’s commenting policy. So what’s going on?

I think there are two issues. The first is something Penny Arcade famously described in the Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory — that anonymity encourages poor behavior. On the Internet, when someone’s gut reaction is pure, sputtering anger, he usually has no incentive to filter himself.¹ The upshot is that the level of discourse takes a nose dive as discussion devolves into name-calling and ad hominem attacks. (Joystiq and Kotaku are partially at fault here too; they both quoted Croal out of context with the sensationalist headline “Clearly No One Black Worked On This Game.” In hindsight, that was not the way to kick-start a debate.)

The second issue, and the more important one in my view, is something common to all video game fans — our need to justify our pastime. With games under near-constant attack from the media and government, we tend to be unduly suspicious of anyone with a critical agenda. Claims of racism, sexism, indecency, violence, or game addiction are shrilly decried by the gaming community for fear of censorship. In other words, I don’t think the Joystiq and Kotaku commenters care what Croal’s opinion of Resident Evil 5 is on a personal level; they’re just worried that his public criticism will somehow affect their ability to enjoy it.

That, I think, is the wrong approach to take. Video games are not yet at the point of widespread acceptance — gamers are still thought of as a distinct subculture in a way that, say, moviegoers are not — and intelligent discussion from mainstream journalists like Croal helps elevate the medium beyond its current marginalized status. By shouting down any and all criticism, especially using the tone that many of the Kotaku and Joystiq commenters adopted, we present an ugly face for the gaming community that confirms the worst of society’s stereotypes.

1. There’s a ton more to be said on this topic, but it’s beyond the scope of this blog. For more on creating accountability in online communities, I recommend the recent post “Can $5 Improve Reader Comments?” from the Freakonomics blog. (Be sure to scroll down and read the comments.)

[Part one | Part two | Part three | Part four]

This post continues analyzing the songs in Ocarina of Time and theorizing about Koji Kondo’s intentions with them.

Before reading, I encourage you to check out the comments on my last post. Hopefully the discussion between Ben Abraham and I can clarify what I was saying, as well as point out where I might have gone wrong. I’m grateful to have the perspective of another music student on this, and I’d like to thank Ben for engaging with me.

Now, on to business! We have three more songs to look at from the “child Link” portion of the game; head past the jump for my analysis.

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