Stephen Totilo, in a Kotaku post entitled “The Year I Gained The Courage To Ignore Video Game Music”:
Not every part of a video game is essential. There is some debate about whether writers are necessary for the creation of a good video game. Game designers can just write their own scripts, some say. And while a game can have dialogue, it is still not required for a game to have voice-actors. The dialogue could be presented as text.
Until 2010 I’d never have put composers in that camp of video game non-essential personnel. I’d have lumped them with the people responsible for making sure that the games I play look good or have impressive sound effects or doesn’t crash. A game couldn’t be made without the people responsible for those tasks, and, if it was, it certainly couldn’t be enjoyed.
I’ve met video game musicians. I’d been to their studios. I’ve seen the hard work they do. Until 2010 I felt they were required. In 2010, however, my behavior proved they were not.
My knee-jerk reaction to this, as you might expect from someone personally and professionally invested in video game music, was “this guy has lost his fucking mind.” I mocked the article with my friends. I quipped on Twitter that 2011 is the year I learned to ignore everything Stephen Totilo says. I blamed Kotaku for reducing one of my favorite games journalists to a pageview-hungry pot-stirrer.
Now that I’ve cooled off a bit, though, I thought I’d try to respond a bit more thoughtfully.
Like Stephen, I have played games with the sound off. I have replaced licensed game soundtracks that I didn’t care for, popping ollies to Led Zeppelin and evading the cops to Caribbean jazz. I have even turned off original scores on a couple of occasions, like when the Morrowind theme looped for the thousandth time.
My issue is not with Totilo’s behavior but with his conclusion that, because he can now enjoy some games without music, composers ought to be classified as “non-essential personnel.” Separating composers from artists and writers and sound designers in this way is bizarrely myopic, not just because it assumes his experience is universal but because it ignores the variety of ways in which games and music interact. For every game that can be muted without much harm, there is another in which the music is “essential.”
And while it is true that music isn’t equally important for every game, the same can be said for any other facet of the medium. Graphics are not important in Dwarf Fortress; writing is not important in Super Mario Bros.; sound is not important in Picross DS. I would even say the gameplay experience itself is not important sometimes, such as in interactive fiction. In games, as with all media, the “essentialness” of any particular aspect is dependent upon the specific work.
Another quote from the article:
How strange and yet how appropriate it is that we gamers think we can do this. How odd it is that gamers can decide that a signature component of the creations they play can be turned off. It does makes sense. Games are the entertainment of meddlers and tinkerers. We, the players, will change them to suit ourselves. We don’t merely observe or consume when we play a video game. We poke. We bend the rules. Sometimes, we control the camerawork. Often, we speed up or slow down our hero’s journey. On many days, on the C train and elsewhere, we confirm by our actions that we don’t believe video game music always matters.
I would say that “we” confirm by our actions that any number of things don’t matter, and it goes far deeper than camera control. Competitive gamers turn down the graphics settings to improve performance. Action-minded gamers skip through cutscenes to get to the next combat set piece (and story-minded gamers reduce the difficulty level to get to more dialog). Modders blow holes in core elements of a game’s design, while speedrunners ignore the designers’ intentions altogether and forge their own paths.
In short, muting or replacing the music in a video game is not some kind of unique expression of gamer remix culture, but a simple consequence of interactivity. Extrapolating from this behavior that game music is “non-essential” is a nonstarter. At best it is a banal observation that some game music is better, or that some games are better suited to a specific soundtrack; at worst it is presumptuous, and dismissive to composers and those who value their work.
It’s the time of year for best-of selections! I feel like I miss too many games to make an informed decision about which was the best, but my favorite game this year was Double Fine’s downloadable RPG Costume Quest.
I loved Costume Quest for a number of reasons. It’s based on what must be one of the all-time great elevator pitches: you’re a trick-or-treater who fights monsters by transforming into your Halloween costume. It’s derivative in a pleasant, nostalgic way, evoking EarthBound’s quirkiness and Zelda’s lightweight puzzle-solving. The story and pacing demonstrate a Portal-like clarity of purpose; the game is exactly as long as its plot and mechanics are interesting. Most importantly, Tim Schafer’s writing is pitch-perfect throughout — equal parts charming and hilarious. In short, everything Costume Quest does feels carefully considered and well-executed.
But more interesting than why I picked Costume Quest, at least to me, is the fact that I picked it at all. Based on my previous choices I’ve always been predisposed towards huge, grandiose titles — and, to be fair, I still am: my other favorites this year were Mass Effect 2, Super Mario Galaxy 2, and Rock Band 3. Looking ahead to next year’s slate of releases, my current must-play list includes Dragon Age II, Portal 2, The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword, The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, and, of course, Mass Effect 3. All big games, all sequels, all plausible Game of the Year nominations.
Part of the appeal of these games lies in their familiarity. New games can mean new mechanics and a higher barrier to entry, but with a major mainstream sequel you can be confident that your skills will transfer over and you’ll hit the ground running. This is invaluable for a lapsed hardcore gamer with limited time and money; I would never have bought Civilization V if I hadn’t already internalized the gameplay from the previous four iterations.
At the same time, though, I’m increasingly excited by small- to medium-sized games because of their capacity for innovation. Recently, for example, I’ve been playing the goofy item shop sim Recettear and the nightmarishly difficult platformer Super Meat Boy. Like Costume Quest, these games are familiar enough to be approachable but novel enough to feel fresh. They can afford to take risks that are precluded by the demands of larger projects. Recettear in particular is the kind of bizarre idea that could only work on a smaller scale, and I’m grateful that it found its niche.
So while I’m still going to tackle blockbuster releases next year, I hope to play more of the smaller games as well. They, I think, are the best antidote to homogeneity.
This week I’m on the Brainy Gamer podcast talking games music with two of my favorite writers, Michael Abbott and Kirk Hamilton. The three of us discuss some of our favorite and not-so-favorite soundtracks (with audio samples!) and generally have a good time geeking out. I hope you enjoy it!
During the recent Vintage Game Club playthrough I found Super Mario 64’s Lethal Lava Land a bit dull, even though I remembered enjoying it the first time. This was my best guess as to why:
I think part of the reason I wasn’t so keen on it is that I’m a better 3D gamer now than I was in 1996. This level is all about teaching precision. Indeed, one of the most fun parts of the level is trying to rebound after falling into the lava — you have to nudge a burning Mario onto weird S-shaped blocks and thin pyramidical platforms with lava lapping at the sides and shrinking the landing area. However, if you just land the jumps, there’s really not much going on here. There are a couple of mildly interesting areas (the red coin puzzle, the spinning doughnut around the volcano, the log) but it’s mostly the same precision jumping test over and over.
(For the uninitiated: if Mario falls into the lava, two things happen. First, he bounces twenty feet into the air with his butt on fire, at which point you must maneuver him over dry ground before he lands. Next, he spends two or three seconds running at top speed while you frantically attempt to keep him from falling back in.)
Failure in video games often means hitting a wall. Can’t beat the boss? Grind some more. Can’t time the jump over the bottomless pit? Try again. If you’re lucky, or if your mistake wasn’t so bad, you might only suffer some setback — losing your rings in Sonic the Hedgehog, say, or your weapons in Contra. All of these are at best mildly annoying and at worst frustrating. The Lethal Lava Land case is interesting because the game is actually more fun if you mess up. The level is designed around a clever mechanic that skilled players won’t experience.
Another example: the most innovative feature of EarthBound’s battle system is its HP counter. When you take damage, the digits spin like the display of an old-fashioned gas pump. If you’re doing well, it just looks like a neat visual effect. If you’re routinely getting your characters killed, though, you quickly figure out that they don’t actually die until the counter reaches 0. That is, if you can navigate through the menus quickly enough, you can heal them before the HP counter finishes spinning. It’s an inspired addition to an otherwise vanilla turn-based battle system, and one you only see when you get killed.
What are the design implications here? It’s hard to say. Instinctively it seems like good practice to present as much content as possible to as many players as possible — and to be fair, you’d have be pretty damn good at EarthBound to never touch 0 HP — but that hardly seems like a necessary condition for success. Also, in every example I can think of the “fun” failure mechanic coexists with more traditional ones: you can still die and lose progress in Mario 64, or need to grind XP in EarthBound.
I would say that as long as mistakes are not frustrating you’re headed in the right direction, regardless of how many players see what that looks like. If you can make screwing up entertaining in its own right, that’s gravy.
If Super Mario 64 was a bad game, I would not have noticed in 1996. My critical faculty, such as it was at the age of nine, stood no chance against my first exposure to 3D graphics; I was wholly enthralled from the first scene, and the game has remained unassailable in my memory ever since.
This past month I replayed Super Mario 64 with the Vintage Game Club and, no longer blinded by its novelty, developed a more considered opinion. I still found the game as enjoyable as ever, though, and even found some new elements to appreciate.
One thing I never gave Mario 64 credit for until now is its humor, which permeates virtually every aspect of the game. Most obvious, perhaps, is the sound design: the echoey pitter-patter of footsteps, the surprised squawk of the Goombas, Charles Martinet’s famously frenetic voice work. (I particularly love the intro’s juxtaposition of the classic warp pipe sound effect with Mario’s gleeful “Yahoo!” as he explodes into frame.) Then there are the animations: Mario skidding to a halt, sticking the landing of a backflip, or getting pancaked by a Thwomp. Even the physics are pure cartoon slapstick: jump into a wall and Mario will bounce off; attempt to keep moving, and he’ll run in place for a moment before regaining his forward momentum. Later 3D Mario games have deemphasized humor somewhat, but Mario 64 was such a landmark title that its influence lingers on.
I also noticed that the game goes to curious lengths to realize its world. Consider the staircase from the balcony to the second floor. From a gameplay perspective, it’s completely extraneous; there is literally nothing in there except stairs, so the door could have led directly to the top floor. However, it does help the player develop a three-dimensional mental map of the castle — something that few people would have experience doing when Super Mario 64 was released. Combine this with the “non-standard” exits that some levels have (falling from the sky might drop you from high above the castle, while getting carried away by a river might wash you up in the moat), and it seems clear that Nintendo wanted an illusion of contiguity that went deeper than the overworlds of Super Mario Bros. 3.
For some reason I was particularly interested in level design this playthrough. As fans will remember, the lion’s share of Mario 64’s levels use a proto-open world design focused around exploration. (More specifically, the favorite blueprint du jour is what I referred to in VGC discussions as the “based around a big thing” design — put up a big mountain or tower with a couple of stars on top, and then surround it with odds and ends to house the remaining stars.) As David Carlton has pointed out, the open-world focus makes Mario 64 something of an evolutionary aberration; look at Galaxy or Galaxy 2 and you’ll see a far more linear design derived from 2D platformers. It may be that Mario 64’s level design has had a more lasting influence on Grand Theft Auto and Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater than on later games in its own series.
With the benefit of fourteen years of hindsight, it’s amazing how close Nintendo came to nailing 3D platforming on the first try. There are quibbles to be had (notably the camera and the lackluster puzzles), but the fundamentals are so solid that they seem somehow inevitable in retrospect, as though 3D Mario could not have been done in any other way. (Imagine if Galaxy had overhauled the jumping controls to be more accessible.) Even now that I’m no longer under its spell, I’d still argue that Super Mario 64 is one of the most overwhelmingly successful game design experiments Nintendo has ever created.
Chris Dahlen earlier today, in a post entitled “The World of Recurring Characters”:
When you think of worldbuilding, you probably think of a herculean task of history-writing, and character-making, and map-drawing. You think of the legendary show bible at Lost or the deep lore of a game like Morrowind. We know that this stuff makes worlds. I mean, you’re practically doing it brick by brick.
But I want to approach the problem the other way: what is the least you can do to make a world? What are the fewest things you need to add to make a story feel like a world?
The post is about the television series Avatar: The Last Airbender, but this is a salient question for game development too — creating assets is expensive, so doing more with less is always advantageous.
Chris is right to look at recurring characters, I think, but I’d argue there’s more to it than that. For example, I was rereading Dickens’ Great Expectations a couple of months ago and was struck by this passage:
As I stood opposite to Mr. Pocket, Junior, delivering him the bags, One, Two, I saw the starting appearance come into his own eyes that I knew to be in mine, and he said, falling back,—
“Lord bless me, you’re the prowling boy!”
“And you,” said I, “are the pale young gentleman!”
Herbert Pocket appears in a scene years earlier, but does not introduce himself; until now, our narrator Pip has simply referred to him as “the pale young gentleman.” This is common practice for Dickens. Many of his major characters have either a recurring description or a quirky catchphrase, which is an effective (if potentially ham-fisted) way to make them memorable.
The real brilliance of this passage, though, is in Herbert’s similarly reductive description of Pip as “the prowling boy.” With this one line of dialogue, Dickens turns his little characterization trick on its head; we’re given a glimpse of the unwritten story in which Herbert is the protagonist. In short, it establishes that the other characters have lives and thoughts of their own when Pip isn’t looking.
Games, even great ones, often come up short in this regard. Worlds are made of people; if NPCs are “created” instead of written, no amount of backstory will give them the believability and humanity of the best characters in other media.
Yesterday I attended the third annual Boston GameLoop, a self-organizing conference held by and for local game developers. The day began with little more than a large blank whiteboard; we spent the first hour proposing session topics, voting on each others’ proposals, and filling out a schedule with the most popular ideas. The rest of the day was devoted to the sessions themselves, which ranged from game demos to introductory lectures to lively roundtable discussions.
This structure worked fantastically. Virtually all of the talks were top-notch, and the signal-to-noise ratio was so high that it I was mentally exhausted by the end of the conference.
These are the sessions I attended:
- “Dialog As Gameplay” by Chris Barney (Family Education Network)
- “Game Journalism and Criticism” by Chris Dahlen (Kill Screen)
- “Narrative Design” by Clara Fernández-Vara (Singapore-MIT GAMBIT Game Lab)
- “Drawing the Player In: Agency In Game Worlds” by Seth Rosen (Maximum Extreme Games)
- “Interactive Metaphor” by Ben Cummings (Mythic Entertainment)
Even if I wanted to I don’t think I could give a play-by-play of each session; there was far too much going on to take notes. Instead, I thought I would outline my three biggest takeaways:
BioWare is king of the narrative space. Almost every discussion I had (or heard) about narrative circled back to BioWare at some point, and the comments were almost universally positive. Even ostensibly unrelated conversations would suddenly, inexplicably, veer towards a BioWare game. The only other company that came close to that level of mindshare was Irrational Games — people still love their BioShock ruminations, especially when the developers are present — but in my perception there was really no contest. I’m glad I got to the Mass Effect games earlier this summer!
Lots of our problems can be traced back to limited resources. I’ve thought about this topic before, but the discussions at GameLoop helped to drive the point home. The issue has never been that developers prefer to implement “meaningless” choices, or to rely on a stilted binary between good and evil; it is that, given finite time and money for a narrative-driven game, there is an inverse relationship between the number of choices that can be offered and the impact of those choices. Similarly, there is no shortage of gamers capable of intelligent criticism, and no one honestly believes that regurgitating PR is great journalism — but there is a shortage of professional opportunities, and of developers willing to grant writers access. We make do with what we have.
Things are getting better. The inevitable kvetching aside, people generally seemed to think we were headed in the right direction in every session I attended. Dialog systems are more engaging, quality games writing is more common (though some have trouble finding it), and the importance of narrative design is more widely acknowledged than ever before. Even the rarefied discussion in the “Interactive Metaphor” session allowed that art games are taken somewhat more seriously than in the past. Perhaps all this was due to the infectious enthusiasm of the indie scene, but I left GameLoop feeling more optimistic about the industry than I have in some time.
A year and a half ago I wrote a post highlighting some favorite bass parts from Sonic games. One of the pieces, the Spring Yard Zone theme, had a bizarre harmonic quirk that I couldn’t quite put my finger on. Since I just wanted to write about cool bass lines, though, I didn’t try to figure it out; I made some handwave about “harmonic ambiguity” and moved on without so much as determining the key.
Well, it’s time I tried to give the Spring Yard Zone theme its due.
Here’s a transcription, pieced together one voice at a time using Audio Overload (click for a larger image):
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Ignoring the intro for the moment, our form is a repeating AB with two eight-bar sections: bars 2-9 are in D minor, and bars 10-17 are in F, its relative major. (As with all Sonic songs, the intro does not recur.)
There is nothing harmonically unusual about the B section; it begins after an unresolved dominant chord in measure 9 and remains staunchly diatonic until it cadences back to D minor in measure 16. Piece of cake!
Let’s look closer at the A section. The lack of coincident, easily analyzed chords in measures 2-3 forces us to collapse the arpeggios to suss out the harmony. Doing so gives us the pitches D, F, A, C, and E, which spells out Dm9. It’s slightly messy, but not a huge theoretical stretch.
Measure 4 is where things get interesting. The melody here is a sequence of measure 2, but it is a real sequence: it maintains the same intervallic relationships and therefore does not respect the key signature. Since the sequence brings up all of the pitches by a major second, we get a raised third (F♯) and a raised sixth (B♮).
Wait, what?
The sixth and seventh scale degrees in a minor key are flexible thanks to the variations between natural, harmonic, and melodic minor, but the third is usually sacrosanct; it is the scale degree which makes the key identifiably minor. How do we justify an F♯ in the key of D minor?
I have an idea. Collapsing measure 4′s arpeggios gives us the pitches E, B, D, and F♯, which is a ninth chord minus the third; I’m going to assume it’s Em9, since the alternative forces us to infer a tritone (G♯) as well. Measure 5 is unmistakably a dominant chord, with a bit of augmented flavor thanks to an F — enharmonically E♯ — in the melody.
That “analysis,” if you’ll buy it, yields the progression im9 | iim9 V7, which looks far less unfamiliar. It’s unusual for minor keys to borrow from their parallel majors (outside of Picardy endings), but I think that’s exactly what’s happening here — the turnaround is borrowed wholesale from the key of D.
Why does this work? I suspect that years of jazz and pop harmony have trained our ears to accept all kinds of modifications to ii-V-I chords: sevenths, tritone substitutions, altered chords, and so on. Given that context, using m9 in place of m7♭5 doesn’t seem like such a big deal. The Spring Yard Zone theme does push its luck, as it were, by prominently featuring the F♯ in the melody, but I found that to be a pleasant dissonance and not an ugly one.
(And if one crackpot harmonic theory isn’t enough, here’s another: though it only uses two voices in contrary motion, I hear the one-bar intro as a quick Andalusian cadence (general form i ♭VII ♭VI V; think “Hit the Road Jack” or “Anji”) that gets averted at the last moment. If we let A-A stand in for A minor, G-B for G major, and F-C for F major, we get the first three chords of the progression in the key of A minor. We would then expect to see E-D to imply E7, but instead we get E-C♯ — which acts as the dominant for the true key of D minor.)
That’s all I’ve got on this one. If anyone has a cleaner analysis, I’m all ears.
When I began reading Tom Bissell’s new book Extra Lives: Why Video Games Matter, I wanted very badly for him to answer the question posed in his subtitle. In particular I wanted something I could recommend to non-gamers that would be accessible but literary, informed but not transparently fanboyish: an evangelical silver bullet.
And although it is largely successful, Extra Lives occasionally lapses into a fervent enthusiasm that felt at best self-indulgent and at worst alienating. Reading from the perspective of a curious non-gamer I imagined myself tossing the book aside, giving up on the medium once and for all.
Consider, for example, this protracted explanation of the “special infected” zombies in Left 4 Dead:
These special infected come in five nightmare flavors: the Hunter (a hoodied zombie who pounces upon and then tears into his prey, rendering the pouncee helpless until a friend comes along to shoot or push the Hunter off); the Smoker (a coughing, shambolic, elastically tongued zombie who operates much like a sniper, extending his tongue to pluck survivors from the pack); the Boomer (an obese and suppurating slob zombie who is as fragile and explosive as a Pinto but whose vomit and bile attract the dreaded horde, and whose vomit, on top of that, is blinding, so that during a well-coordinated attack you cannot see the Hunter tearing to pieces your screaming friend right in front of you); the Tank (as advertised, a steroidally distended zombie as tough as an armored car, but who mercifully appears only a few times a game); and, finally, the Witch (a crying lost-soul zombie who seems the very picture of helplessness, until she is startled by a flashlight or loud noise, upon which she uses her razored manicure to instantly kill the survivor who startled her, and whom you must try to sneak past, and who is as upsetting and inspired a video game character as any). (pp. 43-44)
The level of detail here was mildly cringeworthy on first reading (as it was in a couple of similar passages), but listening to Bissell read the passage aloud at a book signing event was mortifying. Nothing, I thought, could be less affirming of video games’ importance than a minutes-long dialectic — for it seemed even longer when I was forced to listen — on the particulars of zombies.
So: why include it, then? Bissell could have written something with the high-level accessibility of “Painkiller Deathstreak,” a gee-whiz look at video games from Nicholson Baker in the August 9 New Yorker, but he chose not to. If his intention was to convince people that video games matter, why draw attention to their puerile side?
The answer is that “why video games matter” is only half of Bissell’s concern in Extra Lives; the other half, which he says was cut from the subtitle, is “why video games don’t matter more.” During his appearance on the Brainy Gamer podcast, he explains how difficult it was to balance these goals: “On the one hand you want to make people who aren’t convinced [about video games mattering], convinced. And on the other hand you want to tell people who are convinced that their case isn’t as good as they think it is.”
Encouraging two separate groups to reach opposing conclusions is no mean feat, and it’s a wonder that Extra Lives succeeds at all. But I think it does — at least, it articulates the ambivalence I’ve sometimes felt while championing the medium. I can’t say how effective it’s been for the unconvinced, but closing the gap between us will be important if we’re to have meaningful discussions in the future.
The recent announcement of Dragon Age 2 has gotten some spectacularly vehement reactions from fans of the series. “Is Dragon Age 2 the End of BioWare as a Traditional RPG Creator?” asked fan site Greywardens.com. “I beleive [sic] this can easily be considered the worst thing to happen in Dragon Age history, including the Blight,” lamented one poster on the BioWare message boards.
The majority of the complaints are decrying what fans see as a Mass Effect-like restructuring of the Dragon Age model — their particular concerns being the voice-acted player character, the dialog wheel, and the protagonist’s immutable name and race.
By now I’ve developed an affinity for both franchises, so I myself am not terribly worked up. More to the point, though, the ability to play as an elf is no more central to my Dragon Age experience than the shape of the dialog presentation is to my enjoyment of Mass Effect. The key difference, without which I will be upset, is the approach to morality.
In the Mass Effect system, your words and actions earn you “Paragon” or “Renegade” points, which approximately map to “good” and “evil” respectively. Unlike previous RPGs such as Fable (or BioWare’s own Knights of the Old Republic), these are not represented as opposing ends of a spectrum with one canceling out the other; instead, each score is tracked independently, meaning that no one will think less of the virtuous hero for socking the occasional TV reporter in the face.
Because of Mass Effect’s enormous scope, your Paragon and Renegade scores are an abstraction of how the galaxy perceives Shepard. You can earn Renegade points for everything from making sarcastic comments to setting people on fire, but their contribution to your total Renegade score will have a more potent effect than your handling of those individual situations. In essence, your actions and dialog choices reveal what sort of person Shepard might be, and the game extrapolates from there to fill out the rest of her personality.
There are some unpleasant side effects to this approach, however. Most obviously, the impacts of otherwise ambiguous moral choices are diluted when there is invisible arbiter judging your actions. Late in the game there is a mission where Shepard is effectively forced to choose between brainwashing and murder. It’s presented as an agonizing dilemma, but in retrospect it’s not; the game doles out Paragon points for the former and Renegade for the latter, clearing up any confusion about which path was the “righteous” one.
Another issue is that because some dialog options and missions are only available for characters with a high Paragon or Renegade score, it is preferable from a gameplay perspective to maximize one score instead of balancing both. And since the relevant dialog choices are mapped to particular spots on the wheel, it’s easy to short-circuit your roleplaying experience by clicking in the same spot during every conversation.
Dragon Age neatly sidesteps these issues by eschewing moral absolutism. Your decisions are only given weight by the approval or disapproval of others, and you can only predict those by understanding their backgrounds, motives, and personalities. There is no general consensus on whether your character is a good or bad person; you must earn your reputation separately with everyone you meet. It is possible, and even likely, that your actions will make you a pariah when judged by one moral code and a hero when judged by another.
I don’t mean to suggest that Dragon Age 2 ought to use this exact system, or that Mass Effect 3 ought to adopt it — certainly every approach comes with its own set of issues. But for me, the messy case-by-case morality is what makes roleplaying in Dragon Age interesting. It feels more dynamic, and more effectively represents shades of gray. As long as they can maintain that I’m happy to trust BioWare with whatever alchemy they’re planning.
