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This
Developer’s Life: Music
Dear Reader:
This has been a week of
music. It began with Rise Against and
Rancid and ended with meeting Nobuo Uematsu and hearing the Seattle Symphony
Orchestra play music from Final Fantasy.
I’ve always had a lot to
say about music in games (though I have a lot to say about a lot of things, one
might just say I have a big mouth…) but this week has caused me to reflect
further on the subject. It’s not just
that I think that music is often one of the best places, dollar for dollar, to
spend your development budget; this week again demonstrated how, as a
multi-disciplinary art, we can reach beyond just the world of gaming. Oh, and it totally showed me we’re leaving money
on the table with the way we do music these days.
Rancid/Rise Against:
GO SEE THIS TOUR. I don’t know if you’ll ever get to see
another event quite like it. If you like
punk rock at all, and want to see the only two punk bands in the last twenty years
to make it into the mainstream without compromising any of what they stand for,
this is probably your only chance.
Ok, now that I’m done
shilling, I have something more general to say:
Concerts are always
interesting to me simply in terms of being entertainment events. Like going to sports game or wandering
through the casinos in Vegas, there’s a lot you can learn as a designer from seeing
live music. Juxtaposing this show with
the symphony was fascinating for me. But
for the moment let’s just look at this event.
A lot of the basic rules
of entertainment carry over: the bands knew their audience, understood pacing
(how to manage the interest curve, when to give people a break by cracking out
a slow tune), and got a message across without moralizing (something we tend to
be less good at), but that’s only the tip of the iceberg. Two things really stood out for me:
goldfarming and griefing…
“WHAT!11!” I hear you say.
Let me explain:
1.
At most
larger concerts I end up getting my tickets from scalpers, but I wait until
after the opener starts to play. By this
point they’re desperate to get rid of whatever stock they have remaining rather
than take a loss on it, so I end up getting pit tickets substantially below
retail.
Scalpers are an artificial annoyance and do inflate the price of tickets, but
the perishable nature of their goods limits just how much of an annoyance they
can actually be. I am at this point
convinced that this fact, rather than the statutes prohibiting them, is what
keeps scalping from being an unmanageable problem.
Gold farmers and scalpers do almost the exact same thing, they tie up resources
that were intended for an even distribution and redistribute them in a way that
is perceived as unsporting. Clearly we
can’t make gold perishable but it’s led me to believe that there are design
side solutions to the problem of gold farmering.
2. During
the first part of the Rancid show there was an enormous, corpulent whale of a
man, reeking of the cloying stench of alcohol and sweat who would alternate
between beating on people and falling on them.
Now, of course people get hurt at these shows but it’s because it’s part
of a distillation of anarchic chaos, it’s unintentional. Stepping into the
hurricane is part of the ethos. It adds
to the experience.
(Perhaps equally importantly I’ve never seen someone go down in the pit without
being lifted back up a fraction of a second later by the people around them)
This man on the other hand was simply griefing.
He was there for no other reason than to express his compensation issues
in a consequence free environment (much like the anonymity of online
play). Eventually he was simply hurled
bodily out of the pit and back towards the exit. It’s unfortunate that there’s no good system
for implementing this level of community policing in MMOs.
Nobuo:
The second musical event
I attended this week was Distant Worlds, a concert of Final Fantasy music put
on by the Seattle Symphony Orchestra. It
was an incredible event, with Nobuo Uematsu in attendance…the man’s joy at
music is infectious.
I could go on and on
about the show, but I’d rather cut to the chase and talk about what it taught
me about game music today. But, before I
do: for those of you considering going to Video Games Live or Distant Worlds,
Video Games Live has higher production values (the visuals and the “show” are
much better) but the actual orchestra for Distant Worlds, at least in this
case, was superior.
The concert, especially the
main Final Fantasy theme, made me think about how music in games has evolved
over the last twenty years. What’s
interesting to me is that today we create much larger, more symphonic pieces,
but we don’t produce as many iconic tunes.
In many ways I consider this to be a function of the technology. Back when people were pumping out midi tracks
which could only handle three simultaneous tones composers were forced to
create hummable melodies (or simply fail to create anything compelling at
all).
These days it’s much easier to
write nuanced and rich musical tracks, but we seem to have a tendency to lose that
pop sense that made chiptunes so infectious.
Even if we look at the iconic tracks of today – take the Halo theme for
example – they tend to shy away from multilayered complexity and instead leave
us with an easy melody for the mind to hold on to.
Which is better? I don’t know.
I don’t think there is a “better” in this case. What I do know is that iconic music is part
of a brand. What would James Bond be
without the Bond Theme? What would Star
Wars be without the Imperial March?
If we take these songs
away we take hurt the associated brand.
If we are really looking to create new franchises and introduce new “brands”
into the gamespace it’s probably worth aiming towards the simple and the hummable
from a business perspective rather than trying to craft the perfect “background”
music. That’s my two cents.
Oh, and the few bars of
music in those tunes (Bond/Star Wars) are probably worth more than the entire production
budget of most games…
I’m Out
Talk to you all next
week. If you want to reach me, email me
at Jportnow@gmail.com or bother me on
twitter JamesPortnow.
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