RE: We chat about videogames and videogame accessories.
07-05-2013, 05:12 AM
I am mostly dead serious. Go back to the exact words I used: “music is treated as this canned prerecorded thing as opposed to this thing that lives”—this is the primary point; the cutting edge of game audio was not afraid to play with that concept before voice acting came along. I don’t think I’ve seen a game more musically capable of film-scoring techniques than Monkey Island 2; Ocarina of Time’s dynamically adjusted overworld music takes a significant portion of the N64’s CPU time to bring you a more responsive experience than the meticulously recorded (and nonstandard-tuned for Celestial Sphere musical qabalah compatibility) orchestras of Skyrim.
First, I do mean it as a prevalent trend, not “it’s going to be bad in every case forever”. The hyperbolic phrasing I used is similar to an assertion that WoW ruined the MMORPG or that GoW ruined the third-person shooter—of course they didn’t! That’s not what they set out to do. But what happened is that they did inspire a lot of clones, which wouldn’t be a problem except that now that’s most of what people make and play in those genres now, to the exclusion of other major variations. When having a certain feature or set of features is so successful that people can’t imagine things any other way, the other ways die off or languish in obscurity for a time. And this is a multi-dimensional problem, by the way; I’m not saying that there is one right way or one wrong way to do things, but that one wrong way to do things is to ape what “everyone” else is already doing, particularly without first understanding why that may or may not be best for what you are doing (in fact, another equally wrong way is to commit the Chesterton’s fence fallacy of changing things without understanding the reasons for the initial state of things, hence the identification of voice acting as a problematic factor).
Now yes, I do think there is room in this world for the music I consider to be a part of the problem. Some of that is very good stuff! The problem is that I just hear this in a not-insignificant proportion of games, and not only is it happening at the expense of tonal music, it’s often done less competently than it is in movies because they don’t adjust for game pacing being player-driven. The problem is that they would rather duck the music track than remove instruments from the mix or be judicious in where they pan things. The problem is that they are not paying due respect to the interplay of music and what is happening on the screen.
I’m actually not making a plea for quality music here (I don’t think any professional game music composer is sitting down and thinking, “I will do my not-best today.”) or for assiduous Nintendo/LucasArts-level attention to detail, even though those things are very nice and wouldn’t hurt; I’m asking for a little more basic scoring techniques, rather than always resorting to the sort of music you could theoretically purchase and throw in. Some of the greatest film scores often sound pretty blah outside the film, because it is only an isolated part of a Gesamtkunstwerk (as long as I’m stealing a lot of thunder from the TUN videos here, which I am).
I think it’s rather telling that the game music you posted has a median release date of 2001-ish. As far as I can tell this general trend really started becoming noticeable around that time. What changed? Well, for one, it was the time for DVD format to shine, and that meant a lot more room for voice clips and prerecorded music—it was possible before, but CDs weren’t big or fast enough in comparison that you’d want to do it as much. In fact, a number of those examples weren’t even remotely being a part of what I consider to be part of the problem, many of the newer examples not being movie-wannabes nor mass market hits.
No, I am concerning myself with the trendy bestsellers that create a large-scale shared cultural context here, of the sort where I can run into another player of these games. I’m well aware there are plentiful exceptions; games like Bastion and Persona 4 are popular, but they aren’t chart-toppingly popular. You look at the chart toppers for the past few years and you see roughly three things in terms of music: a Nintendo/mobile preference for tunes of sufficient melodicity to fill in for a lack of voice acted dialogue*, and a sports/rhythm preference for Billboard spots, a shooter/sandbox/movielike preference for Rick Berman’s “sonic wallpaper” approach.
And the only sonic wallpaper I like concerns the Sega mascot.
* Yes, I have somehow not addressed the causation here, but at this point I’ve spit out a short essay’s worth of drivel and can’t help but feel I’d be wasting people’s time if I do—it’s partly my time being wasted, too, because I would have to dig through a ridiculous amount of research just to demonstrate this, and right now my research time is stuck in trying to get a dynamic music system of my own programmed in the first place. Nevertheless, I am firmly convinced that having the room for CD-quality audio is what’s the cause for temptation to put in voice acting and then not work around that—it’s laziness, it’s time commitments, it’s a lot of things all different in each case, I’m sure. It is, at any rate, not voice acting’s fault that it’s too desirable to leave out, or that it takes so much time to record, or that computers are simply incapable of it. Yet regardless of cause or my own inability to prove things, I am not ashamed to point my finger at it for making games less “watertight” experiences, and part of that is in the audio space where it’s a godmoding gloryhog.
First, I do mean it as a prevalent trend, not “it’s going to be bad in every case forever”. The hyperbolic phrasing I used is similar to an assertion that WoW ruined the MMORPG or that GoW ruined the third-person shooter—of course they didn’t! That’s not what they set out to do. But what happened is that they did inspire a lot of clones, which wouldn’t be a problem except that now that’s most of what people make and play in those genres now, to the exclusion of other major variations. When having a certain feature or set of features is so successful that people can’t imagine things any other way, the other ways die off or languish in obscurity for a time. And this is a multi-dimensional problem, by the way; I’m not saying that there is one right way or one wrong way to do things, but that one wrong way to do things is to ape what “everyone” else is already doing, particularly without first understanding why that may or may not be best for what you are doing (in fact, another equally wrong way is to commit the Chesterton’s fence fallacy of changing things without understanding the reasons for the initial state of things, hence the identification of voice acting as a problematic factor).
Now yes, I do think there is room in this world for the music I consider to be a part of the problem. Some of that is very good stuff! The problem is that I just hear this in a not-insignificant proportion of games, and not only is it happening at the expense of tonal music, it’s often done less competently than it is in movies because they don’t adjust for game pacing being player-driven. The problem is that they would rather duck the music track than remove instruments from the mix or be judicious in where they pan things. The problem is that they are not paying due respect to the interplay of music and what is happening on the screen.
I’m actually not making a plea for quality music here (I don’t think any professional game music composer is sitting down and thinking, “I will do my not-best today.”) or for assiduous Nintendo/LucasArts-level attention to detail, even though those things are very nice and wouldn’t hurt; I’m asking for a little more basic scoring techniques, rather than always resorting to the sort of music you could theoretically purchase and throw in. Some of the greatest film scores often sound pretty blah outside the film, because it is only an isolated part of a Gesamtkunstwerk (as long as I’m stealing a lot of thunder from the TUN videos here, which I am).
I think it’s rather telling that the game music you posted has a median release date of 2001-ish. As far as I can tell this general trend really started becoming noticeable around that time. What changed? Well, for one, it was the time for DVD format to shine, and that meant a lot more room for voice clips and prerecorded music—it was possible before, but CDs weren’t big or fast enough in comparison that you’d want to do it as much. In fact, a number of those examples weren’t even remotely being a part of what I consider to be part of the problem, many of the newer examples not being movie-wannabes nor mass market hits.
No, I am concerning myself with the trendy bestsellers that create a large-scale shared cultural context here, of the sort where I can run into another player of these games. I’m well aware there are plentiful exceptions; games like Bastion and Persona 4 are popular, but they aren’t chart-toppingly popular. You look at the chart toppers for the past few years and you see roughly three things in terms of music: a Nintendo/mobile preference for tunes of sufficient melodicity to fill in for a lack of voice acted dialogue*, and a sports/rhythm preference for Billboard spots, a shooter/sandbox/movielike preference for Rick Berman’s “sonic wallpaper” approach.
And the only sonic wallpaper I like concerns the Sega mascot.
* Yes, I have somehow not addressed the causation here, but at this point I’ve spit out a short essay’s worth of drivel and can’t help but feel I’d be wasting people’s time if I do—it’s partly my time being wasted, too, because I would have to dig through a ridiculous amount of research just to demonstrate this, and right now my research time is stuck in trying to get a dynamic music system of my own programmed in the first place. Nevertheless, I am firmly convinced that having the room for CD-quality audio is what’s the cause for temptation to put in voice acting and then not work around that—it’s laziness, it’s time commitments, it’s a lot of things all different in each case, I’m sure. It is, at any rate, not voice acting’s fault that it’s too desirable to leave out, or that it takes so much time to record, or that computers are simply incapable of it. Yet regardless of cause or my own inability to prove things, I am not ashamed to point my finger at it for making games less “watertight” experiences, and part of that is in the audio space where it’s a godmoding gloryhog.
sea had swallowed all. A lazy curtain of dust was wafting out to sea