Freedom and Stagnation in Gaming Music

Nick Weidner writes "Indie music website Pitchforkmedia.com asks, 'What if John Cage had owned an XBox?'. The article compares today's game soundtrack composers to ambient artists such as Brian Eno, and discusses experimental soundtrack techniques with Jesper Kyd (the Hitman series), Peter McConnell (Psychonauts) and Russell Shaw (Black & White, Fable)." Meanwhile over at Wired News they are reporting on the suppression of musical creativity the designers had to build into Star Wars Galaxies, for fear that copyrighted works would be played in the galaxy far, far away. From the article: "If we allowed someone to play anything they want, they could play a song by Madonna and then we'd have licensing issues...We don't want to give them the option to try, because the bottom line is, if we open that gate, they will go through it". The latter situation is a real problem for the substantial population of players who enjoy the non-combat activities that SWG offers. Because all the music that entertainers can play has to be designed by SOE staffers, and 'okayed', there are long periods of time where no new music is introduced to the game. Given that every player has to interact with musicians at some point in their career to heal combat stress, it makes for a grating and uncomfortable experience to constantly be exposed to the same music (for players in both the band and the audience).

Comments

Indie gamer could use a few revisions.

[Anonymous Coward]

"we've reached a stage where console and PC games use hundreds of channels of digital audio delivered in 5.1 surround sound. Obviously you can hear the progress in music games like Parappa the Rapper and Dance Dance Revolution,"

It should be noted that both of these games are 2.0 Stereo mixes. If you want 5.1 surround, you need a 5.1 surround capable system. The PS2 has less than 1% PL2 game support (PaRappa ain't one of them); the GameCube sits in the low 10s, and the Xbox has a decent amount of 5.1 titles (complete with DD/DTS support). However, not even DDR on the Xbox is 5.1 -- it's still 2.0 Stereo.

The article talks up adaptive audio. If you've played OddWorld: Much's Oddsee, you know that adaptive audio can be done very, very poorly. Much worse than just leaving in a static scoring in the background. If you haven't played it, they basically had 32-channels of audio, each layered on each other, and would play a couple of base samples, scaling up to the full effect as you alerted mudokins to your actions. It would scale back on a timer as mudokins were killed or forgot about you. It was the same music every level (30ish levels, IIRC). The scaling was the same every time.

That doesn't make the experience richer, it just reminds me that I'm playing a (poorly thought-out) repetitive game that forces me to follow the same gameplay mechanic over, and over, until I finally give up. It's the same thing which puts me off the latest 40+ hour RPG, which has about 20 hours of actual thinking work, and 20-40 hours of mindlessly watching the fight intro graphic, pointless time-cruncher fights, and then the victory tune.

Amplitude, at least, took the gameplay mechanics of Frequency and made them more fun, even if you couldn't play just any song (slaving your to their choices of Sony censored music). DDR, at least, has original compositions (many Konami artists!) which make it nice. The article could've been a lot better if it'd actually been about game music.

And then there's the fact that the "getting away with murder" radio song is in about 8 games on the Xbox at this point.... I buy video games to avoid most of society, why do they feel the need to jam it into my games?