The relationship between music and videogames is not a rhetorical one, it’s not just an analogy– the language describing it may be, but the various identities are a fact. Structurally, there’s little the two forms don’t have in common. This has design implications– rhythmically, formally, texturally, etc. Most importantly, in practice, both music and games are played– and can be played in very similar ways.
Musical instruments are games, as are compositions. They are possibility spaces with boundaries implicitly or explicitly inviting certain types of play.
And this is in essence, exactly what I feel and felt. I said earlier how I had so much fun playing music that I wasn’t playing computer games as much and felt guilty about it (if you make games, you’re supposed to spend your life on them when you’re not making games, right? Wrong).
So I always wondered, what is it that I don’t like with games? That I never do what they want me to do? Achieve goals. It’s been a constant that when I play, I tend to achieve obvious goals when there’s nothing else to do (fighting games) but as soon as I have freedom, I enjoy it. How many times did I even try to play shoot’em ups without firing a bullet, flowing through enemies waves? Oh man. When you think about it competition is good (or the best), when it’s not really perceived as a competition.
And, it’s true, competitions can reveal amazing seemingly endless vistas to our senses of possibility. This openness points toward the divine. Then– the feeling shuts off when we realize that the possibilities can be ranked by order of their usefulness. We will be more likely to succeed if we behave in certain ways. The problem here is that the conditions of success, and sometimes the methods for achieving success, are pre-determined by the game’s design. The game imposes a value system on our experience. The divine impulse can remain intact only if we’re always open to our inner sense of infinite possibility (which will mean entertaining the less "useful" possibilities).
Exactly what I feel when I record my bass: the game rules are that I need to play at at certain constant volume, be perfectly clean on every single note etc. Even if I still play the same as before, I might not feel the “divine impulse” because of the “recording system” imposing itself. So it will be different and probably not as good. Which is why Miles Davis and so many others just recorded everything in the studio, forgetting about the game rules. Just play with this sense of infinite “possibility” (it’s the best description of this feeling I ever read) and have somebody listen to hours of hours of shit to get the gem, the gem that is the purest form of play.
It explains why sometimes by being invincible in a game you just become good enough that you wouldn’t need the invincibility, you know? Because now you can enter the game flow and perform well, without stressing out about hard rules like dying and starting over again.
What is wrong is the widely-held assumption that these kinds of barriers and motivators are essential to the form of games.
Exactly. For example, in Everyday Shooter you have 7 levels. If you fail at say level 3 you have to start over again at level 1. Why? Because the designer decided that it was this way, old school Japanese arcade style. Artificial barrier against my enjoyment. It’s not a matter of being “hardcore” or being “casual”, if play is everything at the same time. If I want to play level 4, I should. If I’m not good enough for it, let me try it. I do that all the time with music and this is how you progress and enjoy. I can start playing music casually on a slow blues and two hours later you can’t follow the number of notes I’m dropping on a 180bpm solo. That is play to me. Let me do my thing with your game.
Competitive structures have had, and will continue to have, many things to teach us (at best– about valued/loved play processes), but they lack a particular kind of realism that’s wanting in our games right now– playspaces that, as in life (though very differently), allow for the full flourishing of our creative faculties, the active exploration of shifting possibility spaces and the intimacy with the materials that form their boundaries.
*Bumps fist* On a side note, it makes me glad that my game prototype tries to dive in more into that matter. It’s good to see that what makes sense to me but makes me doubt, has some backup from a dude I don’t know but who explains it very well. At least, we’re two!