Category: Audio&Games

Games are so potent because the underlying content is a platform for multiplayer storytelling, rather than a linear narrative.

Nah, the multiplayer storytelling is attractive and fun, not potent. Games are so potent these days because they optimize every psychological tricks known and discovered through social media and web games (Farmville) in the early 2010s.

Publishers, developers have leveraged that knowledge and it is lucrative as hell with generations who don’t know anything else.

GaaS is just Pachinko business. Buy tokens, get into the slot machine vibe, boom. All the spectacular numbers we hear about gaming today are thanks to whales that we exploit nurture as much as possible.

Games haven’t changed much if at all in twenty years. But gaming has, dramatically.

Game development is in dire need of candid conversations. It’s suffocating these days.

For instance, game development’s average career is now five years.

How dare we call that a career? Like what in the actual fuck five years are going to do for one’s life? And you go to a game design school for a 3-year degree, $30K in debt for that? How ludicrous it is that we simply turn our heads away from such a terrible deal that is the reality for the padawans out there? My god.

Gaming was worth $7.8B in 2000. It is now worth $180B.

That’s 23 times more in 20 years, and careers are shorter than ever???? Make THAT make sense. Wait don’t, it absolutely doesn’t make sense at all.

We very much need those conversations.

I did read about the Blizzard Activision stuff. It’s rather awful, it’s rather a bit everywhere in this industry and I don’t know how this could change at this point.

If the biggest studios at the highest levels allow and hide those stories from Blizzard to Ubisoft, that this is also happening in indie spheres as well, for years and years, it looks like it’s a wrap. Bad apples stay anyway. This is endemic.

It’s really hard to look at  the outside of game culture —progressive, humble, inclusive—and realize that inside it’s conservative, arrogant and dismissive to 11.

It’s painful to look back at how much time I spent caring so much about this medium. *puts on red nose*

Interesting move from Valve.

I see a big issue in terms of market.

Two categories here: broke people, and not broke people. There is pretty much nothing else.

Broke people already have their portable game device and probably will not buy a new one at that price.

Not broke people probably own most of all the current portable game device options. They can afford to try a $400 portable console that allows them to play the games they’ve been already playing on big monitors or powerful laptops but the truth is, it’s not necessary for them. They might become Steam Deck ambassadors.

Steam Deck is a luxury gaming accessory. In this economy, in this uncertainty, in this panny? Bold move.

Then there’s of course the issues with software compatibility, fixing a machine that has built-in controllers and storage upgrades.

Good luck.

Ha, the classic question. If you look at most games of the past twenty years, you will find two genres in videogame music: orchestra and bleep bloop. There are also basically two feels in videogame music: serious as fuck and whimsical as hell. Yes, you might have the quirky Lo-Fi Hip-Hop loop in the in-game’s shop or the jazzy nostalgic music in the game menu but overall let’s be real: videogame music follows the most rigid aesthetic and in general never really expanded, ever.

Which is why we’re collectively wondering regularly about what videogame music can be. Short answer: everything.

I grouped the most interesting —most liked— answers to Alex’s question.

That’s definitely out of the usual. There is some in Guacamelee but sadly they added 8bit stuff (I have a hard time with SQUARE leads, always had) and electronica on top of it.

Two things: boldness of an aesthetic statement VS game development ultra pragmatism

Game development is insane, with a million things to deal with. Aesthetic boldness is usually expressed through graphics, while music and sound design will be aesthetically “following”, that is, they will be pretty much as boringly expected as possible. Let’s take the example of a “serious” space-themed game. You will have Vangelis type of background music because that’s what everyone in the team will want and settle on. Because it is a safe choice. Games are so complicated to make that they become even more a team’s baby than any other creative output I’ve seen. Therefore taking risks, making bold aesthetic statements like adding some jazz that only two folks in the team feel, will not be done. Even if the public might absolutely love it.

It doesn’t matter that in this example you could say “Cowboy Bebop did it and it works so wonderfully people still talk about it 20+ years later”. If the lead programmer or creative director believes that it’s wrong or that it would only work in anime (or that he/she hates anime), then it’s not happening. There’s never much iteration on music genres in games, if at all. I mean probably at Nintendo, but you know by now that they are the exception (and the metric we’re still humbly trying to match).

SO TRUE. All the technical excellence and overall quality of music can be easily forgotten if you can’t hum something you heard sometimes for hundreds of hours. Nintendo is the King at this. I can hum many of their leitmotif coming to me randomly, decades later (water level in Mario64, I don’t know why). Nintendo always cared.

Music is never thought as an integral part of western game development, it’s always just a layer put on top. Therefore balancing things out cannot be done because it is already far too late and game designers have already moved on to (way bigger) problems. Western game development doesn’t care about music like that. Just slap a big composer name if you can, fade out the music if you can (or just abruptly end it), done. I wish it would change, for sure.

This happens actually quite a lot, it’s just that most people don’t notice :) We have complex game audio engines today (FMOD-Wwise) taking care of that. Why is it usually a bit dull or in the background? Because sudden changes in audio is not a good feeling nor good design. Our ears simply don’t like that. It needs to flow and be fluid. Now, wouldn’t it be cool if we could mute/unmute tracks within the music? Yes it would, but it’s asking the game audio engines to deal with huge amounts of audio data to move around very quickly and, games being EXTREMELY sensitive to anything impairing performance, it’s basically never worth it. Could we do that with less data, with say a MIDI track muting/unmuting MIDI channels? Yes, but it’s still a lot of work and a complex one: it’s a blend of music composing, game integration and iteration with level design to see what works best and what does not. It’s also an aesthetic issue: not every music genre works well with MIDI-only, and telling composers to not worry about their raw audio output is heretic.

The world of audio and music likes to stay rigid and is quite often, conservative. Which is very much the opposite of how games are developed: it’s all about finding new ways to do something better, hacking and tweaking your ways through it.

GIRL. I wish that too! I thought it was obvious that this was needed. I can’t believe —yet it makes sense that we still mention twenty year old games thanks to their music.

Funk is inherently a playful genre of music that Japanese composers have rightfully started to incorporate in their 80s and 90s games and on (I can’t remember which arcade game has straight James Brown samples in it, but yeah). Funk became the backbone of R&B which became known as K-Pop in the late 2000s, go figure.

It has to be said: in the western world of game development, composing that type of breakbeat/funky stuff music is not really considered composing. You compose music only if there are cellos and timpanis otherwise you still compose music but. Anyway.

Vocal samples are to me one of the most iconic and unique aspect of game audio. It’s what made arcades so amazing: those funny, energetic sounding machines, that digital laugh, the corny lines, blasting in sync with flashing lights and screens. It’s all fun and part of the culture. Who doesn’t have a “it’s me Mario” or a “Heavy Machine Gun!” popping up in their minds from time to time, I know I do.

Right! It’s super hard to do. Not so much to sync audio and gameplay, though that can be tricky, but to make a rhythm-based gameplay interesting and not feel like a fad after two minutes. Also it needs to never break and that’s where things usually fall apart. If few games have done that, it’s because it doesn’t work very well.

Dear game developers: people LOVE music diversity. Please offer it, hire folks who can do that (shameless plug: I CAN) don’t deny it for things like “I personally don’t like that stuff so it shouldn’t be in the game I work on”.

I just started watching a new game, Scarlet Nexus. The game begins with slow jazzy, sad chords on a solo piano for the main screen and the first mission starts with fast pop-ish, dubstep-ish house music. And then contemplative breakbeat in slow moments. And of course, it’s all working and exciting and fun and dope.

Why this seems impossible to  create in a western development team, I don’t know but let’s change that.

Oh, the game audio scene LOVES diegetic music. That’s film school influence. I feel like it happens often enough to not be something lacking in games, but I can see how it could be happening more often or in a more subtle way.

The thing that we need to keep in mind with game music: we can do everything. Aesthetically, technically, there are basically no limits besides our own.

He was, as he puts it, “a liberal-arts nobody with no coding skills or direct industry experience, thrown onto arguably the most accomplished and leading-edge videogame production team ever assembled. It’s hard to explain how unlikely that was, and how fish-out-of-water I felt.” Nevertheless, there he was — and System Shock was all the better for his presence.

On System Shock, a remarkable and very important 90s game.

It’s just interesting to read that, as this would never happen today. People with all the skills don’t get hired nowadays.

Here, then, we come to the fatal flaw that undermines almost all applications of this argument. Its proponents would seemingly have you believe that the games of which they speak are rhetorically neutral sandboxes, exact mirror images of some tangible objective reality. But this they are not. Even if they purport to “simulate” real events to one degree or another, they can hope to capture only a tiny sliver of their lived experience, shot through with the conscious and subconscious interests and biases of the people who make them. These last are often most clearly revealed through a game’s victory conditions, as they are in the case of Colonization. To play Colonization the “right” way — to play it as the designers intended it to be played — requires you to exploit and subjugate the people who were already in the New World millennia before your country arrived to claim it. Again, then, we’re forced to confront the fact that every example of a creative expression is a statement about its creators’ worldview, whether those creators consciously wish it to be such a thing or not. Labeling it a simulation does nothing to change this.

The handling — or rather non-handling — of slavery by Colonization is an even more telling case in point. By excising slavery entirely, Colonization loses all claim to being a simulation of real history to any recognizable degree whatsoever, given how deeply intertwined the Peculiar Institution was with everything the game does deign to depict.

Jimmy Maher, at it again, being such a treat to read.

“A creative expression is a statement about its creators’ worldview”. Very powerful and very true. It is the reason why creators have to expand their knowledge, to go broad rather than deep but I digress.

Game developers still don’t do a great job at grasping consequences and outcomes. It’s not a surprise that we talk so much more about tools and new tech or production than morality, gameplay and what kind of fictional reality game developers create for their players.

Spending all kinds of energy to avoid accountability doesn’t scream maturity.

Guile looking like he spittin spittin.

Dhalsim about to DROP it.

Chun li playing fat bass lines on her Moog.

Zangief definitely on some Chicago House mix.

Hip Hop was created by creative, poor young black men in America in the 70s.

Video games were created by creative, wealthy young white men in America in the 70s.

Hip Hop immediately became a cultural behemoth and was already HUGE at the start of the 80s.

Video games immediately became a cultural behemoth and were already HUGE at the start of the 80s.

Hip Hop became a massive, international, multi-billion dollar market by the end of the 90s.

Video games became a massive, international, multi-billion dollar market by the end of the 90s.

Very few white men made a career as Hip Hop artists.

Very few black men made a career as Video games artists.

Hip Hop has always mostly dismissed women working in it.

Video games have always mostly dismissed women working in it.

Both added to and shaped our cultural worlds for the past four decades. It’s interesting how they couldn’t have been more diametrically opposed from the start, yet followed *exactly* the same successful path while they both culturally convey the same exclusive club thing that is so part of their identities. Dude’s stuff I guess?

I’ve always wanted more.

If there’s something extremely consistent with online worlds and communities, is that they get big and always end up being unmanageable.

Even with the best people, the best intentions, the best dev team, the most experience, the less friction.

It *always* happens. And then it’s a mess of decisions and counter-decisions to attempt to fix “the problem”. And it never gets fixed, really.

It’s more than a hard problem. I believe that large scale gathering is just not possible for humans to behave decently in. Especially in virtual worlds where consequences exist but are still virtual.