Settling the Score – what does the music in games do?

February 5, 2012 by 3 Comments

After viewing Dak0ta this week in class, I started thinking more about the role music plays in a narrative.

Specifically, video games.

The way the music from Dak0ta accompanied the fast paced scrolling of the text really emphasized the intensity of the story.  Without the bouncy jazz music, my impression would have been a lot different.  Watching it without music made Dak0ta seem a lot more confusing and disjointed.  In my opinion, the music really brought it full circle and sealed the author’s intent.

 

Video game music works in the same way.  Imagine a video game without music.  There are some out there, but their lack of music is deliberate, such as in Limbo.  The sound director for  Limbo says  that: “For me it has a much bigger psychological impact when you turn a naturalistic soundscape into abstraction by making your sound effects play as “music” rather than adding some traditional background music.” (source).  A lot of players need music to feel as if they’re really immersed in their virtual environment.

I wanted to talk about four different types of music that I’ve noticed in popular games and what it does for the player.

 

1. Battle music

The song in the video is from one of my personal favorite franchises, the Legend of Zelda.  It’s played during small-scale battles with various creatures that you run into and evokes an intense feeling of adrenaline.  The fast paced tempo accompanied with notes that seem to flutter and “jump” around really solidify the idea of a fight.  Once this music kicks on, it takes you from a state of neutral exploration to one of desperation and survival.

2. Scenery/Setting changes

Arguably the best music of it’s time, Super Mario 3 has a great score that really takes you to a different world.  In this video, the Underwater theme sounds as if it’s actually being listened to while you’re in water.  It kicks on when you go from land to sea, thereby changing the perspective of the player from one of land-based play to that of underwater, which uses a different style of controls.  The music helps to transition from one setting to another.

 

3. “Hey, this is important”  or “you did something awesome”

Skyrim contains such a vast amount of possibilities and quest lines that no doubt was it difficult to construct a specific score.  However, during dragon battles, a totally new type of music begins.  While this example is similar to example one, there are differences.  As the Dovahkiin, your biggest mission in the game is to eliminate the dragon threat.  Every dragon battle is essentially a boss fight and they are very important to furthering the main storyline of the game.  The end, where you defeat the dragon (not included in this video) produces a loud crescendo that signifies your victory and accumulation of the dragon’s soul.  A lot of games use music that is seemingly louder and more intense to show an important event in the storyline.

 

4. Suspense or fear

I’m not particularly a fan of horror games (in short, they scare me) but I recognize the importance that their soundtrack has.  The feeling of fear that creepy string music produces only adds to the creepiness of the gameplay itself.  Lots of games (such as F.E.A.R and Resident Evil) use this technique to signify that something scary is about to happen.

 

 

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Forces of Habit: Brain Worms in LIMBO

January 24, 2012 by 1 Comment

When I was a kid, I played the old Mario and Sonic platformers a lot. The old 2-D, sidescrolling ones, where plot wasn’t really an issue and you just sort of moved through levels because they were there. My friends and I even had a joke:

“How do you beat a sidescroller?”

“Hold right.”

Ten years later, and bam: I’m playing LIMBO. And suddenly holding right doesn’t sound very appealing anymore.

LIMBO is a creepy game, and one of the first things it does is force you to question your instincts as a gamer to constantly move to the right as soon as you start. It is a game that even goes so far as to punish you for doing so, a game that asserts from very early on that if you continue to progress as convention has trained you, you are going to die. Or drown. Or get sawed up. It is only through backtracking, stopping, and thinking about your surroundings as a whole that you’re able to advance, and only through your exercise of the freedom afforded to you that you’re able to succeed. LIMBO essentially forces you to consider your avatar (a young, nameless protagonist who looks eerily like a silhouetted Calvin, minus the Hobbes) not as a detached and passive psuedo-Mario figure, as is the convention, but rather as a vehicle through which you can interact with and redefine your environment. In short, a vehicle that represents yourself.

However, as soon as LIMBO teaches you to do all of the above, it turns the system around and strips you of everything it’s worked to open your eyes to by introducing a mechanic just as simple as it is sinister:

Brain worms.

They’ll drop down and burrow into your head, zombify you, and force you to march whether you like it or not. After all the pains LIMBO goes through to teach you to question direction, progress, and mindless playing, it forces it back on you, and as a player, you’ll find that you will not like it one bit. All of a sudden you’re no longer questioning or interacting. You no longer have any control. You can’t explore. You can’t brace yourself against death through careful forethought or planning, and it’s almost as if LIMBO is saying, “Hey, you. Gamer. You remember that linear way you used to consider all the sidescrollers you’ve ever played? Well, why don’t you go back to that for a bit and tell me what you think.”

If it weren’t for the brain worm mechanic, I don’t think LIMBO would be anything more than an ordinary puzzle game. But the fact that LIMBO’s developers chose to go out of their way to point out, multiple times, that having mindless directions imposed on you once you’ve gotten used to exploring on your own isn’t any fun, proves that they’re trying to tell you something. Namely, that LIMBO is challenging its predecessors as well as the conventions of its medium, and challenging you as a gamer to go back to the accepting, detached way you used to play sidescrollers as a kid, to see if that still feels fun.

And suddenly holding right doesn’t sound very appealing anymore.

 

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