Category: Guest Contribution

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Indie Games Concert – Sat. May 16th 2015 – Paard van Troje (The Hague, The Netherlands)

Indie Games Concert – Sat. May 16th 2015 – Paard van Troje (The Hague, The Netherlands)
Contributed by Than van Nispen tot Pannerden

May 16th 2015 will be the second edition of the ‘Indie Games Concert’. The Hague Residentie Orkest (Residence Orchestra) will play some wonderful compositions from legendary Indie Games, such as Awesomenauts (Sonic Picnic), VVVVVV (Magnus Pålsson), Minecraft (Daniel Rosenfeld – aka C418), Cave Story (Daisuke “Pixel” Amaya) and Machinarium (Tomáš Dvořák – aka Floex).

Part of the Indie Games Concert is an interactive programme with live interactive orchestral music with games such as J.S. Joust and a brand new crowd-game developed by students from HKU (Utrecht University of the Arts).

Tickets and more information can be found at the website of the venue Paard van Troje:
http://www.paard.nl/event/3589/SYMPHONIC-JUNCTION-RESIDENTIE-ORKEST-INDIE-GAMES
and
http://www.dutchgamemusic.nl/indie-games-concert-2015.

Commentary on the American Federation of Musicians with update from Austin Wintory

Commentary on the American Federation of Musicians with update from Austin Wintory
By Ryan Thompson

 

On June 9th, composer Austin Wintory posted a video, announcing that he is facing a $50,000 fine from the AFM (American Federation of Musicians) union of which he is a member.  Wintory shares that because of a lack of a contract between AFM and game developers, “For almost two years now…no union member has been allowed to work on a new video game soundtrack as a result.

…After having successfully recorded the iOS game HORN with AFM musicians, I attempted to do the same with THE BANNER SAGA. The unusable contract forced me elsewhere, and I soon found the remarkable Dallas Wind Symphony. This collaboration happened as a direct result of the AFM’s unusable contract, and I am now being punished for simply doing my job under those circumstances.”

By coincidence, the next day on June 10th, AFM announced that they had reached a new agreement with Microsoft.  That agreement, which was reportedly in talks for 18 months, allows for the sort of buyout that the game industry was pushing for.  It did not address all of Wintory’s concerns (to say nothing of his $50,000 fine — I reached out to Wintory, whose comments follow this blog post), but is a good signal that many of us should soon be finding games with orchestral musicians again soon.

I argue this sort of arrangement — both Wintory’s situation and the union politics underpinning it — are important for media scholars to be aware of.  It falls under the broader umbrella of an issue largely solved within academia but remains an important question in other circles — whether or not we recognize games as a unique art form separate and independent from film and other media.  Part of that recognition includes separate legal treatment differing from other media, as Wintory points out in a YouTube comment:

“…secondary market-based royalty is rejected by the game industry because there is no secondary market. In film, if you’re released in theaters the subsequent DVD release would be  the secondary market, and AFM musicians (under the motion picture contracts) make 1% of those secondary market grosses. But games sales are the one-stop transaction. One might try to argue that ports or remasters are secondary markets, but I’d actually disagree. More like parallel primary markets. There is no equivalent in games to a film coming out in theaters and then, say, airing on cable a year later. As a result, the upfront risk for game studios is MUCH HIGHER than for film companies because all their eggs end up in one basket (this is a definite weakness in the business structure of the game industry, as reported by the rampant post-released layoffs lately). Given that there are many, many viable options for royalty-free recording (including very high-end expensive options in London which are regularly used), there is no need to for publishers to deepen their already-huge risk so they refuse to accept these mandatory royalties.”

I first thought of Final Fantasy X HD Remaster, the soundtrack of which I had the opportunity to discuss in a more pleasant context.  Some of the tracks are the original audio from Final Fantasy X, some are remastered, some are re-recorded, and some are re-orchestrated — all of which require different legal treatment.  As Wintory points out, the concept of the re-release is common to film, in which it’s not difficult to track down someone who owns the same movie across multiple formats — VHS tape, DVD, Blu-Ray, and a digital download, in addition to having gone to see the film in the theater (perhaps even more than one theatrical release, for a property like Star Wars).

Wintory is correct that the idea of a (post-launch window) port to another platform a la FFX HD is very rare — of the thousands of Playstation 2 games, only a select few have been re-released for modern consoles. Compare the list of PS2 franchises that have received similar ports (God of War, Final Fantasy, Metal Gear Solid, and the two Team ICO games) to the number of films available on both VHS and DVD.  Game developers often hope but cannot plan for their games to be as successful as these titles.  As Karen Collins warned many of us during her keynote speech at the North American Video Game Music Conference this past January, defining the entire gaming industry by a select few AAA titles is not viable in the longterm, neither for our own scholarly efforts nor for making legal decisions about a giant industry.

Though the agreement that was reached with Microsoft will work for many large studios, based on the numbers in the Variety article linked above, it remains unclear how the burgeoning indie development scene will be able to effectively utilize union musicians for their games.  It does seem that legal teams supporting both the AFM and game developers are realizing that games should be treated on their own terms.  While not an ideal arrangement yet, having a place to start allows game development to function and musicians to do their jobs. Games continue to cast an ever widening net — as they become an increasingly important part of our casual and social spaces, they will require more and more consideration from all perspectives.

 

P.S.  As mentioned, I reached out to Wintory for comment, and he offered the following, largely agreeing with my assessment of the situation.  No word yet as to his personal situation, though it’s important to keep in mind that 1) It remains a personal matter, so we should not expect any further updates necessarily — and 2) It is only tangentially related to the underlying point at hand as I interpret it above.

 

Austin Wintory:

I will add that I think the Microsoft agreement has very little chances for widespread success. The most it offers is the so-called “Franchise buyout,” which some companies (Microsoft, Blizzard) are ok with, but others (Sony, EA, etc) are not. Further, I think indies are unlikely to accept anything but a full buyouts, because they are put at financial risk in a way that’s out of proportion to their efforts. Why would a company like Stoic (developers of The Banner Saga) be willing to put themselves at risk for total bankrupcy (which unexpected new-use or re-use payments could trigger), over the music in their game, whilst having total unencumbered control over every other aspect of the game?

For mid-range studios I can sort of imagine that being acceptable risk (5thCell, or Double Fine), though I know they default to full buyouts. But it’s nonetheless a more acceptable proposition than to small indies who don’t have the administrative manpower to oversee AFM contracts.

So, I have hope for the Microsoft agreement, but only because I’m an optimist. Unfortunately the AFM’s behavior seems to only deepen the conviction that they are woefully out of touch, and disinterested in a long-term relationship with the game industry.

Making a Note Here

Making a Note Here: The Inaugural North American Conference on Video Game Music was a HUGE SUCCESS
By Steven Reale, Assistant Professor of Music, Dana School of Music, Youngstown State University

On January 18, 2014, about 50 people, including academics, college and high school students, and interested locals, arrived at the McDonough Museum of Art on the campus of Youngstown State University for the first North American Conference on Video Game Music, a two-day event featuring presentations by 18 musicologists, music theorists, and music educators on a wide variety of aspects of music in video games, including compositional approaches, analyses, studies of game narratives and genres, and applications of game music for pedagogy (program). Karen Collins, noted author of Game Sound, Playing with Sound, and From Pac-Man to Pop Music, gave the keynote address, “Game Sound Studies: 10 Years On,” wherein she spoke at length about the challenges facing our young subdiscipline, aspects of game music that are yet to receive scholarly attention (such as casino slot machines and musical toys for infants), and sparked a vigorous conversation about the term “ ludomusicology,” asking whether we as a burgeoning community of scholars do ourselves a disservice by placing a hifalutin linguistic boundary between ourselves and those from outside academia (including industry composers) who might be interested in joining the conversation.

Indeed, as the lead organizer for the event, one of its most rewarding aspects for me was the enormous excitement and interest in our work—on the one hand, by the large number of conference participants from outside of academia, and, on the other hand, media outlets including local newspaper and television coverage, an Associated Press piece that, at last count, popped up in well over 100 national and international news outlets, a story on the event that appeared on wired.com, and radio interviews that were broadcast on BBC5 and National Public Radio. This is encouraging; it suggests that in an era of widespread public resentment toward higher education, the work that we are doing is facilitating conversations and creating possibilities for engagement both inside and outside the academy.

Therefore, I must acknowledge the groundbreaking work performed by the UK Ludomusicology Research Group, who demonstrated that this field really is ready for prime-time, and the guidance that Tim Summers, Mark Sweeney, and Michiel Kamp offered when I asked for their advice in how exactly to go about putting on an event of this nature. I also want to offer my sincere thanks to Neil Lerner and Will Gibbons for their work on the program committee and for rendering me support with the snags that crop up any time you try to organize a project of this nature, as well as to my wife, Haley Reale, and my student, Cory Davis, for their tireless assistance during the event to help make sure everything ran smoothly.

Now, for some photos:

Creativity in abstraction: beyond the film/game parallel

Iain Hart (Sydney Conservatorium of Music, Eine Kleine Pwnmusik)

C.S. Lewis wrote, in his science fiction novel Out of the Silent Planet,

“To every man, in his acquaintance with a new art, there comes a moment when that which before was meaningless first lifts, as it were, one corner of the curtain that hides its mystery, and reveals, in a burst of delight which later and fuller understanding can hardly ever equal, one glimpse of the indefinite possibilities within.”

I had this moment when I was sitting in a film music lecture and realised that the music of the video game Left 4 Dead used similar musical devices to the music of the film Psycho, and used them for the same purposes. It was a first glimpse, not of the fact that video game music was emotive (I had felt that already), but that it was deliberately expressive and powerfully designed. I’ll never forget that moment. I can’t. It’s permanently changed the way I think about game music, so as a student of game music it’s always before me. And with it, the notion that game music and film music are kindred spirits, doing the same things in the same ways.

But as I’ve studied the parallel between film and game music, the less satisfying I have found the parallel to be, and the more I have realised that the differences are as myriad as the similarities. Yes, game music does many of the same things as film music, but it also does many more (chief among them: respond to the player/viewer). And there are things film music can do that game music can’t, or that game music is only just beginning to do. Likewise, although game music and film music sometimes have the same function (space-filling, for instance), they often achieve this in astoundingly different ways. No film I’m aware of selects background music at random while you’re watching it, but this is a standard—even simple, suboptimal, obsolescent—method for keeping game music interesting. And the language used to talk about game music is subject to the same difficulties. Film music terminology can accurately describe many aspects of game music (diegesis, motifs, etc.), but it struggles to describe the effects of something as utterly crucial to gameplay as interactivity. The film/game parallel only gets us so far.

We know so much about music in films, and a lot of that knowledge informs our understandings of the music in other media, and even of music itself. It’s only right that where a parallel exists, ludomusicologists should take advantage of it and learn what we can. But that should never prevent us looking for other parallels. For instance, I have found Markku Eskelinen and Ragnhild Tronstad’s chapter “Video Games and Configurative Performances” (from The Video Game Theory Reader, Wolf & Perron, 2003, pp. 195-220) helpful for understanding the player’s role in the game because of their comparisons between games and configurative theatre. I am not a scholar of theatre, but the comparison to a performance artwork helped me reframe the argument in light of my experience with music—and, ultimately, prompted me to start making comparisons with other non-filmic media.

In some ways, music is the most artistic thing I know anything about. In school I was far more interested in scientific and technological pursuits than art, at least from a vocational point of view. I was an advanced computer user before I was an advanced computer player (and I’m still not sure I’d call myself that). I know my way around a computer quite well, and I know a bit about how its hardware and software work, and work together. This doesn’t hinder my research of music in video games; rather, this helps me understand the fundamental elements of the medium, and helps me understand why parallels to other media can be drawn to it at all.

Always, at the back of my mind, is the understanding that a video game is a computer program. A computer program looks a bit like this:

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#include <stdio.h>
 
int main(void)
{
printf("Hello world\n");
}
#include <stdio.h>

int main(void)
{
printf("Hello world\n");
}

This is a very simple program written in the C programming language. Its sole function is to output the text “Hello world” on a command line (the first steps of learning a programming language often involve displaying the text “Hello world” somewhere). It’s functionally trivial, but it can teach a student about the basic structure of a program written in the C programming language and get them to understand how the computer can be controlled by their instructions. However, for the computer to run the program it has to be compiled, after which it looks like this:

01111111 01000101 01001100 01000110 00000010 00000001 00000001 00000000 00000000 00000000 00000000 00000000 00000000 00000000 00000000 00000000 00000010 00000000 00111110 00000000 00000001 00000000 00000000 00000000 01000000 00000100 01000000 00000000 00000000 00000000 00000000 00000000 01000000 00000000 00000000 00000000 00000000 00000000 00000000 00000000 01111000 00010001 00000000 00000000 00000000 00000000 00000000 00000000 00000000 00000000 00000000 00000000 01000000 00000000 00111000 00000000 00001001 00000000 01000000 00000000 00011110 00000000 00011011 00000000

This is the first 64 bytes of data from the compiled “Hello world” program file (the full program file is 8.32 kilobytes). Each binary digit represents one bit of data: a “1” represents an “on” state of an electronic circuit, while a “0” represents an “off” state. Computers and video game consoles are electronic machines containing billions of transistors and complex arrays of circuits, and a program or game is a set of instructions that direct the machine to perform certain calculations or manipulations on a given set of data. For the computer to manipulate data, that data must be in binary format. Anything that is stored on or manipulated by a computer—photos and images, sound and music, documents and games—must be interpreted from a human-readable form for the computer to work with it, and then must be interpreted back into a human-readable form for us to understand it. But programs, apps and games also require interpretation from a human-readable plan or ideation into a programming language (an engineering process) before being interpreted into binary format for the computer to use. Compare this with shooting a film, where (computerized assistance aside) a scene is created and then captured on film as a series of images; or to writing a book, where (again, computerized assistance aside) the words scrawled on a sheet of paper are set into type and are never ostensibly not words. These art forms use engineering processes to capture, manipulate and preserve human-readable elements, but a computer program or video game is engineered in such a way that it is, at several stages, unreadable to most humans.

This is the nature of our medium: at its core, a video game is decidedly abstract. It is, at its most basic level, a mathematical construct, an intensely imaginative piece of engineering. Inasmuch as we interact with a narrative, view images and are affected by a soundtrack, we interact with series upon series of mathematical calculations and algorithms of which we are blissfully unaware. The ever more film-like scenes, the epic soundtracks, the carefully-planned audioscapes, the gut-wrenching stories, are all added purposefully and artfully to a foundation of electronic engineering. And they are entirely optional. The creativity behind a video game starts long before any aesthetic elements are put in place, allowing extraordinary variety in aesthetic, gameplay, narrative, musical, and sonic formulations. For example, Pong didn’t necessarily need a graphical interface to be a reaction-based game. Adventure didn’t need to be humorous to be a caving simulator. Quake didn’t need a Nine Inch Nails soundtrack to be visceral (I should know, I only ever played the music-deprived shareware version when I was growing up). Portal didn’t need the promise of cake to make us play. Left 4 Dead didn’t need to aim for a filmic aesthetic in order to be a survival horror game. But these elements were included in order to shape the game into the developers’ vision and to provide an enjoyable, relatable experience to the player. It is through these included elements that we can draw parallels to other media, whether film, theatre, books or even games of another genre; but they are all additions to the game’s electronic foundation, and are there not by necessity but by conscious choice. If we study the filmic in video games, we have to start by understanding that nothing filmic winds up in a video game until someone chooses to put it there.

Video games are not films made interactive; they are computer programs made beautiful. Their aesthetic elements are pinned to abstract constructs that, from their very invention, have been more receptive to the products of imagination than to the limitations of the physical world. This is why we can see in them an inexhaustible potential for creativity, engagement, innovation and wit; why their storytelling potential is beginning to defy the pessimistic predictions of even just a few years ago; why their music can be filmic or procedural, or both, or neither, and draw us into an imagined space for hours on end. As ludomusicologists, we study just one element of this abstract medium, so we already know to seek out the parallels between music and the other elements of a game. There is no reason why we should stop there, nor why we should be content to rest on parallels to film music (strong as they are) when developers of games have no such restrictions. Instead, we should relish the opportunity to follow this technical, artistic and novel art form wherever it leads. Moments of revelation still await us, and our studies will continue to provide glimpses of innumerable possibilities as we become more acquainted with this new art.

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