Interview: Justin Keverne of 'Groping the Elephant'

Justin Keverne is a gentlemen currently residing in the United Kingdom and a fellow blogger about games. He recently interviewed me about my Permanent Death experiment. I agreed to answer his questions on the condition that I get to ask some of my own, mainly to do with blogging about games, cultural differences between the UK and North America, as well as some more general questions. Here are his responses in full:

1) What is it like living in the UK and writing about games?

I can’t say I’ve known anything else so there’s not a great deal I can compare it too. Living in the UK can be frustrating at times, a lot of Publishers forget that people outside the US play their games, and so they make a big deal of release dates, or special offers that are simply inaccurate or unavailable to me. I doubt I have to explain that aspect of it to you as by all accounts the situation in Australia is even worse.

As for the writing about games aspect, well its part of who I am, I don’t think that would change wherever I lived. I’m not sure how much of it is influenced directly by my living in the UK. Actually no, on reflection I think not being in the US does have an effect; when almost everything you play is created by somebody in another country you can sometimes feel a little safer picking holes in it. As a Designer looking for a professional job I’m torn between being overly critical and playing things safe in case I end up interviewing for a job with a company I torn into. Since most companies are not in the UK I think I’m maybe liable to grant myself more freedom when discussing their games.

2) What sort of cultural acceptance is there of games, and games writing, in the UK?

Well everybody knows what video games are which something, I suppose. I’d imagine everybody under forty here has played a video game at some point and has some pleasant memories of them.

Because of the Spectrum ZX and BBC Micro, there was a huge home computer gaming, and amateur game development, scene in the early eighties; the heyday of the 16K era.

I don’t think it would be a lie to say that most people with high level positions in the tech sector probably started their careers copying code for games out of magazines and manually typing them into their Spectrums and BBC Micros. After that it was the Commodore Amiga and the Atari ST. Growing up I had the latter and it was not uncommon for significant portions of large retail shops to be dedicated to shelves and shelves of Amiga, and Atari games. Moving into the PC era, the UK used to be at the forefront of development, with companies like Bullfrog and Core Design. Games, gaming and game development, are a huge part of the cultural history of the UK though I doubt many people are actually aware of it anymore.

Gaming magazines have been a stable of UK culture for years, growing up there was a running conflict between the magazines for the Amiga and the Atari, Amiga Power, ST Format and other magazines with similar titles. Then there’s PCZone which has been running since 1993, a number of successful writers in the UK have cut their teeth on such magazines, including Charlie Brooker (Writer of Big Brother Zombie cross over Dead Set) who wrote for PCZone in its early years.

Television dedicated to video games were also very popular and successful throughout the 90s, with people like Peter Molyneux appearing on Bad Influence and Games Master. There was also the superb, if utter mental Bits, which featured three women discussing and reviewing video games, Aleks Krotoski who now writes for The Guardian newspaper, and the BBC started her career there. At one time Games Master had a cultural cachet approaching that of something like Top Gear. [While US readers may not get this reference, I’m sure fellow Oz readers will. Top Gear is fantastic – Ed]

Recently though such shows have started to disappear, they’ve become increasingly marginalized until the only place you can find them is on select satellite channels, usually those described as being “For men”.

I’ve mentioned The Guardian and that is maybe one of the few serious newspapers to include intelligent and mature commentary on video games, from the likes of Charlie Booker, Aleks Krotoski and Kieron Gillen. You can find video game reviews in almost every newspaper and “men’s magazine” (FHM, Maxim etc) but they are usually extremely poorly written and styled as pure reviews. The Guardian actually includes editorials and more critical pieces dedicated to games and gaming culture.

I guess what I’m saying is that there’s a huge history of talking about games and treating them as another part of our culture that is being lost. A lot of the really smart games writers who have been around since the Amiga and Atari years are starting to move on to different things and the quality of new writing about games seems to have decreased dramatically.

I think that’s in no small way due to the fact the UK has lost the position it once had, the death of Bullfrog and the relative failure of the studios that formed out of it was a big blow to the UK game development scene.

It’s tragic really when one of the most known gaming franchises in the world, Grand Theft Auto is created in Scotland and most people don’t realize. The UK still has some incredible talent but I think a lot of it overlooked as the big Publishers have mostly abandoned their offices in London for continental Europe and New York.

Anyway, I’m not bitter at all... Ahem.

3) What kind of cultural differences do you think there are between the US and UK games press?

That history with the Spectrum through to the Amiga and the PC, has given a lot of the more established UK games journalists a distinct home computer bias and it can be clear in their work. The SNES was never as big here as it was in the US and other countries and the associated love for Zelda and Mario doesn’t seem as strong.

Also as a culture the English in particular (Can’t speak for Scots or Welsh) have an overriding sense of wry cynicism, I think it’s probably a post-colonial attitude. We used to own most of the world and now we don’t and as a culture I think we’re still a little bitter about that and can act like we’ve seen it all and done it all before and that nothing is new to us.

What I’m basically saying is I think UK, and specifically English, gaming press are a jaded and hard to impress bunch, who still long for the days when the UK ruled the gaming world with the likes of Bullfrog, Core Design and Psygnosis.

That’s a general attitude I feel is shared by UK gaming press and it’s one I can’t help but share. I didn’t really think I was so nationalistic in my tastes but I have realised that as much as I respect Garnett Lee I find it difficult to pay attention to a ListenUP podcast if John Davison is not on it. In fact I think John and Garnett are a good example of the differences between US and UK press. Garnet seems easy to impress and loves almost everything, where as John is cynical, cautious and only really impressed by something that’s significantly new or different.

4) Do you think UK game design differs significantly from US game design?

I think the ingrained cultural cynicism pushes UK designers to try and do things differently. I also think there’s a tendency to focus on ensuring a game has a strong central fantasy, being a hero in Fable, exploring ancient tombs in Tomb Raider or cyber punk paramilitaries in Syndicate. I think the aesthetic idea usually comes first and then a game is built to create that sensation and fulfil that fantasy.

I’d say in comparison US game design has a strong focus on iteration and refining an idea over time.

Also the attitude to sex and a humorous approach to sex and sexual activity is something shared by most people in the UK, we grew up with Benny Hill after all, and that can clearly be seen in most games developed here.

In terms of the pure creativity I think UK developers have a tendency to look to literature and subjects outside the field of gaming for their inspiration. A lot of that is probably because they learn programming as a hobby growing up with their Spectrums and Ataris so what formal education most UK designers have was not focused on games at all, they have degrees in Chemistry and Engineering instead of Computer Science.

I think US develops rely more on movies and television for their inspiration. I’m not trying to make a judgement call here as I think both approaches are valid, and after all I still think Halo is fantastic even if it is basically ripping off most of Aliens.

5) Do you feel more of an identification with UK writers than with US writers?

That previously described home computer bias is certainly something I share having grown up gaming on an Atari ST, as is the cultural cynicism. Also I find the type of references used by UK games journalists are ones I’m more likely to have some awareness of, using Football as a metaphor is something I can understand more than using Baseball.

That’s a general attitude element that I share, however on a person level I actually find myself identifying with the folks from Rebel FM more than anybody. Anthony Gallegos in particular seems to share a lot of my tastes on games, and it probably helps we are both sexually frustrated Star Wars geeks. I also appreciate his frank honesty which I think can be rare in games journalism.

6) Do you think there is a hierarchy in videogame critics blogging? If so, what does it look like, where would you place yourself, and why?

I think there probably is and I’m not sure I’m particular happy about that. I think there’s a hierarchy based on who you know, who you link to and who links to you, and I think that can be problematic. There are some really intelligent writers around who I didn’t know about until very recently, Alex Raymond, Simon Ferrari and several others, and I think the way blogs are set up can be rather incestuous, with discussion staying within that circle of linkage.

I also think it’s too easy for the “cult of personality” to take over and people are praised for who they are more than what they write. I think Michael Abbott is a prime example of this, I really do think he’s probably one of the nicest human beings I’ve had the fortunate to talk to. At the same time I think some of what he writes can feel obvious and of little interest to me, on the other hand some of it is also borderline profound, so it’s swings and roundabouts. However I see a lot of people treating his work as sacrosanct as if he can say no wrong, or that his opinion somehow carries more weight than others. His recent post about Scribblenauts and Bowser’s Inside Story seemed to have provoked ire disproportional to its content because I feel a lot of people somehow expected something else from him. Personally I agree with him on this particular issue, but I fear readers have been using his work as validation of their own opinions and that can be damaging to the discussion of video games.

Furthermore I think disproportional worth is given to the opinions of professional game designers... Oh wow I really am bitter aren’t I, jeez. [No, not really. Angry, maybe…– Ed]

What I mean by that is that from my own perspective I disagree with EVERY game designer I’ve ever heard speak, I mean EVERY ONE. The designer I share the most opinions with is Warren Spector but even he has said some things that just make me shake my head. As for Raph Koster and Will Wright, well suffice to say I don’t agree with pretty much anything Raph says and Will scares me with his intellect but his opinions on stories in games make me laugh derisively. I’m not saying these people haven’t earned some respect, but I do think with such individuals everybody needs to be careful to avoid the “cult of personality”, which isn’t helped by some designers apparent unwillingness to discuss ideas with those they don’t consider their peers.

Yeah I can do the CLINT HOCKING joke as much as anybody else, but I am eternally grateful for his willingness to actually discuss his design philosophy and defend it when necessary. I agree with him on a lot of things, and it’s great to actually debate with him on the parts I don’t.

Discussion of video games needs to take place in an arena where opinions are judged on content and insight not on whose idea it was, and any form of hierarchy can all too easily lead to the unjustified assignment of worth to an opinion even when it’s patently dumb. Everybody has stupid ideas and if our barometer for worth is the individual not the idea we could easily let those occasional stupid ideas be given worth they haven’t earned.

7) What do you like about English weather?

In all seriousness I actually really like rain, I have a strange tendency to actively go out in it and stand staring up and the sky getting soaking wet. It’s such a wonderfully tactile experience having weather you can touch. Sadly we don’t get too much torrential rain, it’s usually just drizzle (Is that a colloquialism?) [We call it drizzle in Oz too – Ed] and mist.

I think what all English like about the weather, and the simply reason we do discuss it so much, is that it’s unpredictable and rarely the same two days in a row. It’s an easy discussion to have as there’s always something to say about the weather when you live here.

8) What is a gerund, and why did your people invent them?

I actually had to check Google for that so I’m really not the right person to ask.

9) Do you tell people that “I’m famous on the net” as a videogame writer? Why/Why not?

No.

I suppose you want something more than that, well I don’t and I probably never would because I consider that a lie. I don’t think I am famous on the net, and I also don’t think I’m a video game writer. I’m a designer and everything I write is an extension of that, some of what I’ve written might have a critical bent but it’s always written, at least from my perspective as a design piece.

I’ve discussed the representation of the mentally ill in Batman: Arkham Asylum but I also made a point of providing an example of how I’d have modified the design. I make no bones about saying clearly that I want to be a professional game designer. It’s a position I’ve interviewed for twice and been unsuccessful but I still call myself a designer if anybody asks what I do. Of course you could argue that’s just as much a lie as saying I’m a video game writer. Either way I hardly think I’m famous.

10) Do you talk about games with your real life friends? If you don’t, would you want to if you could?

All the time, it can actually be a problem. I tend to play a lot of Co-Op with my housemate, or just sit and watch him play something in single or multi player, and I will usually give him a running commentary: “This is a stupidly designed level, why the hell does the enemy spawn there, if they moved it there it’d have a better angle on us as we came through here and let also allow us to see it before we rounded the corner and got insta-killed...”

I can also get very angry as bad game design and I’m sure sometimes he’d rather I just shut up. It also helps that at least three of my friends all have professional game development jobs, two as Programmers and one as a Designer.

11) Tell me what’s so good about this Thief game.

I could use all these phrases like cascading failure states, intentional play, emergent behaviour, shared authorship and a dozen others, but I’ll refrain. All of those statements are accurate but the main reason the Thief games, and in fact everything created by Looking Glass Studios is worthy of attention is that they are intelligent games made by very intelligent people that neither try and hide that fact nor talk down to their players. They expect players to be willing to engage with the world and the design and will reward those players who are.

Playing System Shock 2 and Thief made me smarter, it contained ideas and concepts that I didn’t fully understand but which were presented in such a way as to make me want to go away and find out what they were. Irrational and Ion Storm did the same and 2K Marin, 2K Boston and 2K Australia are continuing that tradition.

Also I adore Looking Glass Studios because they were always willing to discuss the philosophy behind the games they made, there are Post-mortems of Thief: The Dark Project and System Shock 2 available on Gamasutra and the proceedings for the last few years of GDCs are full of presentations by Looking Glass Studios alumni.

For a more specific description of why I adore Thief and System Shock 2, I’ve already written about them on Groping The Elephant: Thief II – The Metal Age; System Shock 2.

Writing those two pieces was pure joy, without doubt the easiest things I’ve ever written. I could write twice as much again and still not say everything I wanted to. If Thief or System Shock 2 is selected for the name Vintage Game Club game I think my head will explode; which is why I’m trying to stay quiet about how excited I really am. [Thief was chosen for the VGC game #8 – Ed.]

See not all UK gamers are jaded and cynical... No wait actually I am as Looking Glass Studios no longer exist and I still blame Eidos even if it was really the fault of the gamers who didn’t realise how much good gaming they were missing.

12) Are you having a nice day?

I am now. Work was once again tiring beyond my capacity to cope with it; I am not designed for manual labour. I also had to come home to my housemate and his girlfriend arguing again which is “nice”. But at least he’s just picked up Halo 3: ODST (Which was part of the reason for the argument), so I’ve been watching him play that this evening.

After finishing off these I’m going to watch the latest GameTrailers TV episode, and then spend most of the night either playing Resident Evil 5 (Just picked it up on PC), or Thief Gold.

Thanks for answering my alternately serious and frivolous questions.

Marty O'Donnell in Interview - Part 4

In this, probably the longest single post of the series, Marty explains the relationship between music and location as well as how much of the music he composes in response to the level. Then, in perhaps my favourite part of the interview, Marty answers my question about why he didn’t (and still doesn’t) allow players to change the volume of the music and sound in the Halo games, resulting in a passionate response about the issue of player control vs. designer control.

Ben: So, the way Halo has used music… it seems like music is triggered based on location or events. So you crest the top of a hill and that particular string piece plays or something like that. I’m interested to know, how much of the level did you know was going to be there when you started writing and when you started recording?

Marty: I’m not sure if I could say what the percentage is… but the majority of the music is written because of what’s happening in the levels. Sometimes I’ve already made what we call music tags, tags that work a certain way or have certain variations within them or certain intensities, I know I can go from here to here. I have these music pieces that are built that will respond in certain ways and I’m building them while I’m watching what the level designers are doing.

But then before I actually implement the music or finish even recording the music, the levels are pretty much done and scripted. So we have what we call trigger volumes. Events will be triggered based on what the player’s doing, or the location of the player, or how much time the players spent. You can pick a trigger and we can trigger something off of it. Pick some event that can happen in real time and we can anticipate it and put in a condition that will be aware of that thing.

So any of those triggers I can decide, this would be a perfect point to start a piece of music, stop a piece of music, change a piece of music, overlay some other piece of music, you name it.

And because I’m sitting and working with the designers all the time, basically, I sit with them and say ‘what are you intending to do in this level, what is the emotional journey you want the payer to have from here to her to here, [etc]’ and then we just keep working that out and that’s when the music is finalized, sometimes it’s composed from scratch from those discussions, sometimes it’s music that I’ve already sort of already anticipated would be useful and I try using it in certain situations. It’s probably half & half in terms of how much music is composed prior to the level being completed and how much is composed after the level is completed and designed.

B: I also read in an interview with you, that you deliberately decided not to let the player fiddle with the volume of the music and the mix. I thought that was a really interesting choice.

M: That goes all the way back to Halo 1, you’re right.

B: And I didn’t even know as well, I’d never gone to look for it until I had started my analysis for it, and tried to turn it up so I could hear it over the noise of a tank. Is that choice related to you want to have that composer control?

M: *laughs* Probably, I think my genetic makeup is ‘I’m a composer’ but I like technology, I love games and I play games and I help design games, but… yeah, my DNA is as a composer and composers are primarily control guys. Even more than that is that I want people to have a really great experience. It’s as though I was a chef and, look, I’m making a really great meal and if the first thing somebody does when I serve them is they pour ketchup all over it or salt all over it, I’m like ‘wait a minute! You’re not tasting what I prepared. Now, if someone tastes it and goes ‘wow this tastes like crap, I need ketchup’ then fine. What I didn’t like was people, especially game players, have gotten into a habit that they should have control over all these things and basically I’m saying, you know what, no – you shouldn’t. What you should do is, play my game and if you hate it you should return it. *laughs* You should stop playing it. But I don’t want you to return it because you poured ketchup on it right away.

“If the very first thing people do, and which I’ve seen people do, is they change the mix before they even play through the game… my suggestion was, hey I have no problem giving people control over the entire mix of the game, that’s fine, I want to give you control of the entire mix of the game, however I’d like you to earn that right *laughs* and I would like the technology to be… play the game my way once, and then you unlock the mixing console and now you can go back and play the game again… but at least I know at least one time you heard it and experienced it the way I like it… I’m not even saying it’s the right way, I’m just saying this is what my vision was. So, what I don’t want-- people go ‘hey you know I had a really crappy audio experience’ and then I say ‘really?’ And they go ‘Yeah, well of course I turned the sound effects all the way up and I couldn’t hear the music’. It’s sorta like, well that’s not the experience I gave you so… On none of the games I’ve been able to convince the technologists at Bungie that we have to have a mixing console for the fans that is only implemented after they have completed the game. I would love to have that, in all honesty I think that would be ideal because then at least I know they would be experiencing the game the way I like it, and I hope they like it, and then they can play around with it to their hearts content.

But it’s sorta like going to a movie theatre and saying “I always like dialogue louder, so even before I watch this movie I want the projectionist to turn the dialogue up”, and that’s just not the way we see movies. And here’s the problem, as a passive audience member in a movie you’re just are expecting that you’re going to hear the mix that people wanted you to hear, and most of the time you say, wow either I loved that movie and I love the mix or I didn’t, but you don’t have this expectation that you’re gonna be able to control that. I don’t think it’s necessarily think it’s a good thing for game-players to think that they should have control over every parameter of a game.

You might as well say ‘hey, if you want to, change everything that’s red to green – because you prefer green. …And no one says the artists are control freaks, even though, trust me, artists are way more control freaks than composers, but that’s just my opinion. *laughs* But no ones expecting that you should be able to choose your own colour palette, unless you’re doing something like Little Big Planet which is a game which is all about the sand box, which is all about you creating your own characters and lighting and fog and textures and you name it. But basically you’re still giving players a controlled palette that designers have already decided… here’s the sandbox, and here’s the parameters we believe are fun to play in, go play.

Anyway, that’s a long answer to your question but that’s why I did that thing about the mix. Very, very few people have complained to me about not being able to mix Halo games their way. I have had some people complain and I apologise I say well that just wasn’t my intent and if you didn’t enjoy it then you didn’t enjoy my mix, and I understand that but…

B: Wow, that’s hard to believe that anyone would complain.

M: Well no I’ve had it don’t worry. *laughs* And I apologised, but at least I know they are complaining about… they don’t like my vision of the audio. They’re not just having a bad experience because they happened to set a fader badly. To most players they don’t know the difference between ‘I intended them to have this experience’ or ‘they inadvertently caused the experience to the bad’ all they remember is the bad experience.

B: Yeah that’s interesting. I had a funny experience with Bioshock at the end of last year, I put it in and I started playing and I went “The music is too loud!” because I couldn’t hear anything else, so I was really glad I could turn it down. So I guess that’s the trade-off, you’ve got to be confidents that you’ve set it all right.

M: Yeah… I mean it’s like… I make the trailers and so forth too for Halo games and no one thinks twice about… we work forever on a the final mix, right. If you’re seeing a linear trailer you’re seeing the mix… no one has the expectation that you’re going to watch a trailer and turn the music up or the dialogue down or turn the effects up or whatever and change the mix… I don’t think it’s necessarily the right expectation to have in a game. Certainly if they have that expectation it’s because they’ve been forced to use it too many times which means that’s a failure of the audio designers because they haven’t done good mixes.

Now, the caveat to that is, I believe the tradition started especially on the PC because, back in the day when you played games on PC’s everybody had different sound cards, and the audio designers could not know what the persons final experience would be, they had no clue. So they had to give all those faders and switches and sliders to people because they knew everybody’s experience was going to automatically be different. So, for me, I understand why it started, I think it’s just a bad habit. And to some extent I think it’s gotten game designers and audio designer people for games a little sloppy because they just feel like, ‘we can just throw a pile of music in there and not have to think about mixing it in, and they can throw a bunch of sound effects in and have all the sound effects normalized and unnaturally loud because they figure ‘well, people will just turn it up and down according to their preference.’ And I think that’s just not how you mix anything.

I would rather actually spend the time trying to do as good a mix as I possibly can, and then having the fans say ‘I love the game, I loved the audio’ or ‘I loved the game but the music was too soft, or the music was too loud.’ And I learn from that, most people didn’t like the mix or whatever. So far I’ve been OK.

But you see what I’m saying? What happens with gamers is they tend to think, well this is an interactive medium and that means that as the player I should have control over everything… and to me I’m thinking, you know what, no, not really… the game designer is making a game and trying to make a cool experience for you and there are going to be a lot of interactive parts to the game but it’s still… I don’t know if you’re religious at all… but it’s like Calvinism, the idea that there is a sovereign God, or there’s man’s free will, right. Well, in the game universe, the game designer is basically like God, but we want the player to believe they have free will, believe they are truly making choices but really we’re sort of God in the background saying ‘yeah you’re gonna have this illusion of free will but we know where you are, we know what you’re doing and you’re never going to get through that door no matter what you do *laughs* but here’s 5 other doors that you can choose any order you want to.”

B: Yeah, I guess the skill is in… well its sorta negative connotations to it, but manipulating the player.

M: No, no, we manipulate, no doubt about it. And frankly think about it, well you can think about it however you want, let me put it this way. You have a tribe of people. No technology at all. And everyone sits around the campfire and everyone can tell a story. Well, after a couple weeks, that tribe of people is gonna say, hey lets have Fred tell the story tonight because he always tells good stories. Just because we all have the ability or we all have the right to tell our own story… some of us are just not that good at telling stories. So certain people in the tribe become the storytellers and become the shamans, and that’s just the way people are.

Just because we say ‘hey, here’s a game and you can tell your own story’, well guess what – people don’t really want that because… probably most people tell kinda boring stories… they still want to be entertained, and to be entertained you have to have someone who’s entertaining behind it.”

Yeah that’s my philosophy, trust me I’m not necessarily right, it’s just what I think. *laughs*

In the next part, I ask Marty about musical scoring in multiplayer and why he doesn’t think it’s currently necessary, and what it would take to convince him otherwise.

Marty O'Donnell in Interview - Part 2

Marty O’Donnell is a man on the bleeding edge, being responsible for the music and audio vision for the stratospheric Halo trilogy from Bungie studios. I wanted to try and find out what this leader in the field of music and sound for games had to say about the subject and get some input for my then to be completed thesis. Around August of this year I embarked on a campaign of multiple emails to multiple addresses to somehow get in contact with Marty for an interview. After what seemed like a longer period than it probably was, finally in October a scant week before I had to hand in my thesis I spoke to the man himself via phone. Even though I approached him essentially out of the blue, Marty held no qualms about chewing my ear off for close to 90 minutes, to my own delight of course, and it is clear that music for videogames is a subject about which he is fiercely passionate.

In this, the second of the series, I ask Marty about his views on using a ‘granular’ live assembled music approach for videogame music, and he explains both why he doesn’t like that approach (for the time being) and what his own approach looks like.

Ben: I guess what’s most deceptive is, because Halo’s levels are designed so that there are multiple ways through it, but you go from point A to point B, you end up hearing all the music in the same order and maybe that contributes to the sense that you hear the same thing every time through. But I never got bored of the music in Halo either, so it’s obviously doing its job.

Marty: Halo 2 was a while back for me now, but I think the first level is the space station, right? If you got to the last encounter in the space station just before the end cinematic, pay attention to when the music actually starts, what the music does, how the music changes based on how you perform and then how the music actually seamlessly goes into the cinematic music, which is a more linear piece because I’m scoring something that’s cinematic… If you were to play through that sequence several times, try to go really fast, try to go slow, try to see what happens when the music in the level and the music in the cinematic go together, you’ll actually get several different kinds of recordings out of that.

Now it’s not like an entirely different experience, that’s not the point… it is still like, ‘that is the piece of music that plays there’, but it’s not a linear piece because different sections don’t happen in the same order and the way the music leads into the cinematic… it doesn’t [just] cross-fade it actually plays simultaneously with the cinematic music but it plays in sync with it in a way that changes depending on how you get into it.

B: So what would be your reaction to someone that wanted to do away with that sort of authorial control you have by mixing it up, and says ‘well lets set some parameters, and if the player health gets to this, do this’ (obviously that’s a simple way of doing it) do you think you do lose something if you take that step back?

M: Well you know it’s interesting because, as someone who’s worked with computer generated music or computer controlled music… and as you know in the music business and creating music, we use digital for everything… I remember back when there were music programs that were… basically lets generate music algorithmically. And I remember hearing a lot of that stuff and playing with all those things and… because I think I’m probably more of a traditionalist when it comes to what music I like, and what music I think actually evokes emotions and what music actually speaks to me, I think the composer still makes better choices than just a combination of random events.

Even when I was using algorithmic music programs, out of an hour’s worth of stuff that was generated I would find maybe 30 seconds of it that was actually interesting. So that’s my problem with that. I think that you might get some fun stuff, but I don’t think you get stuff that really speaks. Most of that stuff doesn’t end up telling a story musically, and I still think that the power of music is a storytelling power, and I might be wrong about this, but I still think that a composer tells stories better than computers do.”

However, if something is repetitive, even if it’s really, really great and you keep hearing it over and over again, and it plays back the same way every time – that is to me where boredom set in or it just starts getting annoying. Which is why when I hear games that use linear music that always plays back identically and starts to get repetitive, and loops... when I notice where the loop is I get really annoyed. That’s something I’m trying to eliminate. I really don’t want people to hear where the loops are.

B: Michael Chion wrote in the 90’s about audiovisual relationships in film and he talked about how if you strip the music off a piece of image, and you just place a selection of random other songs… some pieces of music work better with others. He said that in a few pieces… you will get a few moments of almost serendipitous synchronization between the audio and the video, so I guess where I see the potential for the live generated, granular, building the music up from individual notes, is the potential to pick out those points of synchronization and specifically hit them with the moment that you really want.

M: I would say… I have not been one of the guys who advocates the tiniest granular approach. There are some music engines and music for games approaches that’s very, very granular and right down to the individual sample level. ‘This will interact in this way’ and ‘this will interact this way’, it’s all possibly midi controlled, note generated everything.

There’s a couple reasons I don’t like that, number 1, I lose some of the fidelity that I like, I lose some of the live performance that I think is still essential… A midi flute performance just does not compare to a live flute player performing a melody. I don’t like walking away from something that has a giant history of success, so I’ve never really been an advocate of the high granular approach to writing music for games.

That doesn’t mean it’s the wrong way, it’s just that it’s my preference. The biggest problem I have with scoring a game is that if there is a sequence or an encounter or a moment or whatever it is… the most important moment is how it begins and then how it ends. Because it’s a game and there’s a human being interacting with it, what I don’t have any perfect knowledge of is exactly how long the entire experience is going to last.

So what I decided early on was, I can control when it begins, I can control when something ends, musically, what I need to do is keep the middle section malleable. And if I can do that without people knowing that it’s being malleable – so if they have a 2 minute experience some place then they get a 2 minute piece of music and they’re happy, but if somebody else play it for 5 minutes they get a 5 minute piece of music and they’re still happy because the beginning, middle and the end all correspond with what they wanted the experience to be, then I feel successful.

So it’s all about variations on the beginnings, on the ends, and being malleable with the middles. I keep trying to advance the way that stuff is manipulated musically and it’s sort of an interesting puzzle for me. I really enjoy it, I like doing it, I like composing music that I can kind of dissemble and say “what are different ways of telling the same musical story but making the middle something that is sorta indeterminate.” I don’t know if that makes sense but that’s the system.

In the next post, Marty talks about how close he’s coming with his own musical approach to realising a high level of ‘granularity’ in the music. I ask whether you can get away with more if you’re aiming for an ‘electronic’ sound, as opposed to orchestral and Marty talks about Rez & the potential for more ‘synaesthesia’ in games.

Marty O'Donnell in Interview - Part 1

Marty O’Donnell is a man on the bleeding edge, being responsible for the music and audio vision for the stratospheric Halo trilogy from Bungie studios. I wanted to try and find out what this leader in the field of music and sound for games had to say about the subject and get some input for my then to be completed thesis. Around August of this year I embarked on a campaign of multiple emails to multiple addresses to somehow get in contact with Marty for an interview. After what seemed like a longer period than it probably was, finally in October a scant week before I had to hand in my thesis I spoke to the man himself via phone. Even though I approached him essentially out of the blue, Marty held no qualms about chewing my ear off for close to 90 minutes, to my own delight of course, and it is clear that music for videogames is a subject about which he is fiercely passionate.

In this, the first of a series which will include nearly the full transcript of our interview, I ask Marty about a few things to do with my thesis. Namely, what I identify as the inherent musicality of the sound effects of Halo 2, whether or not his unique role as audio director uniquely enabled that process to occur, and Marty elaborates on his own personal philosophy for music in games.

Ben: I’m doing a music degree, in my 4^th year (honours), and writing a thesis that combines my love of music with my passion for videogames. So I wanted to look into what makes videogames unique and specifically the new ways that videogames can use music.

So, coming to the music of Halo, I started with this hunch that Halo did a bunch of interesting things with music, but I had no idea what it was… And while doing my analysis I came to realize that if I think about the music of Halo 2 as broader than just the composed music… I started noticing all this musicality within the ambient sound and the composed sound effects. That relationship between the music and sound effects is really interesting. It seems to me like there’s so much cross pollination between the music and the sound effects. The first thing that came to mind, or that inspired me to think about this was the covenant carbine & it’s scope zoom. It’s got this sort of low synthy, resonant note. And I though, hang on I can kinda pitch that, and it sounded like an interval of a perfect fourth going in and out. So do you think this is an accurate kind of assessment? Can you see the musicality in the sound effects?

Marty: The most general thing that we do is we try to make the basically human vehicles and weapons sounds actually sound close to what real world sounds might be and we tend to take the alien sounds and try to give them a little more… I guess you could say they were a bit more synthetic. We used more of our musical instruments to create the sounds of the aliens so that… that whole suite of sounds sits in a different place from the human sounds.

B: I think that’s really, really cool. So you just mentioned that was intentional, do you think that was helped by the fact that you were a composer and musician yourself, as well as the head guy in charge of sound? Do you think that would have happened if it was just some sound engineer in charge of the sound effects?

M: That’s an interesting question. I had a long career in music and sound design for movies and television & commercials so I was used to dealing with all those areas but when I was able to get into the game business it was much more wide open. I could be an audio director, which means I was able to say, ‘look, there should be nothing that ever comes out of speakers in these games that I didn’t approve or create’… that’s something you don’t necessarily get to do when you’re part of a team making a film or a commercial or a TV show or something… you’re a composer or sound designer or you’re a sound effects editor or a re-recording mixer – you have a lot of different roles and sometimes there’s no singular audio vision for the whole project and I was always hoping that was something I could do, and games gave me the opportunity to do that.

B: Is that a unique thing to games?

M: If you look for the term audio director in any movie you won’t find it… so it’s unique to games. And I am happy to say, I am probably a pioneer in that area.

B: I’d definitely agree with that assessment, yeah.

M: I mean I actually sorta insisted. I kinda made up the term and said ‘No I’m audio director’ and I told those young guys ‘here’s what that means: It means anything to do with audio comes through me’.

B: Sounds like a good approach, it’s definitely working.

M: Well thanks. *laughs*

B: If you were, say, trying to make a game like the Call of Duty games where they’re aiming for realism and that strict attention to detail do you think that you would be a bit more constricted?

M: In videogames and especially in the Halo audio engine…content is probably only half of what is important; the other half is how all the music and sound effects are manipulated in real time. So you can record the sound of a realistic engine but that doesn’t help make it seem real when someone’s actually driving it in a virtual world. You have to have a lot of different parameters you control to make it feel like the engine, or the sound of the suspension on the warthog, or the tyres or the gravel getting kicked up… all of those things can’t just be pre-rendered. You want to have good content to begin with but it has to be manipulated in real time. We’re using all sorts of real time parameter controls and digital signal processing that is controlled in real time to make it feel that it’s actually happening.

You have a little more latitude with weapons and vehicles that are alien because you’re not starting from something that you’re trying to recreate… like, the way a jeep sounds when it’s driving over sand. …The way an alien hovercraft sounds when it speeds past you – no one knows what that sounds like, you can make it up as you go along. And you can probably be a little more crazy with how the real time parameter controls actually manipulate the audio when it’s an alien weapon, or vehicle or sound effect. You can be a little more adventurous.

B: I found it really interesting reading a piece by Jim Rossignol that recently got reprinted recently on Rock, Paper, Shotgun. In it he mentioned the Multiwinia developers Introversion and how they were working on some animations that at first seemed somewhat so-so, but when they put sounds to it, it made the actual animations look better as well.

M: Right. And that’s one of the other things that’s actually interesting about games, and for the most part especially the Halo games, everything is virtual so we have no source to begin with… there’s not live action that we shot [to] listen to what we recorded and implement, everything is virtual. Character models, weapons, vehicles and you name it are all completely virtual so they have absolutely no sound. It’s like animation, there’s no sound at all, so in order to bring these things to life we have to do it in real-time.

B: There’s a guy who wrote a book called The Acoustic Ecology of the First Person Shooter, and he talks about how sound effects and the in game sounds that the player hears form an ecology, but he kind of writes off music from that relationship. Do you think the music, the linear compositions of music, can contribute to the ecology of sounds?

M: It’s probably somewhat difficult to disassemble [the music of] Halo just by playing it, but if you play sections over and over again… I would suggest actually recording the music you hear when you’re playing it, and then comparing the performance of the music back to each other, especially the in-game music. The reason I would suggest doing that, is ...I think you’ll be surprised at how much non linear-music is actually happening in Halo 2.

B: I guess the impression that you get if you just go straight through, and listen to all the CD’s you go “Oh yeah, it’s that song, it’s that song” and it’s sorta hard to pick out where it does change more than you think.

M: Just so you know, my own philosophy of how music works in games is that’s actually my ideal. I want people to play through a level or play through a game or play through a section or whatever and actually think that somehow the music just happened to be scored for their experience. And what they had was a linear experience because that is all you have – When you play a game you are having a linear experience, you’re playing for 10m you have a 10m experience. But if you play that 10m over again, believe it or not, the music will not play back the same way.

And that is all on purpose…I don’t want people to be aware that the music is actually adapting or interacting with their interaction, I want people to think that it’s just a linear piece of music that seemed to somehow fit what they were doing and they had a good experience. If they are aware that they are changing the music then I think I’ve failed.

B: Right. So you want to avoid what happens in some games, where you know you’re being attacked because the battle music has started.

M: Yeah, right. But it’s not just that… even when a piece of music starts, there are sections where the linear pieces of music that I basically reassemble in order to make a CD soundtrack out of it, but these things are not just disassembled and have stems… you know, you have a rhythm track or a pad and these things cross-fade or whatever, I actually have different sections of music that randomly fit together with each other and give you a different linear experience based on some random chance elements that happen. And I can weight the chance so that section D has only a 10% chance of playing. So you have at least a random playback of what is happening; then there will be more intense sections, or less intense sections, or things that overlay that only happen because of actions that you are doing. If you decide to speed through an area you’ll get a completely different piece of music that basically feels linear from beginning to end, but if you linger and do something different you’ll have a completely different musical experience. That’s actually something that I think is fun to do and to try to find those sections, and try to analyse how many different things are you hearing that are changing up.

In the next post our discussion moves onto granular music approaches in videogame music, why Marty has not been one to advocate a granular approach to videogame music, and what his own alternative approach is.

An investigation of new musical potential in videogames; A Thesis

So the day has finally arrived and the chickens can now be counted. First the raw mark:

For my thesis, which I spent all year writing, I received a mark of 86 which is safely within the High Distinction band. Accordingly, the full text of my thesis is now available here. Go read it, print it, bind it, critique it, lambast it, or just put it on your coffee table and let it look pretty.

So here's the inside scoop on what to expect:

- Chapter 1 is me raving, perhaps somewhat inadvisably, about a loony Indie game for 1000 of my 17,000 word limit before getting around to talking about music and what I'm going to say in this wordy monstrosity.

- Chapter 2 is my literature review (highly skippable if you aren't interested in either a) Ian Bogost or b) Gonzalo Frasca)

- Chapter 3 is all about how I think the current musical paradigm in videogames is, erm... how you say? COMPLETELY RUBBISH (okay, not quite, but almost) and then I talk about games like Guitar Hero, Audiosurf and Everyday Shooter and how wicked awesoe they are....

- Chapter 4 is the thesis, really, and it's where I interview the awesome Marty O'Donnell in an attempt to glean some insights about music for videogames from him. If you only read one chapter, it should really be this one.

Which also reminds me that I've got the full text of the interview ready to put up, so I'll kick start that series later in the week - keep an eye out for it. I think Marty has some genuinely interesting and important things to say about sound and music in games - and about game design more generally.

What are you still doing here? Go download it already!

Also: props to my man in Melbourne, Dan Golding, who recently posted his own thesis for which he got an even better mark (90) so go download and read his when you're done with mine.

Edit: Matthew Gallant from The Quixotic Engineer has graciously provided hosting for my thesis so I don't have to use Mediafire. Isn't he lovely? =)

A retrospective of 'ZZT', part Deux

In this post I am having a long-form discussing about a particular videogame with a childhood friend of mine and fellow blogger, Bibliosimius. In this 2 parter we discuss our mutual affection for the game ZZT and it's profound impact on our underdeveloped teenage minds. Part Un, in which we discuss the influence of the aesthetic of ZZT and more, can be found here.

B'simius adds his $.o2:

That's given me another thought. We learn visual art, creative writing, mathematics, "citizenship", all compulsorily in school. What about programming? One could argue that it'd make a good addition to the basic curriculum to give kids a general introduction to the very basic basics of how it all works. Using computer programs is increasingly becoming a part of schooling these days, but what about understanding how they're made? Not so much.


Ben:

Wow, that's such a brilliant idea! I think that kids would also really be into it - I know I would have been. But then again, I was a massive nerd, so... I'm sure there'd need to be classes tailored to skill levels much like the maths and sciences.

You're right that knowing how to use them is about 100 times more important than knowing stuff like how a Hard Disk Drive works (hey, I was under the mistaken impression that there was no magnetism involved until just recently, and I'm OK), so maybe school computer classes should be teaching fundamentals of programming. It also makes sense, because students are currently being taught stuff like how to use specific software packages like Microsoft office and Photoshop, etc, which all go out of date within a year or so. The ideas behind being able to understand programming are so much longer lasting though.


B'Simius:

Absolutely. It comes down to whether we want kids to grow up as good little mechanoids in the social machine or to be informed individuals who actually know how stuff works, and not just how to work it. We want new generations to avoid hardware problems which could be resolved with the dual typicals "Have you tried turning it off and on again?" and "Are you sure it's plugged in?" Understanding basic programming principles could alleviate similarly ridiculous problems with software.

I haven't thought about it from this perspective before, but understanding the basic ZZT-OOP programming paramaters and commands has probably helped me understand a fairly diverse range of electronic applications. I'd be interested in any kind of study into whether understanding the basics makes the complexities more intuitive. I'd more than tentatively guess that it does.


Ben:

Mmm, good points. I don't think it's just an age thing either. My nana in her 80's got her first ever mobile phone recently, although I guess that is more an extension of an existing older technology, but my other grandmother is getting a laptop too, so she can get on the internet.

So, to segue into a neat conclusion - what's the single best thing about ZZT? The Aesthetic? Teaching Programming? Creative Potential? Or even the community of programmers and storytellers that grew up around it?

B'simius:

I'd say that the single best thing about ZZT is all the good times it gave us - it was fun; fun to learn how to use it, fun to collaborate, fun to work individually, fun to share... but that's a matter of opinion. There's a lot in ZZT for a lot of different types.

Single best feature in your opinion?


Ben:

For me probably the creative outlet aspect. I really need to have something like that and ZZT was the first ever thing where I could just be creative without being constrained by lack of skill or talent or equipment or something =P

It's not like there weren't constraints on ZZT (in fact there were lots) but it was the first real "medium" or toolset I ever managed to come to grips with enough to get to the stage of being able to make something that was meaningful to me.

And on that note, thanks for taking a stroll down memory lane with me, B'simius! Feel free to blog about the experience and how librarians can use Facebook threaded conversations, etc on your own blog. And dear readers, may I also encourage you to check out Bibliosimus sometime in the future too.

-------------

That's all for my two part discussion with B'simius, however if people find this format at all interesting (and I quite like it myself) then look out for more posts in a similar vein. If you're looking for Part Un, in which we discuss the influence of the aesthetic of ZZT and more, it can be found here.


Random ZZT Linkdump:

ZZT @ YTMND.com
ZZT In retrovision article at Gay Gamer
Official Wikipedia article on ZZT

A retrospective of 'ZZT', part Un

In this post I am having a long-form discussing about a particular videogame with a childhood friend of mine and fellow blogger, Bibliosimius. In this 2 parter we discuss our mutual affection for the game ZZT and it's profound impact on our underdeveloped teenage minds.


Ben fires his opening volley:

So in this blog post I'm discussing with my long time friend B'simius a game that is part of both of our shared gaming heritage, and has probably had the single biggest impact on my tastes when it comes to games. I am of course talking about the 1991 classic videogame ZZT!

ZZT was a game by Tim Sweeny, later founder of Epic games, who went on to make both the Gears of War and Unreal Tournament series. What is probably most notable about the game is that it's not quite your ordinary PC game - in large part ZZT was just a level editor for making your own games. B'simius, would you also agree that a large part of the attraction to ZZT was the fact that it was really just a cleverly disguised game creation tool?


B'Simius replies:

As far as I'm concerned, the editor was ZZT's primary point of appeal. I probably spent more time programming Objects and drawing giant sandwiches using nothing but ASCII than I did playing the games, even though some of them were pretty amazing feats, especially given the limitations inherent to the program.

In retrospect my many attempts at crafting masterpieces of ZZT-OOP were generally fairly shoddy, but I couldn't get enough of trying, and trying, and trying again because of that ever-present sense that I made this, this is mine; a sense that's generally out of reach to the common gamer. A bit of a melodramatic assessment, I must admit, but there is truly a warm, snuggly spot in my heart reserved for this game.


Ben:

You're totally right about the feeling you get of owning your creations. I remember I once spent a good six hours scripting an EPICintro cut scene to a game that I never made more than a single screen for. It was fantastic!

Do you get the same sensation of ownership from Spore? I know you have been playing that game like a bit of an addict, does it reflect a similar attraction? I've been formulating this weird theory recently that ZZT (and the semi-sequel Megazeux) have been more of an influence on my gaming tastes than anything since.

I mean, how else do I explain why my favourite game ever is the batshit insane Randy Balma: Municipal Abortionist? I can only guess that the surreal games of ZZT (I'm looking at you Bernard the Bard & That Game With B-Fly Ptarmigan in it. For readers unfamiliar with this particular ZZT game, B-Fly was a Ptarmigan God who spewed up the universe).


B'simius:

Spore has a similar feel, although it pales in comparison to the scope and scale of ZZT. You can only go so far with creating Spores; eventually you have to set them loose in the universe, which is where the majority of the game really takes place. In ZZT, though, it's not just the majority but the entirety of the game that's forged in the editor's fires.

A thought's occurred to me. ZZT may have influenced your taste in games as far as the surreal and loopy content goes, but do you think your early exposure to ZZT has influenced the way you think about games as games - that is, the structure, outlay, design, etc. of games?


Ben:

ha ha! I was actually hoping this topic would come up, because, yes, I think ZZT has totally influenced the way I think about and appreciate games. And not just games too - I think the 'ZZTOOPS' system of scripting burrowed deep into my impressionable mind as a child and is influencing the way I make music.

When we started working with a music program called Max/MSP in Digital Musics back in 2nd year Uni, I was one of those insane few people who actually got it. Although I wasn't super great at making cool stuff with it, I understood the underlying principle of the visual patcher environment as a programming language and that gave me a huge advantage over just about everyone else in the class.

When it comes to games, I think I also have that same rule based approach, hence my attraction towards the work of Ian Bogost & Gonzalo Frasca who both talk about games qua simulations or computations. It's all rules and instructions baby!

And thus concludes part I of our ZZT retrospective.