- Analysis: How To Get Creative With Game Music

Generally considered one of the biggest afterthoughts in game development even now, music is of utmost importance to developers attempting to create depth within their work.

So said Duncan Watt, founder and creator of game music production company Fastestmanintheworld, at a Gamasutra-attended Montreal International Game Summit session aimed at offering developers better understanding of music’s place within other creative works.

“Music has an incredible hold over the viewer,” Watt said. “Not only does it follow the action of a work, but it tells the story behind the story, and can inform the viewer on what they should be thinking. As a game designer, this is an incredibly powerful ability that you should use.”

In any creative work, music is either ambient, or background music, referred to by composers as underscore — or source music, where something within the world is generating the tune.

(This can also be called diegetic versus non-diegetic music, as columnist Gregory Weir recently explained in Gamasutra.)

“The great challenge faced by composers, particularly when writing underscore, is that they do not know exactly what is going to happen. A player could choose to walk into a bar and walk right back out again, or they could spend twenty minutes there,” said Watt.

However, not all techniques in creating game music require taking player behavior into account. “Even static ambient music — music which doesn’t alter to fit what is going on on screen — can bring a lot to a game in communicating the mood and setting to the player immediately,” said Watt.

“A game like Jet Set Radio Future communicates as much by playing Cibo Matto’s Birthday Cake as it does from its cel-shaded visuals.”

“Reactive” ambient music is probably one of the most well-used methods in games, but Watt emphasized that “it doesn’t just have to show that the player is in battle or not,” remarking that casual games were leading the way with reactive scores that communicate a variety of different states to the player.

And though the form may still be too nascent for this, Watt noted that music affects how players feel to such a great degree that it can be used to trick them for dramatic effect.

“You are telling the player what to think when he hears that battle music. He thinks, when he turns the corner, here come the enemies, but there’s no reason that has to be true.”

To discuss source music, Watt referred to what he felt was the best example of what it can do for a game – Portal’s radio, which is found in the very first area.

“It’s right there behind you, so it gets you used to the space and informs that you could, should turn around, which gets you used to the controls, and as you start to warp around, the distance you are from the radio helps keep you straight.”

One recent example of source music that also excited Watt was Fable II’s bard, who sings songs of the player character’s adventures. “This is reactive source music driven not only by the player’s action to initiate it, but by their previous actions in the world,” he said.

These examples were important enough that Watt used them to argue for an improved connection between game and music design – which doesn’t mean things like Guitar Hero. “Songs with lyrics are completely valid story drivers,” he said.

“You can’t think of every musical as ‘High School Musical’ – there is so much potential to this; compare Portal without ‘Still Alive’ and with it, and then tell me you wouldn’t play something as silly as a minigame collection if it promised a thematic link to Portal through the music.”

“The bottom line is that is timeless, it’s universal, it doesn’t matter where you came from or who you are, you understand music on an intrinsic level,” Watt concluded. “It’s like a smell; it puts you on that spot, and we should use that.”

- Sony Reveals New PlayStation Credit Card

Sony Computer Entertainment America has unveiled a new PlayStation branded credit card, which will allow savings of over $150 on the purchase of a PlayStation 3 console this year.

As described on the official U.S. PlayStation.Blog website, the card will “offer fans a new way to show off their PlayStation pride and earn reward points towards the purchase of PlayStation and Sony products”.

The $150 introductory rebate offer is valid until December 31st, 2008 and can be used at any authorized PlayStation retailer in the U.S. The discount effectively reduces the price of the 80GB PlayStation 3 model to $249.99.

The card has no annual fees, with full Visa Platinum benefits – including double warranty protection. An additional promotional offer allows owners to get a free Blu-ray movie when purchasing another movie at full price.

- UK Charts: CoD: World At War Entrenches At Number One

Treyarch and Activision’s Call of Duty: World at War has solidified its position at the top of the UK sales charts, despite a fall in demand of 51 percent. Nonetheless, combined sales of the game on all platforms outsold the runner up, EA’s FIFA 09, by a factor of 2.5 to 1.

Despite another week full of new releases, there was not a single new entry in the top ten, with the rest of the chart dominated by Nintendo titles.

Sales of Mario Kart Wii were up 33 percent at number three, Wii Fit rose 45 percent at number four, Brain Training (aka Brain Age) was up 46 percent at number five and Wii Play rose 22 percent at number six.

Also appearing in the top 10 for the first time was Wii Music, with second week sales increasing by 67 percent to help the Wii exclusive title to reach number seven. Even co-production Sonic & Mario at the Olympic Games managed to re-enter the top 10, three months after the end of the Beijing Olympics.

The highest new entry of the week was EA’s Need for Speed: Undercover on PlayStation 3 at number twelve, with the Xbox 360 version at number thirteen. The game’s debut is the lowest this generation for the series, which has previously enjoyed a number of UK Christmas number ones.

Also underperforming this week was Tomb Raider: Underworld, with the PlayStation 3 version at number 14 and the Xbox 360 version at number 28.

Perhaps proving to be a blockbuster too many for the busy pre-Christmas period, combined sales of the game still outperformed remake Tomb Raider: Anniversary (of which there was no PlayStation 3 version) by only 6,700 units.

Also new at number 16 was the Xbox 360 version of Valve’s Left 4 Dead. The lead PC version did not chart in the top 40, with many users likely to have purchased it online via the Steam delivery system.

Finally, two Wii titles debuting in the top 40 in their second week were Ubisoft’s Shaun White Snowboarding: Road Trip at number 31 and THQ’s All Star Cheerleader at number 36.

Once again, there were a number of high-profile casualties during the week, with Midway’s Mortal Kombat vs. DC Universe, Nintendo’s Pokemon Ranger: Shadows of Almia, Microsoft’s Lips, Sony’s LocoRoco 2, Square Enix’s The Last Remnant, and EA’s Skate It and Rock Band 2 all failing to chart.

Overall in the top 40, there were 14 games for the Xbox 360, 10 for the Wii, seven for the Nintendo DS, six for the PlayStation 3, three for the PC and one for the PSP.

TW	LW	Title	Publisher	Format
1	1	Call of Duty: World at War	Activision	360
2	3	Call of Duty: World at War	Activision	PS3
3	7	Mario Kart Wii	Nintendo	Wii
4	9	Wii Fit	Nintendo	Wii
5	10	Dr Kawashima’s Brain Training	Nintendo	DS
6	8	Wii Play	Nintendo	Wii
7	11	Wii Music	Nintendo	Wii
8	4	Football Manager 2009	Sega	PC
9	5	Gears of War 2	Microsoft	360
10	13	Mario & Sonic at the Olympic Games	Sega	Wii

Leisure software charts compiled by Chart Track, (C)2008. ELSPA Ltd

- Moore: It’s Tough To Reach Wii Users With Sports Games

EA Sports president Peter Moore attributes poor sales for Madden and the company’s other sports games on the Wii as the result of competing against Wii Sports.

“The challenge we face is that that consumer gets Wii Sports right out of the box,” he says, according to a report from game weblog MTV Multiplayer. “That’s a sports experience that’s good enough for a lot of people. That is a challenge for us at times.”

EA Sports’s latest Madden release, Madden NFL 09, sold over two million copies on the PlayStation 3, Xbox 360, and PlayStation 2 combines in the U.S. in August.

During that same period, Madden NFL 09 All-Play, a version specifically tailored for the system’s controls and more casual audience, sold a little over 100,000 units.

Moore adds that EA Sports’s success with migrating “core consumers” to the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 has led those those gamers to seek hardcore multiplatform titles on those systems over the Wii.

He argues, however, that some multi-console households are buying multiple copies of games, purchasing an Xbox 360 or PS3 game for traditional gamers, and then the Wii version for casual players in the home.

The EA Sports president also recently brought up his company’s troubles with attracting Wii gamers at a recent investor’s conference, admitting, “We didn’t get off on the best foot with the Wii with our authentic, simulative products. In our first year, our results were probably best described as miserable. But we’ve made huge progress.”

Moore says that the company knows what it hasn’t been doing right and has been correcting those deficiencies, providing a “more casual, lighter, [and] more approachable experience.” He notes that the division’s core games on Wii, Tiger Woods and Madden NFL, are up 20 percent year-on-year and are EA’s top-rated games on the system.

Even with that trend, he doesn’t believe that the company will see attach rates for its Wii sports games match its releases for other consoles.

“We’re seeing progress,” he says. “Is it easy? No. Will we ever see attach rates for authentic sports games, for licensed sports games, on the Wii to the same we see on 360 or PS3? Probably not in this cycle. Are we going to see continued growth of both? Absolutely.”

- Edu Feature: ‘Press The Action Button, Snake: Self-Reference In Games’

Where does the video game character end and the player begin? Matthew Weise, a lead game designer for the Singapore-MIT GAMBIT Game Lab, considers the complex relationship between video game players and characters in a new feature article on GameCareerGuide.com.

Weise’s argument is that, unlike in theater and film, video games don’t ever really break the fourth wall, as it were, because in games, there is no hard and fast wall between the characters on the screen and the player in front of the screen.

There is evidence of a much more complex relationship between the two in all kinds of video games, says Weise, from more experimental modern titles, such as Eternal Darkness: Sanity’s Requiem and Mirror’s Edge, to older games, like Sonic the Hedgehog and Zork.

Weise disagrees with Ernest Adams, who argues that a player’s sense of immersion is “interrupted” when something in the game reminds them that they are “only” playing a game.

“When a game is self-referential,” writes Weise, “when it acknowledges the technological apparatus of the computer, it can have a profound effect on player experience.” Part of re-interpreting the relationship involves getting rid of this notion of a “wall” that can be broken:

“It is useful to think about the boundary between player and fiction as an elastic membrane — a threshold — rather than a wall, like Adams does. Drawing attention to how this threshold functions through self-reference can actually enhance fiction rather than destroy it. It can draw the player and game fiction together rather than driving them apart.

Conventional wisdom suggests that anything that draws attention to the technology of a medium is destructive for fiction. The characters in a movie, book, television show, or stage production must not ‘know’ they are in one, else they become aware of their own non-reality and everything falls apart. This is typically what’s meant by ‘breaking the fourth wall.’

But video games are not exactly the same as these other art forms. The reality-fantasy dynamic in games is complicated by the player, who is always tethered to the game world by an umbilical cord called technology.

In some sense, the ‘reality’ of a game always involves the player, since it would not be a game otherwise. In story-based games players make choices that have meaning and consequence in the fictional world of a game, so they are always a part of the fiction, acting under the guise of an avatar, a digital mask the player puts on to ‘enter’ the fictional world of the game and become part of it.”

The article, “Press the ‘Action’ Button, Snake! The Art of Self-Reference in Video Games,” is now available to read in full on GameCareerGuide.com.

- Inside GDC 2009: ‘Content Is King’

[Ever wondered how talks get selected for GDC? Starting a series of articles from the event blog, Game Developers Conference event director Meggan Scavio reveals this year's GDC advisory board and submission process.]

Every summer, the GDC advisory board gathers to discuss the direction of the next event. The board is made up of 17 of the most dedicated, brilliant people in the industry. And I’m not just saying that because they might read this.

You may have heard of some of them, for example Blizzard’s Rob Pardo, Electronic Arts’ Lou Castle, veteran creator Mark Cerny, Bungie’s Chris Butcher, MGS’s Laura Fryer, and Maxis’ Chris Hecker. See, it’s true. Smarties.

Anyhow, during this meeting they talk about everything from networking opportunities (“wouldn’t it be cool to have a roundtable follow a thought-provoking lecture so the attendees can discuss what they just heard?”) to session formats (“what if we gave speakers 3 minutes each to present their cool idea or technology”).

The meat of what they talk about, however, is the session content and how to make it better. It’s all-quality all-the-time with these folks.

Our attempt at improving (and some might say maintaining) session quality for GDC 2009 was evidenced in our Call for Submissions. The board is always looking for interesting, well crafted submissions but the reality is they are really looking at takeaway.

When reviewing submissions, they want to know if the attendee is going to walk out of the room knowing something they didn’t know when they walked in.

We updated the submissions process this year by dividing it into two phases with takeaway being the focal point of phase one.

GDC Submissions: Phase One

We asked three things in phase one of GDC submissions this year: what do you want to call your talk?; briefly explain the focus of your talk; and explain to us how the attendee is going to benefit from attending this talk. We received over 800 of these.

The board then reads, reviews and grades every single one to determine who moves on.

This process involves locking the board into a hotel meeting room for 2 whole days while they productively discuss (sometimes I call it bickering like little girls but they don’t like that very much) the merits of the submissions.

It breaks down like this: by track, we sort the submissions by the reviewers average grade and discuss every single submission that received a grade of 3.8 or higher (1=not so much, 5=much awesomeness).

The board determines which of these will move on to phase two. After that, we go around the room and each board member has an opportunity to fight for a submission that didn’t score so well but they want to save.

We continue to go around the room until no one has anything left to save. Wash and repeat. All weekend. And you wonder why I drink.

GDC Submissions: Phase Two

Right now we are in phase two. Submitters are in the process of, well, submitting the bulk of what their Game Developers Conference presentation is going to be for a second round of review.

This is where the board can see if the content matches the intent. And this will, fingers crossed, help us in making sure that what seems like a super awesome submission turns into a super awesome GDC session.

We shall see!

[Meggan and her colleagues will be posting regular updates from behind the scenes through the lead-up to next March's Game Developers Conference 2009, including content reveals and other helpful information. You can subscribe individually to the GDC News blog via its RSS feed.]

- Sony: PSP Piracy ‘Trending Downwards’

Software piracy for Sony’s PlayStation Portable handheld is on the decrease, according to claims made by John Koller, Sony Computer Entertainment America’s head of hardware marketing.

Piracy on the PSP has always been particularly prevalent, with the system’s memory card slot making installation of counterfeit games relatively easy — though multiple operating system updates included with PSP games have tried to lock out pirates.

The piracy problem is potentially a factor in the generally low software sales of PSP titles, which are far below what might be expected from the otherwise strong hardware sales in some territories.

Sony has never denied the problem, but speaking recently to consumer website MTV Multiplayer, Koller said that piracy on the PSP has decreased over the last few months.

“It’s trending down right now — we’ve seen the piracy not be as such prevalent in the last month to two months,” said Koller. “But it has been a problem for us.”

No specific reason was given for why the problem should have decreased recently, but Koller suggested that Sony closely monitors piracy websites. “We’ve noticed there’s kind of a ‘good vs. evil’ battle that we track on many of the forums and many of the pirated web sites,” said Koller.

“There’s certainly people that are standing up and fighting for what we consider the good side, the rights of developers and publishers to make money on their IP,” he added.

“And then there’s certainly the other side that believes that they can take as warranted. It’s kind of been nice to see other consumers going and help and fight the battle for us.”

- Q&A: From’s Hamatani On Channeling Cinema For Ninja Blade

Independent Japanese developer From Software (Armored Core) has been surprisingly supportive of Microsoft’s Xbox 360, delivering exclusives (and timed exclusives) like Chromehounds, Enchanted Arms, and Tenchu Z since soon after the system’s launch.

Its visually impressive upcoming title Ninja Blade, set to be published by Microsoft Game Studios in early 2009, is characterized by the studio as a “cinematic action game”.

By shuffling together a variety of different gameplay styles within missions, the team hopes to create an unceasingly action-packed experience that lives up to its silver screen counterparts.

Gamasutra caught up with From Software main planner Kazuhiro Hamatani, who spoke about the philosophical core of the game’s design, the importance of pacing in gameplay, and why it can be important to restrain in-game storytelling.

How did you arrive at the different modes, with the cinematic button-pressing “quicktime event” mode, the direct combat mode, and the hybrid of the two?

Kazuhiro Hamatani: What we wanted to create here is a cinematic action game. It’s not just one game system. It’s difficult to express a situation like a Hollywood action movie with just one game system, so we wanted to create a game by focusing on the situations.

In that case, it wasn’t really the game system [that was conceived] first. The situations came first — there were certain situations we wanted to express.

We tried to think of how we could create such situations, so that users would be able to play them in the game. This was more like a situation-driven development.

When it comes to creating the game in terms of pacing, how did the team arrive at a good balance between the three different modes?

KH: Over time, you will know more about this game, but there are some other situations included in this game as well.

Basically, there are cutscenes with button entries and evasive combat scenes, as well as scenes with combat on the surface of building walls.

We included them in one set, connected in sequences that comprise missions. For each different mission, we’ve tried to have a clear set of characteristics by including a certain type of situation.

We aimed for a cinematic action game, so in one mission, we try to have a beginning, the excitement, and then something like an ending or conclusion to make it one small drama — something like a movie.

Did you study the classic act structure, as used in films for example, and then apply that to the design pacing?

KH: Films and games are different from each other, but in Hollywood action movies, there is one exciting scene once every three minutes or so, so we tried to refer to such things as a philosophy, something like an ideal.

Rather than referring to the movie structure, we tried to refer to the philosophy behind movies, because we don’t have dramatic scenes in the game.

How do you tie that pacing to the different types of gameplay sequences?

KH: In action games, there are elements I like, but I am unsatisfied in some areas as well. In some cases, the users tend to get bored or lazy, and they become too calm or quiet — in a negative sense.

That doesn’t mean that we have to create many scenes, like in varied action movies; it doesn’t mean that we have to increase their frequency. But what’s important is the user to be able to feel excitement, rather than being tired or bored by the game.

It’s not about how many minutes you have to switch to the other situation. That’s not the question. But we want to feel some excitement, rather than being bored or getting tired. That’s what I get behind in switching between different situations.

I get the sense there aren’t a lot of cutscenes — it’s mainly unbroken gameplay?

KH: That’s right. The dramatic scenes are used in very limited circumstances. Maybe at the opening and the ending, and also when scenarios change, we include such scenes, but not elsewhere very often. Also, the cutscenes with button entries account for just ten percent.

There’s been a lot of talk, especially in the U.S., about trying to limit the non-interactive parts of games, and also to create games that tell stories interactively, rather than sit the player in front of a story. Have you given this any thought?

KH: Yes. That’s very important. Once the player becomes an observer or outsider, he or she will lose the sense of unity with the main character, so we tried to be careful in that respect.

That’s an interesting concept, the unity with the main character. I think there’s more than one way to look at it. I think that often, Japanese games create a character like a movie character that you can enjoy their story, but you don’t feel like you’re really participating.

Often the goal in American games is to create a character that the player aspires to be like, and thus participates in their actions directly. I was wondering if you could talk about your philosophy there, please.

KH: There are pros and cons to each of the philosophies you have just mentioned, but this is a game, so it’s important to have characters that players can empathize with in the game.

We do have characters with certain features, and something special or a uniqueness about the characters, but there should be some room for the players to project themselves onto such characters. In that sense, we don’t disclose too many details to the users.

The main character is wearing a mask. That’s another aspect. It’s important to have special characteristics of the characters, but we also want the players to be able to feel some emotions about the characters as well.

- Bethesda Announces Fallout 3 Mod Tools, DLC

Bethesda plans next month to make available user content creation tools for its open-world RPG Fallout 3, with paid downloadable content for PC and Xbox 360 users coming in January.

The official editor is entitled G.E.C.K., or Garden of Eden Creation Kit. It will be offered free to PC players.

Even as recently as the month before Fallout 3’s release, the fate of its mod tools were in question, with marketing VP Pete Hines claiming that mods were “not on the schedule,” because “it takes a lot of time and effort.”

The new single-player DLC, on the other hand, has long been promised ahead of the game’s release, and is exclusive to the PC and Xbox 360 platforms; on PC, it will be distributed through Microsoft’s Games for Windows Live platform, which is integrated into the game.

The first DLC pack, “Operation: Anchorage,” will reproduce the liberation of Chinese-occupied Alaska, and will ship in January 2009. Another pack, the Pittsburgh-area “The Pit,” will ship in February, and a third, “Broken Steel,” will ship in March, continuing the main quest line by allowing players to join the armored Brotherhood of Steel.

Modding has been a significant part of Bethesda’s player community since 1996s The Elder Scrolls II: Daggerfall, which players modified despite having no sanctioned tools with which to do so. For the third and fourth main entries in the series, Morrowind and Oblivion, Bethesda released official mod tools, each called The Elder Scrolls Construction Set.

No price points were given for the paid downloads.

- Adams: Obama Victory Doesn’t Mean Game Censorship Is Done

In a detailed opinion piece posted on Gamasutra, IGDA co-founder and game designer Ernest Adams has been discussing what a Barack Obama presidency means for video games and censorship, noting that “our most aggressive critics have not come from the right, but from the moderate left.”

Adams, who co-founded the IGDA partly to fight back against government and state censorship of games as a medium, then lists some of games’ most vociferous critics and explains why we shouldn’t let our guard down:

“Tom Lantos, our earliest Congressional critic, was a Democrat. Hillary Clinton is a Democrat. Tipper Gore, wife of Al Gore, who took on the music industry, is a Democrat. Joe Lieberman is a Democrat… sort of.

These people would never dream of threatening to impose a government labeling system on books if the book publishers didn’t set up their own, yet that is exactly what they did to video games.

Part of this is simple “triangulation,” as Bill Clinton called it. In order to avoid appearing too far left, Democrats need an issue that will appeal to social conservatives. They can’t argue for censoring books or movies or TV, or they’ll lose the support of their base.

Video games are a safe target. Nobody important cares about them. Unlike movies, games don’t have a lot of rich, popular, and very good-looking people standing up to defend them.”

While Adams notes that there is plenty in the economy and foreign policy areas to keep Obama busy in the near future, he does urge caution for the longer term:

“There’s nothing to be happy about in any of that bad news, but at least we can take some comfort in the fact that video games are not anybody’s major concern at the moment.

I don’t think it’s safe to relax, though. The economy will come back; Obama will end at least one war; and perhaps he and Congress will do something about education and health care.

In two years there will be another Congressional election, and both sides will be trying hard to prove that they serve the public better than those other guys. When that happens, video games may be back the firing line again. We’ll have to be ready.”

You can now read the full Gamasutra feature on the subject, including lots more discussion on the political climate and what game developers can do to ensure further censorship of games doesn’t occur.

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