Day 6: Most Annoying Character

The obvious (and clichéd) answer for this question would be the Adoring Fan from The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, but I’d put him there at the risk of taking an enormous cop-out. Also I actually find him quite endearing, and not just because we have similar hair. People might feel differently, but I’m just gonna go right ahead and say it: I’m an Animal Crossing player, and FUCK Truffles.

I HATE HER. I cannot STAND her. I demolished my first Animal Crossing town because she WOULDN’T LEAVE. And before that, she said to me ‘Mayor Phoebe, I’m thinking about moving out of Trotston’ and I thought ‘YES FINALLY I’LL BE RID OF YOUR FAKE-ASS CHEERFUL ATTITUDE’ so I said something to the effect of ‘whatever you feel is best for you’ (or something else that I can imagine my avatar saying through gritted teeth), and THEN she said ‘oh, only a true friend would tell me to follow my heart! And I could NEVER leave my true friends!’ SO SHE STAYED PUT. After all that. Months of not talking to her, screwing up any task she gave me, whacking her with my bug-catching net, all of that for her to go ‘you’re my BEST friend’. It’s like that annoying kid who you gave a few crisps to at lunch that one time and now they won’t get the hell out of your house.

I’ve never disliked an Animal Crossing character so much. She’s one of the ‘peppy’ characters, which means she’s always upbeat and excited, dreaming of being famous in the future. This is all fine and dandy with other villagers, but with Truffles her disgusting cheeriness is completely at odds with her appearance. Don’t pretend you’re happy to see me, Truffles. Don’t pretend you haven’t noticed the weeds popping up because I haven’t been to work for four months. Don’t pretend you’re happy living in a town with no roads and nothing to do except develop a sudden interest in ichthyology and earning your money by selling oranges. Those eyebrows don’t lie, Truffles.

Now get the fuck out of my town, and stay out.

Day 5: Game Character You Feel You Are Most Like (Or Wish You Were)

Being a person who’s never really enjoyed being in their own skin, I tend to identify with characters with no connection to reality. Often these characters border on the supernatural and bear no similarity to the person I actually am. Characters like Morrigan from Dragon Age, whose quick wit and emotional coldness offered a relief from my over-thinking, highly emotional mind, and Altaïr Ibn-La’Ahad from Assassins Creed, whose physical prowess, intimidating nature, and rebellious attitude gave me a feeling of freedom. It was comforting to experience life in another time, another world. But in the end you have to come back to earth and ground yourself in reality, or risk being trapped in a virtual world with a warped perception of the person you are. For that reason, I’ve chosen Max Caulfield from Square Enix’s Life Is Strange as the game character I feel I am most like.

Image from http://dontnodentertainment.wikia.com/wiki/Max%27s_Camera

Yep, that intolerable hipster with a Polaroid camera, manipulating time for the greater good. I said that my favourite characters border on the supernatural!

I’ve chosen Max because, like me, she’s hugely introverted and lacks confidence in her abilities. Using her camera, she takes a passive role in life, preferring to document and observe than take an active role. When she discovers her time-bending abilities she realises she has the potential to change the world for the better, but it soon becomes clear that her powers take more control and responsibility than she is capable of.

Max is very retrospective and takes great responsibility for the things she does. I don’t think she fully understands the person she is; she is presented as a social outsider (not quite an outcast but certainly on the fringes of the social life at her school) and there are several moments during the game which put question on her sexuality. It’s never confirmed exactly what Max defines her sexuality as, and it’s not necessary either. She’s just trying to do the right thing by being true to her feelings. I get the feeling that she’s just a bit lost, and I relate to her because I spent much of my teenage years feeling exactly the same way. I can’t count all the times I sat alone wishing I could turn time back and change something I said.

Max isn’t perfect, sure, but she’s growing into her own skin like all kids do. Like me, she’s just a bit of a late bloomer.

Are there characters that you relate to or wish you were? Comment below or tweet me at TCasualGamer.

Day 4: Your Guilty Pleasure Game

I’ve had a couple of days off to go off the radar away from my computer screen. I’ve missed having any sort of electricity bar a few batteries for some tent fairy lights, but, on the plus side, I now know how to build a teepee fire and cook jacket potatoes on it. All that time playing The Forest was worth it.

This post is all about My Guilty Pleasure!

While Grand Theft Auto IV and V would certainly be right answers to this question, in light of Take-Two’s cease-and-desist order to OpenIV, declaring all unofficial mods illegal, I’ve decided not to mention them because NO PUBLICITY FOR YOU.

If you’re also in the position where you love GTA but you’re so angry at the prospect of not having single-player mods for seemingly no other reason than a straw-clutching claim that it allows people to bypass security features, I’ve got the best game for you. Do you want to:

1. go around punching people for the sheer hell of it?
2. spend most of your time avoiding the police?
3. kiss any girl you can get your hands on?
4. steal cars willy-nilly?
5. shoot a punk in the face and then run away?
6. start out the underdog and come out on top as a really big fish in a really big pond?

Well, don’t play GTA. Just substitute ‘police’ for ‘prefects’ and ‘cars’ for ‘bicycles’ and you’ve got yourself Bully.

Developed and published in 2006 by Rockstar Games (and distributed by Take-Two Interactive but WE’RE NOT TALKING ABOUT IT), Bully follows the story of 15 year old Jimmy Hopkins, who is sent to the New England boarding school, Bullworth Academy. Once there, Jimmy asserts himself as a troublemaker; collaborating with the sociopathic Gary Smith, he works to gain control over the various cliques of the school. It’s a story of power, betrayal, and doing the same detention over and over again. Did I mention it’s got a stellar soundtrack too?

Bully‘s part of that crowd of games where the facial graphics are actually pretty good (for the main characters at least) but the hands are like big stubby carrots with a piece of wire stuck through the middle. Modelling and animation have come a long way since then, but actually it adds to the charm and gives a bit of nostalgia. I’m all about nostalgia, and one of the reasons I like Bully is because it immerses you completely in the school environment. I wasn’t a huge fan of my own school for various reasons, but now I’m an adult I sometimes miss the safety net of authority figures, as well as the security of walls and fences. There are loads of things I wish I could change about my school experience, and with Bully, it’s almost like I can go back and relive my teenage years without any of the consequences.

I’d like to point out that although Bully is pretty violent (it was banned in Brazil and former British MP Keith Vaz argued for the game to be given a rating of 18 in the same manner as violent films), the way in which that violence is presented is very cartoon-like. Beating someone with a bat produces no blood, no broken bones, no ambulance sirens. Even the yielding pleas of your victim are over the top and comical. While this could be construed as a way to desensitise the player to horrendous acts of violence, I would argue that it is a contributing factor in taking the game over the lines of reality and firmly into fiction. There are many other attributes of Bully which affirm the game’s existence purely in the realms of fantasy; the over-exaggerated clique stereotypes and characterisation of the teachers, to name a couple. There is a scene where the player is taken into the cafeteria to be shown all these cliques one by one. Only in fiction is there such rigid dichotomy between several different friendship groups.

I really love Bully. I’m not a violent person by any stretch of the imagination but my God it’s fun to shoot a kid in the face with a deluxe slingshot. Oh, because of that I have to spend the rest of the afternoon mowing the school lawn?

Worth it.

Day 3: A Game That Is Underrated

Most of the games I play are pretty well-rated, so this was really hard. I wracked my brains trying to think of one, but I couldn’t. Psychonauts came to mind, a brightly coloured children’s platform game which hasn’t had a huge amount of attention since its 2004 release besides a couple of sequels releasing this year and next (much to the delight of its fans). But I never finished Psychonauts, so I felt I couldn’t in good conscience put it as my #1 Underrated Game. Instead, I’ve gone for something that’s…less than triple-A, let’s put it like that. My choice for A Game That Is Underrated is Sherlock Holmes versus Jack the Ripper.

Yeah, okay, there may be a bit of self-indulgence here. This game was panned for clunky mechanics and game-breaking glitches, as well as dated graphics and sound quality. However, the ability to dive into my favourite book series at the time (I played this in about 2010-ish when I was about 16) was wonderful in itself; I was probably in the middle of the books at the time and since then I’ve read every Conan Doyle story of Holmes. I said last post that I get borderline obsessive with characters, and Sherlock Holmes was one of those. So, dodgy mechanics aside, I was just really excited to play as my literary hero.

I’m also a little bit of a crime nerd. What I really liked about this game was the ability to get up close and personal with the crime scenes of Jack the Ripper. I loved examining the bodies because they are replicas of the actual murders committed by the Whitechapel Murderer. And this is what makes this game worth it; it’s a fictional world laid over reality, and the details are such that it can be used as an educational tool. Real victims. Real suspects. The most exciting moment for me was walking into the in-game Mitre Square, finding Elizabeth Stride, and knowing that Catherine Eddowes was out there, still waiting to be discovered. There are lots of other little quirky moments, but as I haven’t played the game in seven years I’ve mostly forgotten them.

Examining the body of one of the Canonical Five; the cartoonish art lessens the gory effect. Above, the player finds a bruise on the left cheek indicating the killer had his thumb around the victim’s mouth.

Having said that, I’m hugely biased. I love crime and serial killers and Jack was one of the first I ever learned about. It’s true that the game glitches and there’s a weird point-and-click mechanic when you’re in third person to make Holmes and Watson move about. When you’re surely hovering over the place you need to click on, the game makes you search for the exact pixel, a laborious and frustrating task. The cutscenes jerk from one location to another, separated by a static loading screen, and there’s no audio or visual fade. Both sound and visuals black out suddenly, go to the loading screen, and then another cutscene will play, usually in a completely different place. This is a jarring experience for the player and doesn’t help with immersion.

But…it’s Jack the Ripper. Versus Sherlock Holmes. Come on.

Remember you can always tweet me at TCasualGamer or comment below with your thoughts. Thanks for reading!

Day 2: Your Favourite Character

As with my last post, there are so many it’s really difficult to pin down. I’m the sort of person that connects with characters, but my tendency towards that is so strong that I usually either feel only basic apathy for characters I’m not connected to and become borderline obsessive about characters I like.

I love Chell from the Portal series, but she doesn’t really have much of a character besides the one I’ve given her, seeing as she’s mute and you never see her without portal trickery. The heart-wrenching choice at the end of Bastion made me feel such a range of feelings for Zulf that I feel he deserves to be at the top of this list. Ezio is, in my opinion, the best character of Assassins Creed, and I’m grateful to Ubisoft for spreading his story over three games so the player can really get to know him. I also have a strange crush on Trajan from Civilisation VI. But if we’re talking about borderline obsession, not just because of the character but out of huge respect for the voice actor, my favourite game character would have to be Morrigan, from Dragon Age: Origins.

Image from http://dragonage.wikia.com/wiki/Morrigan

She’s sexy, she’s intelligent, she’s mysterious, she’s a Witch of the Wilds, and she doesn’t much care about you when you first meet. She’s also hugely manipulative, horrendously rude, and takes great offence to the assumption that she’ll do the cooking in the party. Feminist characters = win.

As you get to know her, however, you learn more about her and discover that she’s a troubled individual. She’s a romanceable option if you’re playing a male character (although there is a mod to make it so any gender can romance any other gender). You get the feeling that she’s not experienced even friendship with anyone before, and that opens up a whole box of emotions for her which you can choose to act on or not. Just before the final battle, a choice will present itself to you. Your actions will determine whether Morrigan stays and fights with you, or disappears into the night, her heart returned to the twisted, bitter, and resentful stone you were so close to softening.

Partly I think the reason I got so into Morrigan is because I recognised the voice actor and couldn’t figure out from where. Being fascinated with the familiar voice led to fascination with the character itself, and this exploded when I found out it was Claudia Black. The super talented actor has given her voice to numerous video game characters including Chloe Frazer in Uncharted II, III, IV, and the soon-to-be-released The Lost Legacy. I know her as Vala Mal Doran of the cult television series Stargate SG-1. And I had a huge crush on her then, so really what else could have happened when I played Dragon Age: Origins?

I haven’t played any other of the Dragon Age games so I don’t know what she’s like in the sequels. I’m quite reluctant really because I don’t want her character to be spoiled through terrible script decisions. She also looks different and I can’t cope. If anyone has anything positive to tell me, comment below or tweet me at TCasualGamer!

As always, thank you for reading.

The 30 Day Gaming Challenge: Day 1 – Your Very First Video Game

In order to build my portfolio (as well as getting into the habit of writing), I’m going to take up the 30 Day Gaming Challenge, seen on Reddit/Tumblr/pretty much every social networking site. It’s a list of 30 questions about gaming, one per day, for which I have to provide the answers.

Now, I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking, ‘Phoebs, you can’t even commit to taking your pills every day, what makes you think you can write a blog post every day for a month?’

Yeah, I know. I know. Just…just bear with me, okay?

Here are the questions, for anyone who’s interested!

So let’s dive in with the first question!

Day 1: Your Very First Video Game

There were honestly so many it’s difficult to pin down which was the very first. I had several Knowledge Adventure educational games, from a rabbit teaching me long and short vowels to Dorling Kindersley’s I Hate Love Learning trilogy; I had a particular fondness for I Hate Love Science, especially the Chemistry kitchen where Al Luminium taught me that you can’t filter brussels sprouts through a sieve. Thanks, Al.

My first game that could be considered anything near to ‘adult’ would be the PC version of Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone. This game actually took me years to complete because I was so scared of being caught by Filch on my way up to the Astronomy tower to drop off Norbert the Norwegian Ridgeback that I refused to go any further. But if I’m being strict about the question, the very first game that I can remember having an effect on me was Adiboo: Magical Playland on Windows 98.

Adiboo is one of the most unusual, weird, bizarre games I’ve ever played. Created in 1999 by the long-dead French games company Coktel-Vision (owned by Sierra Entertainment at the time), Adiboo is about a blonde-haired pointed-eared alien child (called – you guessed it – Adiboo) with a penchant for mischief, living in his house with his dog Pup, a yellow dog with a suction cup for legs. It’s a point-and-click game made up of minigames, although there is a sense of progress through growing plants to use in the kitchen, placing beehives for the bees and so on. Amongst the minigames were sliding puzzles which revealed pictures (quite disturbing ones too, as lots contained monsters and shadows which would move when the picture was completed – I’m fairly sure this contributed to my childhood fear of the dark), a block destroyer which was essentially Breakout for kids, and a very weird facial recognition game where the aim was to match the face on the right with the face on the left. It was very strange, surreal artwork that I haven’t seen in children’s games since.

Looking at playthroughs now, I can see how six-year-old me would have been drawn in to the bright colours and over-exaggerated cartoon features. In addition, Adiboo‘s world is peppered with weird and wonderful characters such as Fuzzy Galump, the monstrous, hydrophobic antagonist who Adiboo likes to spray with his water pistol, and Kee-Cook, the…whatever Kee-Cook is. But blimey, it’s weird. This game would surely fall into a Buzzfeed list of ‘Kids’ Games We Can’t Believe Were For Kids’.

Here are a few screenshots from YouTube Let’s Player Mr. Nutt‘s playthrough of this game, found here:

Adiboo’s garden, with Adiboo himself in the middle. You can see Pup at the top next to The Hollow Tree, and a robot who I can’t remember the name of. I especially like how his house looks like him, complete with turned-up cap.

The weird face game, where you click on the facial features of the right until they match with the left. Each feature has a different sound. As if I needed anything else to have nightmares about.

Fuzzy Galump roaring at Adiboo, who proceeds to spray him with a water pistol.

The interesting thing about this game is that there’s hardly any information about it. Coktel Vision became defunct in 2005, and there’s no Wikipedia article about this or any other game in the Adiboo series. Giant Bomb describes the series as ‘long forgotten‘, and this may be in part due to the direction Coktel Vision took it. By 2004, the endearing 2D pixel art animations had gone, and the toned down colour scheme had been reduced to…well, to Adiboo and the Energy Thieves:

It’s been pointed out to me that this may have been Sierra, the publisher of the Adiboo series, trying to keep up with the developing world of video games, competing with more popular game titles such as Jak II, The Simpsons: Hit & Run, and Prince of Persia: Sands of Time, all released in 2003. But all the creativity, inventiveness, and bizarre art have disappeared, and we’re left with an uninspired, terribly modelled copy. I mean, look at those eyes. The boy just doesn’t look good in 3D.

But maybe that’s because I’m so full of nostalgia for Magical Playland that any other incarnation of Adiboo is wrong and sinful. I get the same feeling when I see the current 3D-animated version of Fireman Sam. Nothing will top stop-motion animation. Nothing. Ever.

If you’ve got any childhood games that stuck with you, send me a message at @TCasualGamer! As always, thank you for reading.

All I Want For E3 Is TES6 (But It’s Not Going to Happen)

It’s been six years since the release of Bethesda’s multi-award-winning RPG, The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, and with E3 firmly underway, I am once again in a permanent state of not-getting-my-hopes-up for the sixth game.

It’s my favourite series; call me an optimist, but I just can’t help it.

Skyrim was praised for its vastly improved graphics, realism, and dynamic environment and won a large number of awards including five BAFTAs (one for Jeremy Soule’s incredible score), many for Best Design etc., and several for Game of the Year. Bethesda had switched to the specifically designed Creation Engine from to the Gambryo engine, which was great at making beautiful landscapes, but notoriously bad at making people. This was described by PC Gamer’s Tom Francis as leading to ‘ugly people and odd behaviour‘.

There were lots of things that Skyrim got right. The abolishment of the class system allowed for more freedom to role-play, as well as making the character creation less confusing for new players. The decision to mix the Blade and Blunt skills into One-Handed and Two-Handed was a sensible one, as well as the wonderful addition of Perks, allowing the player to customise their character even further (I still have nostalgia for the skills of Athletics and Acrobatics but I understand that they somewhat unbalance the levelling system). Melee combat is still a bit clunky, but far better than IV: Oblivion and worlds away from the dice-roll combat of III: Morrowind. And, of course, who doesn’t love a good cutscene displaying your killing blow in all its glory.

However, there were lots of things that Skyrim got wrong. The procedurally-generated side quests are boring and lack depth, and the main quests aren’t much better. The facial graphics are much improved, but there’s not much variation in facial structure, especially in the female NPCs; this leads to a limited ability to connect with characters, and although there are approximately 60,000 lines of dialogue and more voice actors than in previous games, it gets extremely tiresome listening to the same faux-Nordic woman asking me if I’m the one who fetches the mead when I’m clearly wearing a full set of Daedric armour and I’m the Thane of the city, you inconsiderate milk-drinker.

So, with that in mind, here are my top 5 things that I’d like to see from The Elder Scrolls VI: Not-Getting-My-Hopes-Up:

1: More emphasis on beast races

Beast races don’t get nearly enough love. Resistance to disease, ability to breathe underwater, and general scaly-coolness are what make me adore the lizard Argonians so much, and woe betide the fool who challenges my feline Khajiit to a brawl with her claw

The Argonians have come a long way from the dorky leg movements of Morrowind. Image from  http://elderscrolls.wikia.com/wiki/Argonian_(Skyrim)

attacks. Ideally I’d like the next Elder Scrolls game to be set  in Black Marsh; a thick tangle of forest and swamp would be a stark contrast to the open landscape of previous games, and a main quest centred on the Shadowscales (Argonians born under the sign of the Shadow and trained from childhood as assassins) would be an interesting break from the cliché of the main character being the hero just because…well, because. If not centred directly on the beast races, it would be nice if the main quest didn’t have an immersion-breaking flaw sitting right in the middle – is it likely that an Argonian or a Khajiit would have the power of the Dragonborn, or am I missing something? For me, Skyrim is far more immersive when playing as a Nord, and I think any game that purports to be an RPG should have a main quest that works for all races equally.

 

 

2. Overhauled inventory system

Let’s be real here – Skyrim‘s inventory system sucks. It’s badly organised. It looks awful. It’s not even in alphabetical order. You don’t know what things are stolen and what aren’t. Thankfully, SkyUI Team on NexusMods.com created (you guessed it) SkyUI, an inventory organising mod that just makes it so much better. It’s detailed, easy to use and so clear that you’ll never lose anything ever again.

Image from http://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/3863?

If Bethesda could collaborate with the Sky UI team and make an inventory system that looks like the one on the right of the picture above, that would be great. And Sky UI does more than just overhaul the inventory; every single interface is improved, from alchemy to magic to enchanting. This interface should stay for the long term; it is superior in every single way to Bethesda’s original.

3. Better NPCs

I’m lumping a lot of things into this one because there’s lots of things I’d like to see done. More variety in the appearance of NPCs would be good, as lots of them have the same facial structure and the same, oddly grey-yellow skin tone. I like to connect with characters, and I feel that there needs to be an increased number of NPC voice actors to enhance the realism in the game world. The marriage system is good, but in the end feels empty, especially when everyone and their mothers is asking you if you’d like to enter into a binding legal contract until the event of your death. I’d basically like the NPCs to feel like real people, with real personalities and dialogue you can relate to.

4. Bring back the Arena

In Skyrim, where your very presence should command respect despite you not having actually done a single thing, it seems that your skills and abilities are given to you through divine intervention rather than through hard work. For that reason, I would like to see the return of Oblivion‘s Arena, a place where you’re a maggot until you prove yourself otherwise. Working your way up the fighting ranks instead of being the hero straight away would be a refreshing change, but I’m not suggesting copy-and-pasting Oblivion‘s gladiator style Arena into a backwards, poverty-stricken Black Marsh; give me an illegal underground bare-knuckle fighting ring with a hard-hitting story any day. And, speaking of stories…

5. Plots with emotional depth

To start, I would like to draw the reader’s attention to the Dark Brotherhood questline of Oblivion. Deceit, mystery, emotional involvement, and a twist the size of Dwemer ruin, this questline is better than every quest in Skyrim put together. You are drawn into the culture of the assassins, but they’re not just your classic evil guys with a taste for blood – they’re people, with humour and uniqueness. And when you learn the truth, and you make your way up to the little cottage in the forest to meet with your mentor, a person you have come to revere and trust – I could have cried.

Few in-game stories have hit me quite as hard as that one. And this is something I feel Skyrim lacks. Lack of depth and lack of ingenuity when it comes to quest design leads to boring and samey quests which don’t require a lot of brain activity. As I said, I like to connect with characters and quests, and I’d like to see a return to unique and quirky quests such as An Unexpected Voyage, Paranoia, and the Cheydinhal Reccomendation for the Mages Guild.

Just give me Oblivion with the graphics of Skyrim, and I’ll be a very happy writer.

 

Imposter Syndrome

I figured ‘what is this blog for if I can’t express myself?’ I want this to be a springboard for a potential career but also this is a place where I can write whatever I like. Getting my assignments in took it out of me – I never wanted to write anything ever again. It’s difficult when you want to do things but you’re so mistrusting of your own abilities that you’re rendered inert.

Insecurity plagued my teenage years, in everything from playing music, to making art, to writing stories. Anything creative I would doubt. I used to spend my breaks writing chapters of fantasy books that would never be finished, drawing other-worldly characters that would never come to life. The trope of ‘I’m not like other girls’ is one I particularly hate as it carries the air of superiority, something I’ve never felt and I hope I never will. But it’s true. I honestly did feel different from the others. A clear memory is from when I was 13; a girl in my friendship circle leaning over me and reading aloud a line of speech from one of my protagonists. I wanted to die. Just wanted to crawl inside myself and take all my papers with me, sew them into a blanket and fall asleep forever to the sound of Elven harps.

If there’s one thing I can say about me, it’s that I’m a quitter. I quit the violin, I quit piano, I quit my professional singing lessons, I quit composition, I quit painting, I quit running, I’ve quit every single diet I’ve ever tried, I quit my part-time job, I quit crochet, I quit cycling. I quit writing. The only things I haven’t quit are singing, gaming, and learning the cornet.

My university work has suffered greatly because of this. And here is where the title of this piece comes in; I get good grades. I recently got the marks back for a 7,000 word essay on the music of Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture and it was a good result. So why did I spend the rest of the afternoon crying? Because I truly truly don’t believe I deserved that mark. I’ve just got very good English skills and I’m good at bullshitting. Maybe I should work for a tabloid.

I constantly fight the belief that I’m not good enough. Constantly battling the conviction that I can’t do certain things because I’m not skilled enough. Worrying about the words people will say behind my back (‘Phoebe’s doing wHAt?’ ‘What an idiot, who does she think she is?’ ‘Sit down, you can’t possibly think YOU can succeed at this?’). The word ‘she’ cuts like an insult, inferiority coursing through all three letters, the sibilance slicing through the air like a chef’s knife. There’s just something about that word that isn’t right, like a circle in a round hole with one square edge sticking out of the top.

There’s only one way to combat this feeling, as I’ve learned from when I first started playing the cornet and was in a brass band playing music that was far too difficult for me. You just have to keep doing it. Eventually you learn that it’s okay to still be learning, and it’s okay for your work to not be to the standard you want just yet. Being a beginner is completely acceptable. Which is why I’m not going to let this blog stagnate again because I’m scared that it’s not good enough.

I don’t work for an editor (yet). So, right now, the only person who can evaluate the quality of my writing is myself.

Ludo2017 – Friday 21st April

The second day of Ludo2017 followed the same format as the first day, and I had the chance to speak to more people and listen to some even more interesting talks. I got the impression that music conferences rarely have such a friendly atmosphere, and I feel that this has something to do with the subject matter. Most of us are gamers ourselves and as well as a vested interest in musicology there’s also a lot of nostalgia and emotional feelings surrounding the games and game genres mentioned over the three days. I noticed that many of the ‘ooh’s and ‘aah’s came when recognising a piece of music from a game beloved in our childhood, or a particularly memorable scene either for its sense of heartbreak, an iconic reveal, or simply for its comedy value. I personally felt a deep tug when I saw the aerial shot of the Imperial Palace from The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, accompanied by Jeremy Soule’s famously dramatic theme.

I arrived at the conference slightly late on Friday 21st, and so unfortunately missed James Tate’s paper on the video game music canon. Some interesting points are raised in the questions, however, that so called ‘AAA’ games (pronounced ‘triple A’ and meaning games that have the highest budgets and levels of production) have trouble becoming canonised because of the sheer number of them. For example, the Assassin’s Creed franchise is now exceptionally well known and has many titles under its name, but the games themselves perhaps have less sentimental value as more sequels appear. For me personally, the classic AC games are the first one (Assassin’s Creed) and the second ones (Assassin’s Creed II, Assassin’s Creed Brotherhood, and Assassin’s Creed Revelations). After that, I believe the developers sacrificed plot and script quality for gimmicks and sensationalism. The video game business is, after all, a business, and they obviously saw a formula that worked. The controls also became simpler in Assassin’s Creed III, and after that the plot became so convoluted and far away from the original game that I have trouble connecting with the characters. I miss Desmond. Certainly the AC franchise as a whole is part of the video game canon, but not the individual games themselves and this, I believe, is partly due to the number of them.

James Cook’s paper, ‘Sonic Medievalism and Cultural Identity in Fantasy Videogame’, was particularly engaging as the fantasy genre is one I have identified with for a long time. I’ve enjoyed hours and hours of Dragon Age: Origins and The Elder Scrolls series has a special place in my heart, but James speaks about a game I haven’t played: The Witcher III. He talked about how the fantasy genre takes influence from the medieval in both sound and aesthetic, such as architecture and mythical beings. Some of the musical techniques used in the game come in the form of layering; for example, the same battle music will play when faced with an enemy, but if the enemy is small only the first level of music will play. I assume that more layers are added on according to the difficulty of the enemy. James also highlighted some stereotypes within the fantasy genre, such as northernmost parts of the game being associated with hardiness and deep-rooted traditions, whereas southern countries are known for their wealth, lavishness and comparative femininity. Characters from rural areas often have west country accents, and characters from the north will often have accents from Yorkshire. Wealthy characters, if they have a British accent, will often use received pronunciation found in the home counties of England. This contrast between wealthy and not can be seen in the cities of Oxenfurt and Novigrad which, although the two cities are situated in the north, are two of the most affluent cities in the game and this shows through their architecture. While the rest of the game takes influence from the medieval, Oxenfurt and Novigrad clearly represent the beginning of the Renaissance and the dawn of science, art, philosophy, music, and other intellectual pursuits. The choice to give Oxenfurt and Novigrad this Renaissance aesthetic separates them from the rest of the game, giving them a perceived ‘higher’ status. I’m interested to play this game and see these contrasts for myself.

A highlight of the Friday was listening to British game composer Rob Hubbard giving advice to aspiring composers. I’m not really a composer myself but it was interesting to listen to an expert in the field on the do’s and do not’s of video game composing. He criticised the composers who have no musical knowledge, saying that while you do have to be experimental with your music, you also have to make musical sense. Music theory must make up the foundation of your work, otherwise you risk writing weak pieces. Arguing further for the practice of theory, Hubbard stated that having theory to back up your creativity was important for motivation, as trying to keep momentum without any knowledge is a bit like trying to get a car to its destination by rolling it down a hill with the engine off. The nature of video game music is repetitive; players hear the music time and time again, loop after loop (which is probably why so many of us have such emotional ties to certain music), so the least the composer can do is make it interesting. Again, this comes from having musical knowledge and being able to vary the key, rhythms, and tonal areas around. No one wants to hear annoying video game music over and over and annoying music that uses terrible clichés is even worse. Immersing yourself in the video game music world is also an essential part of being a composer; by simply listening to video game music all the time you will absorb the style and rules of the trade, and the more you write the better you will become at decision making and the faster you will compose. It really was a privilege to hear Rob talk about his work from a realistic but encouraging standpoint.

It was another successful and enlightening day at Ludo2017 and I’ve heard many varied and fascinating perspectives, from analysing the sensory overload ‘brostep’ music of the Major League Gaming videos and their parodies to the Elvis-obsessed Kings of Fallout: New Vegas. The third day was just as exciting and I wish I could write about it all here.

For more information about the Ludomusicology Research Group, visit ludomusicology.org, where you can sign up for email updates and find contact information. If you’re a musicologist with an interest in video game music, I’d encourage you to have a look at the SSSMG (Society for the Study of Sound and Music in Games), a new society with the aim of connecting researchers and professionals in the field for the understanding of music within video games, at www.sssmg.org,

Ludo2017 – Thursday 20th April

This year I have the privilege of attending the annual Ludomusicology conference in Bath, UK, organised by the Ludomusicology Research Group which is run by Tim Summers, Michiel Kamp, Mark Sweeney, and Melanie Fritsch. Having referenced Summers and Fritsch in my undergraduate dissertation I’m very pleased to be here and listening to some of the most current research in the video game music field.

The day starts with a friendly registration where I get a badge and a booklet containing all the abstracts for the next three days (I also meet James Cook, a musicologist and lecturer who taught briefly at my university, and it’s nice to see someone I know especially as this is a pretty niche field at the moment). At about half past nine the party is whisked upstairs to one of the lecture rooms, where Tim greets us all formally and introduces the first speaker. It seems I needn’t have worried about my jeans being more than a little faded as it’s all very informal; I get the feeling that of all the fields of music this is probably one of the least snobbish.

The first speaker is Blake Troise, with a paper entitled ‘Beeper Music: The Compositional Idiolect of 1-Bit Music’. It goes a little over my head as I’ve had almost no experience with music technology (give me a blank Sibelius file and I’ll be alright), but it’s hugely interesting to hear the different methods for getting around the technical limitations of 1-bit music and creating polyphony out of something that is naturally monophonic. The rest of the first session is equally as technical and I start to worry that maybe I’m not cut out for this after all, but then a topic comes up that I wrote about extensively in my undergrad dissertation; diegesis.

(Just for clarification and also for me because I literally had to Google this before typing it as I can never remember which one is which: diegetic means music or sound that is heard in-game, by the characters and is a part of the action, and non-diegetic means music or sound that comes from outside and is only meant to be heard by the player. A good example of this is in Fallout, where the radio in the Pip-Boy is supposed to be heard by the character, whereas the general game soundtrack is only for the benefit of the player and is not heard by the character.)

Stephen Tatlow comes to the front with his paper ‘Diegesis and the Player Voice: Communication in Fantasy Reality’, arguing that when the playable character has no voice, the voice of the player, when using a microphone, essentially becomes part of the on-screen action and, in effect, becomes the character themselves. He questions why player voice, especially in MMORPGs, was not considered diegetic sound when it is most often used to direct other players to complete quests or do certain actions. An argument against that, he states, is that a fundamental concept of RPGs is immersion. Introducing an element of the real-world, for want of a better phrase, has the tendency to break immersion and can ruin the experience. My ears pricked up at this point as I thought about my own experience with World of Warships, as I lose many more battles than I win when playing alone – but with much more experienced friends, I find myself playing better and winning a lot more. Those disembodied voices are, for all intents and purposes, part of my particular game. In this way, every single player will have a different experience of a multiplayer or MMO depending on the people they are playing with, and the method and language used for communicating can either make or break the fantasy barrier.

The keynote speaker, Kenneth McAlpine, gives an hour long lecture on chiptune music and goes into detail about his own childhood experiences with the C64 and Spectrum, and I’m now kicking myself for not writing more things down as it was honestly so interesting I forgot to write. One thing he mentioned does stick in my head; that chiptune music is now so associated with the 1980s that it’s impossible to take it out of that environment and not have it sound retro. It got me thinking about Fallout 4 (again) and the use of various beeps, boops, and distortions used for the Pip-Boy sounds. I wondered why the developers chose to use those as opposed to more sophisticated sounds which I believe would be more likely used in the far future, especially for a portable computer. I concluded that it was probably because it was more important to give the player something they could relate to, and if chiptune music is so associated with times gone by, then what better to show the passage of time than an outdated method of composition?

Until lunch, it all goes a bit technical again and while I’m trying my hardest I do lose track a bit. Ben Jameson gives an interesting analysis of his composition ‘Construction in Metal’, a piece for electric guitar and Guitar Hero controller which challenges the authenticity of performance for both the ‘real’ guitar and the ‘fake’ guitar, and there’s a fascinating talk by Ricardo Clement about composing music using game engines. Ricardo finishes his paper at about quarter past one, and we break for lunch.

I have to post a picture of my lunch. For real. Look at this:

I’ve never been happier. It was delicious. I have no idea what was in that pie but it was amazing.

After (a frankly incredible) lunch, it’s time for the ‘Realities and Spaces’ part of the talks, and the final section of today’s conference. The last paper, given by Elizabeth Hambleton and titled ‘Levels of Reality and Artifice in The Talos Principle‘ is one of my favourites of the day; Elizabeth goes into detail about the methods used in The Talos Principle to convince you of the reality of the game’s overworld. She also mentions the use of a choir whenever Elohim, the disembodied voice of God which speaks to your character everywhere they go, is heard. It may be that this choir affirms the position of Elohim as the benevolent creator of all things, perhaps making him seem more trustworthy; I’m reminded of church choirs and how religion is so often accompanied by music, so hearing this choir would make it seem that everything was in order. Elizabeth shares some spoilers about the ending which I won’t reproduce here, but it looks like a fascinating game for more than just the music and I’ll be purchasing it the next time Steam has a sale.

We wrapped up the day there, and went to the next room for a small drinks reception. I left quite quickly as I wasn’t staying for the dinner, but it’s been a fascinating first day. Personally I’m quite glad that lots of the music tech papers have been put on the first day, because I’m much more interested in what’s going to come tomorrow and Saturday. It’s amazing to hear studies on video game music from so many different perspectives, and I’m sure I’ll be leaving on Saturday enlightened and with many ideas for my own personal study.