The new week brings with it Develop, the conference for which the UK videogame development community descends upon Brighton for a couple of days worth of talks, sessions and helpful insight into how to make games more awesome.
The event culminates in the Gameindustry.biz party on Thursday night, at which, with the help of Eurogamer’s free bar, everyone forgets everything they’ve just learned.
For those three days in between however, attendees could literally make just about any game.
I’m involved in the event in a number of ways, from a number of different perspectives this year, which should make for an interesting time.
With my producer hat on I’m representing Littleloud, the Flash/ iPhone game developer I work for in Brighton; with my game journalist hat on (that one’s a Fez, I think), I’m writing up sessions for Gamasutra; and with my speaking hat on, I’m, um, speaking.
Specifically, I’m co-presenting the session ‘Secrets, Lies and Exclusives’ with my friend Ste Curran. It’s a talk about game developers and game journalists, how the two vocations interact, how they might interact better and how each party can help the other to do their job more successfully.
Ste and I have worked on both sides of the fence for long enough to understand why the grass always looks greener to the other guy, and I think it’s a subject we should be able to provide some useful insight into. Some of the stories and quotations we’ve collected from members of the UK games press (which we’ll present anonymously) will be, at very least, worth attending for.
Then at the Opinion Jam event, held during Thursday’s lunchtime, I’m one of the ten speakers presenting a 3-minute diatribe on something in videogames that we want to see banished from videogames forever. Like Room 101 but with more Nintendo.
No spoilers here, although I might post the text later in the week depending on how well it goes…
Finally, tomorrow night (Monday 28th) I’m attending The Guardian Gamesblog’s ‘Have I Got Games News For You‘ quiz event, playing for the Pocketgamer squad.
If you’re coming, we definitely know more videogame trivia than your team does, so start practicing your gracious-loser face.
Anyway, urgh, enough about me. Other sessions I’m going to see include:
* Ken Levine’s keynote, ‘Immersing the player in an alternate world without drowning out gameplay’, because some might argue Levine failed in this regard with BioShock. Not me, some…
* Media Molecule’s ‘The Experiment Further Along the Way’, because this will be about Little Big Planet in one form or another, and so we should listen…
* Jonathan Smith’s ‘How to make Children Cry, because that’s effortlessly the best title for any session ever…
* Alex Wiltshire’s ‘Doing it Yourself’, because, not only does Alex gives me work for Edge, so I need to show him I care, but also I like his writing and the title’s intriguing…
* Margaret Robertson’s ‘Why you should care about ARGs’, because I’m about as far from caring about ARGs as it’s possible to get…
Best Thing I Saw Today? That’s a stupid and flippant context for this content, but it’s an accurate one, nonetheless.
Photographer Phillip Toledano presents a photo essay about his elderly father. The photogrphs were taken in the days and months following the death of his mother.
At 98, Mr Toldano Senior has acute short-term memory loss, but also boasts a sharp and interested mind: one of late life’s cruel juxtapositions.
The result is a touching and intimate exploration of a life’s closing moments viewed both literally and figuratively through a son’s lens. The inscrutable and unspeakable tension in wanting someone to let go of life for their benefit, while also wanting them to hold onto it for your benefit is explored while the inherent beauty of the photographs themselves transcends this narrative.
The presentation deserves a mention too, as the site that frames the story has been designed (by fashionbuddha) with sense and sensitivity.
Make sure you’ve a full, uninterrupted ten minutes to spare and then head over to dayswithmyfather.com
I read this when it first appeared printed in the newspaper on Tuesday, but digging out the online link for a friend today caused me to re-read it.
In terms of a balanced, carefully-constructed snapshot of the Anglican church in general and the Archbishop in particular, it’s illuminating.
I realise that most of the people who read this site are young-ish atheists/ agnostics (who are interested in games, not theology!) for whom the fact that a story like this appears on the front page of any contemporary newspaper, let alone The Guardian, is an anacrhonistic waste of time.
Maybe you’ve never heard of the Lambeth conference and, even if you have, I’m pretty sure the majority of you neither know nor care about the intricacies of the homosexual debate that’s bringing the Anglican communion ever closer to break-up*.
But to dismiss the severity of the Anglican schism and its wider implications to the world we all live in is, frankly, a bit stupid. Not least because the unique example set by Rowan Williams in taking the moderate road, trying to find compromise even where there is no hope of one, and working to unite leaders (whose behaviour is meant to be characterised by love and grace but looks an awful lot like angry hatred), is one the world could really use right now.
Anyway, there’s no way this ends well. As with any group of humans whose work benefits the world a hundred times more effectively when they’re united (despite their differences), the near-inevitable splintering of the Anglican church is a little bit heartbreaking. And that this fracture should be caused by issues of immovable biology: of gays and women, is hellish. God have mercy on us for we know not what we do.
*I understand that. I understand the characterisation of people of faith as unthinking loons, peddling an antiquated agenda that science tore up a hundred years ago. The loudest religious minorities are always the most-embarassing crackpots, those who peel bananas on telly to refute evolution and other such heart and head-breaking nonsense, and they deserve every second of Youtube/ cultural ridicule.
The worse ones, the Westboro baptist demons, deserve far worse. But more than the American religious right, or teenage blinkered evangelicals posting broken ideas and logic onto internet forums in defence of they-don’t-even-know-what, there are those for whom faith is simply a third way that repairs the world. The internet, more than most public forums of debate, loves absolutes: idiots and thinkers, right and wrong, black and white. Where did we lose our nuance? When did we all become so beastly that we forgot how to have a conversation? When did we become blind to the truth our opponents inevitably happen upon? Or has it always been like so?
Short, sharp, compelling PC gaming has to be presented in a browser window these days, otherwise I’m simply not interested.
Downloading and installing an .exe or mounting a .dmg is an entry barrier at least a hundred miles too high for a game I’m going to try out for 2 minutes when I’m meant to be working (exception: Peggle, which I tried in my browser first, and downloaded/ purchased second).
Besides the hassle and dead time spent installing a new program on a whim, there’s also the disincentive of clogging up your harddrive, welcoming in spyware and handing over details to a publisher before you even come to understand their product.
These smaller games that emphasise addictive mechanics over technical balls need to work like web pages: destinations I can browse to in an instant and, if they pique my interest, spend time exploring or save as a bookmark to check in with regularly. Imagine having to download and install a website before you could see if it suited your tastes?
Additionally, browser-based gaming (especially that delivered in Flash) removes all of the hardware/ operating system-type boundaries that traditionally turn gamers away from PC games. Now I don’t have to care if I’m running the right version of Windows, or have enough memory installed to run the game at a decent speed, or know whether I’ve an Intel or PowerPC Mac and so on.
With multliple save files that can be held in shared objects (basically inside your browser cache) there’s no need to write down passwords or create sign-on accounts to keep retuning to and progressing through a game over days and weeks.
Flash game developers are improving all the time at incorporating the web principles and ideas into their titles, making the experience as accessible and universal as gaming can possibly be, while also finding creative ways to monetise their games.
Here are two super-awesome examples I’ve played today. Totem Destroyer (pictured above) is a low-fi Boom Blox type game in which you have to destroy a prescribed number of blocks without letting the golden totem touch the floor. It’s free-to-the-max and excellent fun.
The second is a much larger delivery, a top-down shooter/ RPG called, Robokill. It uses shared objects for save files (a brilliant way of handling saves without breaking the game flow, so long as players use just one computer throughout) and the full-version can be bought for $9.95, something offered in a subtle, non-intrusive manner.
Both games exhibit traits and ideas that will become a hallmark of future gaming, not only in their core mechanics, but also in the details of their delivery. As we grow ever more versed and entrenched in the ways in which we use and interface with the internet, so the best games will be those that adopt the internet’s principles and experience as their own.
The Onion’s A.V. Club provides us with a neat segue from music back to games in the form of this interesting interview with Mike Patton, Faith No More frontman turned videogame voice actor (amongst many other things.)
Patton’s first game vocal session was for The Darkness, in which he played the titular black force, all guttural screams and yelps. Since then he’s done work for Portal, Bionic Commando and is rumoured to appearing in Left 4 Dead.
In the interview he talks on a wide range of related subjects: videogame compsoition, voice acting, FNM appearing in Rock Band, curating the Nightmare Before Christmas 2008 event with The Melvins, as well as some of his current music projects.
It’s all good stuff and, according to author Chris Dahlen, the piece signals the start of a series looking at the interface between the game and music worlds. So keep an eye on it.
Here’s a neat excerpt:
AVC: Eventually there’s going to be that kid who learned to play drums because he played Rock Band.
MP: Yeah, absolutely. But there should be a way for him to actually not just play a Led Zeppelin song, to make music doing that.
AVC: Guitar Hero IV, the new game, is going to integrate some kind of music creation tool.
MP: I knew it. It had to happen. I’m all for it, man. I think it’s great. I am no one to be a purist. I didn’t go to school to learn how to do this. I taught myself. If these kids are teaching themselves by looking at a TV or doing it through a videogame, yeah, it’s pretty sick, but who am I to argue? If someone can do something creative with it, I’d buy it in a second. I mean, would you go see a band of 10-year-old kids playing original music on Rock Band? I would. I’m not saying I’ll like it, but I definitely would go see it.
It’s music week here on Chewing Pixels! The anti-E3! Actually, come to think of it E3 is pretty much the anti-E3 these days, right?
Anyway, some twit in the Youtube comments called Leslie Feist a sell-out for doing this. Literacy and numeracy putting the dollar in Fei$t, eh?
Ignore that: it’s just about the cutest thing I’ve seen (the literal, unadulterated JOY on her face at the end of the clip is so awesome) and that she called filming this the “best day of her life”, makes it all the sweeter.
(P.S. My kid calls the Muppets the “Puppets” which makes correcting her difficult).
Like walking through a busy restaurant, I only catch the loud parts of this song’s sentences.
Thursday pounds a four-to-floor gallop in the low to mids, while intricate Fender Twin-vocalised guitar lines fly overhead, creating a wide, fast-moving soundscape. I like the understated way in which the vocals lilt over the cacophonous ending.
If there’s a theme to this list, it’s emerging as one of contrast: the timid and fragile held in tension with the grand and powerful, and this song exemplifies that best.
9. Four Tet – My Angel Rocks Back and Forth
This song is my first trip to Japan. It’s cherry blossom and don’t care tourism: watching a Buddhist festival held in a temple, ancient and timeless tradition brought to colour and life by bustling families and red paper lanterns.
The harp reminds me of my early twenties, of being less tired, less cynical and remembering a time like that is, in equal parts a sad and thing and a hopeful thing, because what once was might sometime come to be again.
8. Mono & World’s End Girlfriend – Part One
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After Ste gave me a copy of Mono’s masterful Japanese post-rock collaboration, Palmless Prayer, Mass Murder Refrain, I listened to it every day for a month. It is November to me now: winter without Christmas, pitch black commutes, teary pavements.
This is the album to end the world with, and Part One is how it begins.
7. Innocence Mission – Lakes of Canada
Just about as far from Mono as it’s possible to get in a single placing. The little girl voice is tempered by menace and tension in the occasional jangly acoustic overtone.
That and, ‘I feel that I could change’.
It’s just good songwriting, appearing as simplistic as a nursery rhyme but being built from ten thousand hard-earned lessons of experience.
6. James Newton-Howard – Carl’s Fishing Net
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Metal Gear Solid’s Hollywood composer delivers an icicle of a soundtrack. It’s one of my favourite movie scores (for ‘Snow Falling on Cedars’), wholly subtle, mixing brooding orchestral chord swells with the briefest echoes of electronica.
This, the soundtrack’s opening move, reminds me of driving across Dartmoor at night, but also of armchair fires and family. Film’s good too.
5. Philip Glass – Facades
Probably my favourite piece by modern composer Philip Glass. It reminds me a little of Aphex Twin, or vice-versa, probably, all rolling repetition and haunting restraint. How Harry Potter would have been scored had it been written by Ursula Le Guin.
4. Duo505 – Facing It
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Stay with it past the flickering beats until, at 00:46 the wail of a strangled synth high note calls out. Then at 1:07 all heaven breaks loose in the heavy plod of a dusty piano. Blips and pips and ivory have never spoken so deeply.
3. Jóhann Jóhannsson – Odi Et Amo.
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Icelandic composer Jóhannsson was commissioned to write the score to a play. It was, so the story goes, a horrifically violent production, full of darkness and horror.
Jóhannsson decided that the only way to approach such a play was to try and write the most beautiful music he could. Of course, this back story can’t be heard in the piece, but once you know it’s there, you can’t un-know it.
2. For the Widows in Paradise – Sufjan Stevens
If I’m honest this never made me cry. I welled up during Sufjan’s instrumental version of Once In Royal David’s City the first time I heard it at work a couple of years ago, but there’s no way I’m admitting to that.
1. John Williams – Theme from Schindler’s List
It’s a choice so utterly obvious and unsubtle – the trembling violin, the dark history, the unbearable sadness of its story – that it’s almost too worthy, too universal in its impact to warrant putting here.
But John Williams’ theme, while framing its subject matter perfectly, also transcends its narrative and, like the best classical music, can stand apart from that which it supports. It communicates through melody and chord so very much, establishing its time period and geography with subtlety and nuance.
Specifically, it’s the step from the seventh to the eight note in the principal melody that breaks my heart, but also the tenderness of Itzhak Perlman’s playing, the warmth of the oboe in the middle section and the squealed sustain at the end foreshadowing all that is to come.
It is sadness made music, a swansong for existence.
The Guardian’s Stephen Moss recently wrote a short column on the last time a piece of music made him cry.
At the first night of the 2006 Proms in a “hot, crowded, ultra-responsive Albert Hall” and with “too many glasses of white wine” inside, it was the chorus’ rendition of Deep River, from Michael Tippett’s, A Child of Our Time, that proved too much for Moss, who wept at the beauty, wonder and hazy tipsiness of it all.
It’s interesting how an audience’s tears are considered such a high prize for creators. More than joy, laughter, hope or dismay, to make an audience weep is to hit the emotional jackpot for a writer, composer, poet or director. Perhaps it’s because tears are such a tangible manifestation of emotion, an outward signal of supreme inward reaction, that their elicitation is so sought after.
Or maybe they just indicate, more than any other emotional response, that the artist has touched upon a universal truth, that highest of all creative goals.
I’ve never cried because of a videogame (and even if I had, it’d be tough to admit because a. I’m an adult, b. I’m a man and c. I’m British). Outside of a cut-scene, it’s a difficult response for a gamemaker to draw from a player, probably for the same reason it’s difficult to successfully execute a traditional joke structure in a game: the timing is all in the player’s hands.
Films succeed at making their audiences cry because they have had their emotional build and release timed and conducted with microscopic precision, pulling together multiple disciplines of writing, editing, direction, audio and performance to orchestrate a multifaceted assault on the viewer. This kind of coordination is near impossible in the freer boundaries of a videogame, especially when the player dips in and out of the experience over a period of days and weeks, rather than in a single, concentrated 90-minute period.
Anyhow, for once I’m not here to talk about games. A couple of days after I read Moss’s column (and in the middle of July!?) I was blind-sided by John Taverner’s Christmas Proclamation (conducted by Christopher Robinson and sung by the choir of St John’s College, Cambridge). The piece came on when I was listening to some shuffle music and made my stomach heave and crunch. In the light of that, I thought I’d put together a list of songs and pieces of music that have made me cry, or at least brood darkly, to try and work out if there’s a pattern or principle.
A good friend studied music at King’s College London and he tells the story of when the class was asked to talk about the most beautiful piece of music and why they thought it so. Each class member stood up to speak abut their particular choice and began by taking a mechanical, self-consciously musical approach to explain why it made them feet the way they did. ‘…a technical marvel’, ‘…the emotive chord sequence’, ‘…such a surprising melody’ and so on.
But in the end everyone in the room let their intellectual guard drop and told the truth, that their favourite music was music tied to precious memories; that the beauty in the composition was brought to focus, heightened and perfected by the lens of life.
Moss agrees, saying: “Musical tears are the result of association – childhood memories, the circumstances in which you are listening, your state of mind, factors external to the music rather than the music itself. Chopin’s lilting Etude No 3 from his op 10 set doesn’t usually make me cry, but it might if I recalled the packages of silent movie classics it used to introduce at Christmas-time in the 1960s, multiple lost worlds.”
It’s a truth that’s almost impossible to escape when compiling a list like this. No matter how objective you want to be in your choices to be, almost every piece of music that we love is the soundtrack to a fond memory, a link to another time and place, a sentiment, a smell, a significance.
When you’re putting together a ‘favourites’ list – any list – for a public forum, you’re acutely conscious of the reader. You want to appear wildly eclectic, for your tastes to be perceived as noble and mature, to endorse canon while exhibiting some individuality. But these concerns are the enemy of honesty.
Self-consciousness risks robbing items on your list of the power they once had, as you start to analyse the choices, question your tastes and focus on others’ perception of those tastes. In that light you begin to fear that you’ve mistaken beauty and meaning for something that’s actually twee and shallow. I’ve compiled loads of favourites lists before but this is the first time I’ve been conscious of the forces that drive my choices, and it’s made me wonder how useful any public list truly can be. Still, I’ve tried to be honest and things that I initially discarded, I’ve re-included in the interests of integrity.
These things are super fragile too. Some of the music here, which once moved me, now washes over me, its punch deadened through familiarity. Searching Youtube for video links (the easiest way to present compositions without having to worry about legality) spoils the purity of much of the music, moving images bringing with them new and alien associations and purposes.
Then you question what it as that moved you in the first place: something true and wonderful or just a cultural, memetic fashion. Did I put Devil’s Got My Woman on the list because Skip Jones’ playing makes me ache for (and for) the past or because it’s inextricably linked to Daniel Clowes and hipster favourite, Ghost World? Is this just a posing, Juno-esque parade of neat things that I know exist?
I almost certain that I don’t think so. Anyway, woah! I’ve been writing for like a million words. This has definitely been over-thought…
I hope you find something pretty, or interesting or beautiful or moving or unsettling here. Where possible I’ve included a Youtube link to the piece (many of which are unofficial videos or, um, slideshows…). Where not possible I’ve included an .mp3 to listen to.
Here’s the first half, in no particular order (in a particular order).
20. Jacques Brel – Ne Me Quitte Pas
Because Brel’s is a voice that could light a cigar, and nobody sings melancholy like a dour Frenchman. The words are OK in translation, but in French they dip and roll as a landscape, addendum after addendum till the verse shudders to its conclusion.
“Ne me quitte pas,
Il faut oublier,
Tout peut s’oublier,
Qui s’enfuit deja,
Oublier le temps,
Des malentendus,
Et le temps perdu,
A savoir comment”.
There’s a symmetry and feel that’s attractive even if the words are meaningless to the listener. That’s ‘Cellar Door’ in song.
19. Lali Puna – Faking the Books
This is one of those songs that would stop me dead in my tracks a few years ago, but now just makes me reminisce warmly about unspecific things. The contrast between the robotic hi-hat and the organic acoustic is still magical.
18. Dire Straits – Brothers In Arms
One of the embarrassing ones, I guess, but that’s almost wholly for reasons outside of the music: the dad-rock connotations, the guitar fetishism etc.
I had the song on one of those naval-gazing C90s we’d make when people my age were thirteen-years-old, but nowadays the music is tied to one of my most favourite moments in television: Martin Sheen’s West Wing soliloquy/ rant to God in in which he slips from English into Latin and back again, full of fury, anguish and regret, putting eloquence to feelings common to anyone who has lived and loved and lost.
The song doesn’t kick in until the end of the episode (Season 2′s finale, and the bit that’s shown above) but the association has already been made in my head.
17. The National – Start a War
I don’t know what the hell that video is but it has Regina George from Mean Girls so I guess that’s OK. Rolling toms, kick drum and absolutely no hope of a musical release. Perfect.
16. B Fleischmann – Static Grate
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Because if I was recording a story for This American Life I would request this be the final act’s soundtrack. Everybody’s thought about that thing, right? Oh gosh, this is definitely opening a window to my mind that maybe should have stayed shut.
Despite the big, dumb drum loop, it teeters between sadness and hope masterfully, something I seem to be getting better at just by virtue of having been alive for a bit.
15. Julie Andrews – Feed the Birds
It’s ridiculous, but this still moves me. It’s memories of being a kid and visiting central London on a weekend and seeing that grey of St Paul’s stone. And it’s memories, of course, of Sunday afternoon Disney films.
But more than that, when the choir joins, oohing and aahing in the second verse, and Andrews sings about the saints and apostles looking down as this tramp-like merchant sells her wares, I find the contrast between tradition and grandeur with a more simple way to live, affecting.
By the way, Julie Andrews is 30-years-old in this clip. I find that interesting but I’m not sure why.
14. Faultine – Where is My Boy
You have to be mean about Coldplay. Them’s the rules since Parachutes, right?
But this guest appearance by Chris Martin on producer Faultline’s much-overlooked record will get past your elitist hipster defences. Despite a trying-slightly-too-hard vocal take, it’s a dark and brilliant record.
13. Skip James – Devil Got My Woman
(From 1:04 in video)
You can buy numerous versions of this recording on iTunes and the quality on all of them is, um, crackly at best. Still, it’s the saddest guitar tuning ever invented (open E minor, rarely used in the Blues as it’s not good for slide-playing, so the internet tells me), and I just wish the devil would give her back .
12. Ms. John Soda – Plenty Of
(I have no idea what this slideshow is. Just click play and do something in another window for a few minutes or something)
Another understated dramatic record from German label Morr Music. I love when the cello sustains the guitar note at 00:43, a trick that’s then reused later in the song.
There’s not much to it but what’s there is unexpected and perfect.
11. Ghostland – Interview with the Angel
I don’t know anything about this piece of music. Good friend James Underwood put it on my computer because he said I’d like it. So in contrast to most of the other stuff on this list, I have no context, no faces and no history to colour or filter the music through. It’s just really pretty and I listen to it a lot.
Ok, as Mike Skinner would say, dry your eyes, mate: part 2 tomorrow.
The new week brings with it Develop, the conference for which the UK videogame development community descends upon Brighton for a couple of days worth of talks, sessions and helpful insight into how to make games more awesome. 
I read this when it first appeared printed in the newspaper on Tuesday, but 
The Onion’s A.V. Club provides us with a neat segue from music back to games in the form of this interesting interview with Mike Patton, Faith No More frontman turned videogame voice actor (amongst many other things.) 
The Guardian’s Stephen Moss recently wrote a short column on the last time a piece of music 
.
