Emptying the Haunted Air

So, I guess I got myself a Doepfer theremin module a week ago. The good news is that, as a purchase, it probably represents the height of my musical indulgence. It marks the beginning of my slow journey towards redemption. As far as I’m concerned, as a CV/gate output only device, it’s much less lame than playing an actual theremin.

In theory, anyway. So far, its actual presence in my patches had produced rather worrying results:

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I discovered ScummVM a month ago. To be more exact, I’d heard about it quite a while ago, but never ventured to try it. Who the fuck hasn’t played a good number of Lucasarts adventure games by 2009, anyway?  It took a few months of uninspiring game releases and shitty Fallout 3 add-ons before I deigned to initiate the measly 3mb download.

I can now attest that ScummVM is an essential part of any modern pc gaming setup. As a product, it is conveniently small, easy to use, well-documented, sleek. As a platform, well… It makes wonderfully, harmoniously compatible a collection of some of the smartest, funniest, most enjoyable games that were ever made. Nostalgia isn’t even really the salient part of the experience. While a fully-fledged product in its time, The Secret of Monkey Island - when occupying a small window on one’s desktop, vying for attention amongst the throng of web browsers, windows and other applications – plays more like a surreal distraction from the quotidian. All the more so, for its short duration.

It feels a bit like Indy Desktop Adventures. Uh, but not crap, like Indy Desktop Adventures.

Anyhow, going through and playing Monkey Island 2: LeChuck’s Revenge (which, oddly enough, I had never actually done before) got me thinking; when did music in games lose its power to enthrall? What happened to catchy theme tunes, quaint melodies; that wondeful feeling that the music was, at some stage, shaped and touched by another human being.

Lost in the wankery? Let’s stop using words for a second. We’re talking about music, right?

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This is a recording of the score for Monkey Island 2, composed by Michael Land and brought to life by iMUSE. This is just Guybrush Threepwood wandering around on Scabb Island at the very beginning of the game. Land composed a series of musical themes and timbres that weave seamlessly together and unravel as you travel between and peruse the different locations. Considering the small number of sound effects in the game (and the fact that there’s no recorded dialogue), the score jumps out at you as you try to solve the puzzles on Scabb Island. The melodies, all subtle variations of the memorable Monkey Island theme, grow on you – partially because they are so well crafted, but also because it is so wonderfully apparent that the music is a part of your experience of the game. It waits for you when you need it to wait, changes character when it should. Not a moment sooner, or later. It moves with the distict type of temporality that defines the medium. Sometimes time in games goes forwards, backwards, or doesn’t exist at all.

In other words, the music in Monkey Island 2 is a score. It has been designed, to the greatest extent possible (and still, perhaps, unmatched by games eighteen years later), to suit the flow and dynamics of the game, while still incorporating locale and mood-specific themes.

This is becoming less and less the case in mainstream gaming. I really struggle to remember exactly what the music sounded like in Call of Duty 4, for example. It was a fun game, but one characterised by incessant propulsion. The experience of COD4 could be described as something like being carried on a gargantuan wave from beginning to end (awesome!). The music just formed a part of the shapeless torrent, even if you were standing still. As advanced and fascinating as the sound engine might have been, the music… Well, I hesitate to call it music. I mean, when it’s so fucking difficult to remember, what is it? On the scale of salience within COD4, music falls below the enemy AI, the player’s weapon, the sound effects, the special effects. It hovers somewhere around the level of ground and wall textures. It’s just an engine asset, pulled from a data file on a computer hard drive and systematically inserted into the mix.

I haven’t talked about the form of the respective games, of course. Monkey Island 2 is very different to COD4. There’s a lot of time spent standing around, or circling the same locaitons, tyring to figure out just what to do with the fucking rat. The opportunities to listen – just to listen – are rife. But, then again, there are a few action (-tinged) fps games that have been characterised by a similar auditive experience: Deus Ex, Half-Life. Granted, they feature elements of puzzle solving and adventure too but, again, they use music in a way that flows with each player’s temporal experience. Deus Ex balances catchy melodic motifs and locale-specific themes against ‘combat’ variations. In Half-Life, the music is sparse; an occasional force against the weight of silence as you creep around Black Mesa Research Facility.

So, uh… I guess you should go and download ScummVM and buy a few old Lucasarts adventure games?