I’ve spent the better portion of the week playing Spore. Strictly speaking, one doesn’t finish the game—once your species has developed as far as it can as a spacefaring civilization, you can keep on playing for as long as you like—but sometime on Wednesday night, I completed the “42” achievement for discovering the secret at the centre of the galaxy, which is the closest thing the game has to an ultimate goal. In the true spirit of Battlestar Galactica I have yet to find Earth, though I am assured that it exists, and that you can destroy it.
In case you couldn’t tell, Spore is rather fantastic. Will Wright couldn’t have been more correct when he said (to paraphrase) that there’s a great unexplored gulf between the massive multiplayer online game à la World of Warcraft and the joy of the classic single-player experience where you, you get to be the star of the show without any interference from the addicts, cheaters, and generally rude malcontents who dominate computer game culture on the Internet. So here you have a game of a scope that could only be satisfactorily populated by the freshness, diversity, and sheer staggering quantity of user-generated content in the shared online space—but the territory of the playground itself is yours and yours alone. It’s like Animal Crossing, but more so.
There are some design flaws, many of which are fertile ground for future bloodletting sessions at the hands of Electronic Arts (aka expansion packs), but I want to get the elementary what-works-what-doesn’t criticism out of the way quickly so I can talk about more stimulating topics like user-driven storytelling and everyone’s favourite weasel word(s), intelligent design.
With 120 stars in hand, I’ve seen most (but not all) of what Super Mario Galaxy has to offer—and my favourite thing about this wholly remarkable game has to be the Comet Observatory waltz. In the many hours I spent with the game, I expended no small measure of time hopping and bopping about in those plumber’s overalls and immersing myself in the rhythm of the piece, which exhibits the sweet, stately lilt of a Tchaikovsky ballet. Like the level selection music in Yoshi’s Island, the instrumentation changes as you progress through the game, building from a lighthearted melodic statement by the flute to a fleshed-out lullaby of Straussian violins befitting a midnight hour with a Disney princess.
Galaxy is the first Mario title to feature live orchestral music, as opposed to music generated by the game system’s MIDI instruments. While most video games have been moving towards scores on par with movies in sound quality and composition—two of the most promising film composers of the past decade, Harry Gregson-Williams and Michael Giacchino, come from a background in games—Nintendo has traditionally been reluctant to move away from programmed music, mostly because of its adherence to the philosophy that interface is always the highest priority (something we similarly observe in their attitude towards story). For instance, they insisted on programmed music in The Wind Waker so it could change dynamically in response to the actions of the player, such as consecutive hits with the sword, and to indicate changes in the environment like the presence of unseen enemies.
In the Mario series, the music serves an even subtler function: it determines the rhythm of the game. It’s there to push the player towards a natural tendency to activate sound effects associated with certain actions—jumping, hitting blocks, collecting power-ups—on the beat.
That’s what the composers claimed, anyhow—and that’s the kind of claim I just had to verify.
I’ve long been reluctant to jump on the open source cheerleading bandwagon with quite as much zeal as most other people who work with computers, but I’ve become a convert overnight.
Oh, sure, I’ve been an end-user benefactor of the open source model’s more representative products for years, but that has only made me sympathetic to open-source software’s actual philosophical tenets to the same extent that feeling warm in a comfortable pelt on a winter’s day would make me exclaim, “Golly, it’s a joy that we still club baby seals.” By and large, it’s the product that matters, and as far as I was previously concerned, processes of production are pretty much interchangeable unless they hold things up or cause serious collateral damage. Like seal-clubbing, I liked open source when it worked, and it was not something I was ever clearly for or against.
No, what got me to believe in open source was a scenario where I really, really wanted something to work, and it just wouldn’t. Enter DarwiinRemote.
Amidst all of the distractions in my immediate local orbit, I almost neglected to mention a certain item that made it to the U of A’s ExpressNews feed: a piece about Guillaume Laroche’s summer research project, which had something to do with variation theory as it pertains to the development of Koji Kondo’s musical compositions over the course of the Legend of Zelda series. (I’ll not go into it further, as I do not wish to misrepresent the argument.)
The article was originally filed under the Faculty of Arts news page (here). For some reason, the ExpressNews version adds this somewhat awkward lede:
September 4, 2007 – Edmonton – New university students will hear warnings that they won’t get much studying done if their room mate has a video games. But the opposite would be true if you roomed with Guillaume Laroche.
Having actually roomed with Mr. Laroche on one occasion, I seriously beg to differ. But I digress.
I was directed to the original article upon its publication on the Arts page about a fortnight ago, and I remember thinking exactly two things: a) “Well, that’s some good publicity,” and b) “I can’t believe he convinced them to print the word ludomusicology.” Ludo-what? Perhaps I should explain.
Never seen me interpret video game music? YouTube to the rescue!
If you’ve had a Wii for any amount of time, you’ve probably spent a couple hours in the Mii Channel making caricatures of friends and celebrities alike to fill up your ragtag baseball team. (Dan Lazin, for one, sent me a most excellent Lieutenant Worf.) And if you have, then it’s almost a certainty that the Mii-making music has been stuck in your head at least once. Naturally, I set about figuring it out on the keyboard, only to discover that I couldn’t quite get all the chord progressions right by ear.
So the other night, I turned on my Wii, set it to the Mii Channel, and did a rough transcription of the music as it played, mostly to figure out what was going on harmonically. Like most of the repetitive but catchy incidental music that comes out of Nintendo, there’s a great deal of complexity under those unassuming bleeps and bloops. So I switched up the rhythmic feel from Latin to a medium swing, jotted down some fancy chord substitutions, and decided to see where I could take the tune. Here’s the result:
I’m not all that happy with my solo, but I almost never am, and given that most listeners are absurdly easy to impress, I doubt a lot of people will complain. I gave myself a fairly challenging set of chord changes to play over, so the take I recorded was more about surviving four choruses and staying in time than actually taking risks and coming up with lovely melodic architectures. It’s easy to stretch out and aim for the pretty notes when you’re just jamming, but recording a complete take creates considerably more room for error. Apart from cutting back on the arpeggiation and going for longer melodic lines, there are two other things I’d change should I do this again. First, it swings a bit hard for a two-beat feel, and probably isn’t as laid back as it should be. Second, my left hand is mostly preoccupied with spelling out the bass line here, so the chord voicings are quite sparse; if I were to do a bassless recording, it would free up the left hand to highlight some of the more interesting substitutions I found.
As I said earlier, this is a surprisingly deep tune, compositionally speaking. I’ll go into some specific analysis for the benefit of the musically literate.
The biggest wrench in the whole affair is the oddball 25-bar form. There’s a straightforward 16-bar A-section that modulates to the subdominant (in the original, from A to D major; in my version, from B-flat to E-flat), followed by a 1-bar break and an 8-bar B-section (the only part in the original that really casts a melodic line into the foreground). In the video, I chose to keep the break at bar 17 in the solo choruses just to keep the tune quirky, and encountered all of the expected difficulties. I may do another take at some point that keeps bar 17 when playing through the head, but removes it for a more predictable (and playable) 24-bar solo form.
Harmonically, the most interesting part is probably how the B-section modulates back to the original key (again, A in the original, and B-flat in my version). The tonal centre moves up a major third: there’s a II-V-I in E-flat followed by a II-V-I that resolves to G major, which then drops to a minor and proceeds down the circle of fifths until we’ve returned to the key of B-flat. Jazz musicians will recognize the major-third jump as one of Coltrane’s “giant steps,” which most obviously predates Coltrane in Rodgers and Hart’s “Have You Met Miss Jones?” and becomes commonplace in a lot of post-Coltrane compositions by Wayne Shorter, Herbie Hancock and the like. Here, we don’t take the tonal centres all the way through a circle of thirds (which is more of a triangle), but the modulation from E-flat to G suffices to make the tune particularly susceptible to jazz improvisation with a modern sound, and generally fun to play.
I hope Nintendo lets the cat out of the bag regarding the composer of all the Wii’s onboard music, as I’d really like to give credit where credit is due. I’m sure some people have speculated that it’s the work of Nintendo legend Koji Kondo, but I’m inclined to put my money on Kazumi Totaka, or Totakeke to his legion of Animal Crossing devotees. No sign of Totaka’s Song yet, though.
