Blog - Musical Play
Saturday, December 27, 2008My mom rented Wii Music and it has me thinking about games with musical play.
While discussing the topic with Dan, a friend and fellow game design student, I came up with a few parameters by which I was ranking musical gameplay features:
1.) Complexity
2.) Musical Quality
3.) Creative Control
4.) Dynamic Quality
Complexity:
Guitar Hero is a fantastic game because its goal was to make you feel like a rock god even if you have no musical talent. That's what this parameter is all about.
Complexity is the degree to which you can create something as complex as music very very easily, and potentially with very little in the way of controls. Also, how much musical talent does it require of the player?
Musical Quality:
How good does the resulting 'music' sound?
Creative Control:
How much input does the player have over the music? How easily could they recreate any song they wanted, or play whatever music they imagine?
Dynamic Quality:
To what degree does the act of the music creation happen smoothly and on-the-fly, as though playing an instrument live?
Now, Guitar Hero for example... did a great job as I said of simplifying the process of playing a guitar into something your average person could do. It's still moderately complex though with multiple buttons, the strumming at the same time and at least on the right notes... if that's not technically musical talent then the game at least requires something akin to it. However, the game also provided such a range of complexity with the difficulty modes and song selection that I think it nails the complexity score pretty solidly. And because it's prerecorded music, the musical quality is great, but that's the problem... it's all prerecorded music, so the musical control is almost nonexistent. You can miss a note, or hold certain notes differently, or mess with notes with the whammy bar, but largely you're playing someone else's music, rather than your own. Finally, dynamically, it at least feels like your jamming live, so Guitar Hero does fine in that category.
Wii Music on the other hand...
In one sense the game is very simple. You don't even need to press buttons, merely strumming to the beat. Interestingly, that beat is whatever you feel like or want it to be. So, on the one hand, that's more creative control than Guitar Hero gives you. But it loses creative control when it comes to melody. Wii Music makes the melody for you. If there is a way to influence what pitch your strum will make, then I wasn't able to figure it out. This made my own music unpredictable and often sounding like a mess, so I'd rank it fairly low in musical quality. At least once again, you're doing the playing live (besides the pre-constructed melodies).
If you'd consider tools in games that let you 'compose' music, like the track editing tools of the latest Guitar Hero game, or Frequency's Remix mode, then they obviously score poorly in the dynamic quality category, and usually rely on a very complex interface adding complexity as well.
I clarify all of the above to express my love for a small feature included in Frequency: the "Axe".
At certain points in the game if you were doing well you might get access to special bonus 'instruments', one of which was like a simulated turntable scratching effect, and the other being the Axe.
The Axe has always been my favorite implementation of player controlled music in a video game, and with my above parameters I can back up my claim:
The controls for the Axe are very simple. All you did was hold down a button and use your joystick to move a slider back and forth. Depending on your position of the slider, it would play different synthesized melodies, which all were very well written to always seem to fit the rest of the music. The genius, however, lay in the fact that unlike Wii Music where it is difficult to determine what your input is doing and accordingly to influence the music being played, It was apparent within seconds of using the instrument that your joystick position caused the melody being played to switch to ones of higher or lower pitch ranges. Given that you could also shift your position around as fast as you could move the joystick, this meant you actually were given quite a lot of control over the melodies the instrument produced. This is because on any given note of the song, you could slide your joystick left or right to make the pitch of the next note be lower or higher. And because it was a whole slider-bar sort of display for the instrument, you could easily gauge from where you were on the slider approximately how deep or high that next note would be when it hit.
Whereas Wii Music takes control of the melody and gives you free reign over the rhythm, the Axe of Frequency takes the opposite approach.
You have great control of the melody, but the notes are always timed to the rhythm of the song you were playing.
This is a far better system in my opinion.
With Wii Music's approach the resulting 'music' players produce often doesn't sound very musical at all as a cacophonous, unsteady jumble of seemingly random notes.
Because the Axe's synthesized blips were always set to fit the tempo of the music but you had a simple but surprisingly graceful control over which notes were playing (and those notes possible all seemed to always fit nicely with the rest of the music) meant that the Axe did well in all categories.
It was simple, required no musical talent at all, and despite having the tempo done for you and the notes you could select from were from pre-written loops, you still had a surprising degree of control over the music that came out it. Best yet, the music that came out of it always sounded amazing and fit the rest of the song like a glove. Finally, you played with it live like a real (if bizarre and abstract) instrument.
Of course, there's no way to score something like it (but then again, there's no way to score the jam sessions of Wii Music either) so, figuring out a way to incorporate a similar feature in a game may prove tricky.
But still it seems like a useful feature to look at if you're making a game that requires some kind of musical gameplay.
Labels: game design, music
posted by Brian Shurtleff @ 4:47 PM
0 Comments: