Tag Archives: SSSMG

2018 in Review (For Want of a Better Title)

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It’s now almost a year since I submitted my revised thesis and around nine months since graduation, and things are going fairly well. Have I recovered from the PhD ordeal, I hear you ask? Not by a long shot. Hearing you ask my rhetorical questions is probably a sign that further recovery is still required. But I’m working full time (in a non-academic capacity), I’ve got a few projects on the boil, and I’m occasionally getting time for some hobbies.

My part-time-during-study job has transitioned into a full-time job. It’s at the university I studied at, and a perk of the job is full library access, so my access to research tools is basically uninterrupted. This is fantastic for the writing projects I’m working on, and generally helps me maintain my academic career while squabbling over the bottom rung of the academic job market. There has been talk around town of academic career trajectories being suboptimal, and I suppose I’m getting a taste of what some have suggested as an alternative. It is hard to shift between work and academic mindsets, particularly when work is stressful (be kind to your IT support folk, everyone – if your IT is obstructing your work, get angry at your university’s cost-cutting leadership not the people who are specifically there to help you), but it is both possible and rewarding.

I’ve been told that it can take a year or so to recover from something as big as writing a PhD thesis. Thankfully, the wellbeing of postgrad students is getting more attention these days — we’re starting to speak about and speak out about it. I wish I’d read some of the articles and posts out there in the first half of my studies, rather than when I was almost through. I think the wellbeing of recently-post-postgrads is just as vital, particularly when the reality of underwhelming job prospects and the absence of familiar work patterns hit home. I’m hopeful that some of the discussions around academic careers, workloads, and alternatives translate into helping prepare postgrads for reality during their studies, but I think widespread institutional change is a long way off. Universities are too busy chasing ratings and funding to care about humans right now.

Anyhow, it’s new year’s eve and there are more positive things to reflect on. In late July, the Ludomusicology Society of Australia held its inaugural Winter Symposium at the University of Adelaide. The two-day conference was held in a seminar room in a Chemistry building, which I loved — it stirred memories of my science background and of the methodical thought processes required for science laboratory work, which are strong influences on how I do my research. We heard papers from Sebastian Diaz-Gasca on the evolution of musical themes in cutscenes in Final Fantasy X, Barnabas Smith (with Brendan Lamb) on tavern music in Skyrim and The Witcher 3, Mary Broughton (with Jane Davidson) on the physical behaviours of players of music video games like Rock Band 4, and Callum Kennedy on notation practices for chiptune music, among others. We also had the best roundtable discussion I’ve ever been part of, rambling around questions of terminology (diegetic/non-diegetic/extra-diegetic, ludomusicology/video game music studies, etc.), discussions of research methods, and more than a little gushing about various video games. All told, great conference, and I’m very much looking forward to next year’s iteration.

This year also saw the SSSMG launch the Journal of Sound and Music in Games, “an academic peer-reviewed journal presenting high-quality research on video game music and sound”. This is long-awaited and very exciting – I’m very much looking forward to the high-quality research this journal will produce and inspire.

My gaming highlights for the year would be:

  • Superflight – incredibly fun wingsuit simulator with generative landscapes to fly through. A single flight can last seconds so it’s relatively easy to play for a short time, but you won’t want to stop.
  • Oxygen Not Included – a much more complex game than it appears on the surface, but hugely engrossing. Also, not many games include fluid dynamics, thermodynamics, and microbiology as gameplay mechanisms/threats.
  • Skyrim – seven years on, still one of the most beautiful games ever (and I’m not even playing the shiny new versions). I went deeper into some of the soundtrack for one of my writing projects this year and I love it even more now. Jeremy Soule is my hero.

 

What’s coming up:

  • A couple more writing projects
  • More work stress
  • Parenthood
  • Photography
  • Who knows, probably games?

 

New Year News

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Happy new year!

While it’s generally too hot to think at this time of year in Sydney, I have set myself the task of finishing my thesis in the next couple of months. Why that is inspiring me to write blog posts instead of chapters is beyond the scope of the current study.

Twitter reliably informs me that the ludomusicological year is off to another flying start with the fourth annual North American Conference on Video Game Music held over the weekend in Austin, TX, USA. If you were (like me) unable to attend, the Twitter hashtag #NACVGM is definitely worth perusing. It sounds like there were some fascinating papers presented, and it’s always great to kick off the year with a flurry of ideas.

In related news, the Society for the Study of Sound and Music in Games (SSSMG) was launched late last year — a collaborative community formed from the Ludomusicology Research Group, NACVGM, and Audio Mostly. It’s a hub for ludomusicological resources and discussion the world over. Get on over and check it out!

My own year is starting a little slower. The Christmas break was relatively quiet for me from a gaming perspective, being away from Sydney with only my old laptop and with lots of people to hang out with. One new thing was that my brothers in law and I made a game. We held a very informal game jam with just us, and built a third person puzzle game in UE4. I built a level or two, but my main task was audio. I scrounged and spliced together some audio files and gave the game a soundscape — fairly rough, but serviceable. And by all accounts, the 16 bar looped score that I composed in an hour was super annoying and therefore “good video game music”. A lot of the levels were really hard, and the music was ultra cheery, and that combination is all kinds of evil. All told, quite fun.

Over the last few days I’ve been working towards a thesis case study (on blurred boundaries between sound effects and music) by playing through Portal 2 and then Portal for comparison. I played through Portal in one sitting the other day. I ended up with one of the worst cases of what I call “gamer brain” that I’ve ever had (what others may call “motion sickness”, but I only get it when I play games; not a reference to gamergate, etc.). Half-Life 2 and its derivatives seem to have a knack of messing with my inner ears like that. Any ideas on how to avoid it?

Also, I’ve just listened to the soundtrack for Quake, which I had never heard before. I played the first episode of Quake over and over again when I was young, on a 486 DX2 that really couldn’t handle it. The first episode was shareware, and I’ve never yet played through the full game with an original CD; like quite a few games of the pre-MP3 CD-ROM era, the music was played straight from tracks 2+ of the game disc. So, Quake for me was never musical. It was sparse, sci-fi, horrific, ambient. I’ve assumed for a while that the soundtrack was something like that of Quake II with heavy metal all over the place, and so have been concluding that my cautious play style (which has lead to me being better at playing things like Skyrim and Portal than Quake III or Call of Duty in its later multiplayer forms) was at odds with the intended experience. But listening to the soundtrack now, I see that’s not necessarily the case — the music is really quite dark and fairly spooky in a sci-fi way. I’m quite surprised, and doubly so — perhaps I’m used to series like The Elder Scrolls and Halo and Portal and Half-Life where the aesthetic differences between games in the series are more nuanced, but the leaps in aesthetic styles between Quakes 1 through 3 are fairly stark in comparison. Is that a common thing in game series where the story is less prominent?

One last thing for now: Games with CD audio music can produce some unintended-yet-interesting soundtracks. Forget to put the game CD in the drive, and voila, your Age of Empires gameplay is forever associated with A Perfect Circle’s Thirteenth Step, track two and onwards.

Anyway, notwithstanding my inability to update blogs on a regular basis, I’ll try to keep this updated with thesis completion info and other thoughts. Laters!