Site Re-Jig

Leave a comment

Astute readers may have noticed that a change of address, a slight rebrand of the site, and the mildest of redesigns occurred several months ago.

I decided to change the name from “Eine Kleine Pwnmusik” to simply “Pwnmusic” because it’s a bit more direct. While I liked the play on the title of a well-known Mozart tune when I first designed the site, I have recently felt that a simpler title would be better. Perhaps ironic, because I probably like Mozart more now than I did then. It’s odd how tastes change. Also, I don’t speak German (yet – it’s on the to-learn list) but I do speak “contrived mash-up of English and Internet” so it’s more of a reflection of me, and ain’t that just the point of blogs? And the redesign is mostly just making it full-width, to bring it into the last decade while playing havoc with the featured images.

Anyhow, I think I’ve finally sorted out all of the redirects, and email should still reach me if sent to any not-updated addresses (for now), so welcome to the not-terribly-new site!

Book Chapters

Leave a comment

I have recently (by which I mean this year – what even is time anymore) had two book chapters published!

The first is a chapter in The Cambridge Companion to Video Game Music, edited by Melanie Fritsch and Tim Summers. The chapter is called “Semiotics in Game Music”, perhaps unsurprisingly! I really enjoyed writing this one, as the brief was to write for an undergraduate audience and I took that as affording a slightly less formal tone. The subject is essentially what it says on the tin: a slightly simplified version of my theory of ludomusicological semiotics. The case study of the themes of Morrowind, Oblivion, and Skyrim was particularly fun to write, as I observed a link I hadn’t noticed before between the Morrowind and Skyrim themes (which was probably obvious to every other fan of the Elder Scrolls games).

The second is a chapter in Women’s Music for the Screen, edited by Felicity Wilcox, on the career and works of Winifred Phillips. The case study of the chapter is on the music of Assassin’s Creed III: Liberation, which is a fantastic score. Phillips wove together several geographical and sociocultural influences to create a musical experience that makes the game world more real than real. I found this particularly impressive given the game was originally developed for mobile phones, a platform where music (and, indeed, sound) has often been regarded as optional (though I hasten to note that this is now even less accurate than it would have been when Liberation was developed).

It has been an absolute honour for my writing to become a part of these two volumes. Please go and have a read if you can!

Surviving Survival Games in a Pandemic

Leave a comment

There is a very real sense in which I feel that my geeky teenage years, chatting on MSN Messenger, playing video games, and generally being content with my own company, have prepared me well for the days we find ourselves in. The COVID-19 pandemic has had us all stuck inside and glued to our computers like we’ve only just discovered the internet. My IT helpdesk work has been primarily conducted via Microsoft Teams chats replete with cat GIFs. We’re avoiding each other on the streets, much like my introvert self has always done instinctively. And as Australia opens up its economy in the eye of the cyclone, I’m still plodding along with minimal social contact and an odd sense of déjà vu.

What games do you play in a pandemic? Somehow the family board-games-via-Zoom nights avoided the Pandemic board game, though the instinct for survival did not fall entirely by the wayside. My brothers-in-law and I jumped into two very different co-op survival video games: Green Hell and Scrap Mechanic.

The first of these, Green Hell, is absolutely gorgeous and really quite brutal. Our first few sessions after being dropped into the Amazon without a hope or a clue brought intoxicatingly hard won gains, only to be brought low by an attack that destroyed literally everything we had built. So we turned off said attacks and started again, using “totally valid” and “not cheating” settings to balance our psyches against the ongoing challenge of staying alive in the face of thirst, hunger, disease, and animal attacks. This somehow broke the game, though we didn’t realise for a while: after a couple of in-game weeks without rain we figured things were not right. However, by that point, we had also broken through an invisible barrier that exists in Green Hell‘s co-op survival mode between the gameplay phase when you think it’s an open world, and the gameplay phase when you think it’s a linear game. The further east you go, the fewer options you have and the more the world directs you along a single path. You stop exploring and start speed-running; you stop treating your hunger and thirst as something to address and start treating them as something to race. And when you finally reach the end of that path… it loops back on itself. The tantalisingly narrow way leads back to the open valleys. There is no end. No resolution to the struggles. The brutality of this realisation and its effect on our hopes turned out to be the game’s insurmountable challenge.

We have had much more fun playing Scrap Mechanic. We became reasonably adept farmers early on, yet always struggled to fight back the hordes of angry robots each night. We enjoyed both the ridiculousness of the vehicles we built and the challenge of making them work. I honestly don’t know if Scrap Mechanic has an ending to its survival co-op mode, and I don’t care. This game provides a different kind of enjoyment that I found more readily accessible, especially now. It’s not just that it’s a more humorous take on the survival genre, nor that it’s necessarily easier – less punishing, perhaps, but far more technical. I think there’s just more joy to be found in the construction of the slightly absurd than the barely functional. Or perhaps there’s more hope for success when building with wood blocks rather than bare sticks. Or perhaps the brighter colour and sound palettes provoke optimism. Or perhaps all of these combined allow mortality to be a less imminent threat, and one whose sting is only the inconvenient rebirth of the video game rather than a worm-riddled and lonely end under the leaves of an Unknown Fruit tree.

My neighbour just coughed, and I am an antelope at a pond that has just heard a cheetah in the grass. Simulated death can be too real when death is all around. Absurdism, humour, and escape can help us process the risks of our time more gently. While realism and caution help save lives during a pandemic, time away from the news and immersed in a world where gravitational glitches can send cars flying miles into the sky only to land on your head can also be strangely healing.

2018 in Review (For Want of a Better Title)

Leave a comment

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?

 

The Finish Line, But For Real This Time

Leave a comment

My PhD is done.

Like, proper done.

Actually finished.

Nothing left to do (except graduate).

Fin.

Game over.

The last six months have been a roller-coaster. My initial comprehension of the new-found freedom following thesis submission didn’t take into account the three months of revisions that would follow examination. I have played Civilization IV, PUBG, and very little else (music included, unfortunately). I have (nearly) finished reading Patrick O’Brian’s Aubrey-Maturin series. I have been taking lots of photos. Ultimately, though, most of my post-thesis to-do list remains undone. In its stead, I compiled responses and completed revisions based on 231 points raised in the examination reports.

I’m very grateful to my examiners for their feedback. I can’t say that I agreed with all of the points raised, and addressing so many points in three months tested various limits of mental and physical endurance. Ultimately, though, my thesis is now much stronger. Responding to the feedback allowed me to patch up a lot of the problems that I knew were there. I’m quite happy with how it’s turned out.

Anyway, a few weeks ago I was notified that the university had accepted my revisions, and then I received a completion letter. So, that’s that. Along with a gradually-getting-stronger sense of relief, I’m starting to understand that I have some time for other projects now, and finally (after a decent amount of time imitating a zombie, and the standard post-examination bout of sickness) feeling like I might have some energy with which to take them on.

What’s next? Not sure, but that’s fine for now.

 

P.S. If you’d like to read my thesis, Ludomusicological Semiotics: Theory, Implications, and Case Studies, there is a link on the “Bibliography” page of this site.

The Finish Line Is Back There a Bit

Leave a comment

I submitted my PhD thesis the other day.

This is a rather excellent development.

I think I’m happy with how it turned out. Though, of course, I’m not really willing to re-open it and check just yet. I’ll wait and see what the examiners say, and in the meantime, I will try to recover from the final stretch. I took six weeks off work to finish the thesis—a time period in which I took about three days off thesis work, not including the time I spent preparing and presenting a paper at the Games Research Methods Symposium at Sydney Uni (a really interesting conference, but from a timing perspective it wasn’t my greatest decision). I worked myself beyond exhaustion, lost track of the day several times, and still had to make compromises on several aspects and processes. I had to avoid Twitter to keep my mental health above water. I had to employ several fine-toothed combs, including one to remove spaces around em-dashes (a bad habit), one to ensure the use of Oxford commas (easy things to miss, it turns out), and one to switch out the singular ‘they’ (a good habit, but a PhD thesis isn’t the time to fight that battle). EndNote caused a day of intense frustration when it started changing citations of its own volition. And while most aspects of the formatting style I’d previously used for my honours thesis could be re-used to save trouble, I did have to switch the font in the end. But all told, I think it turned out well.

My initial plan, going into this PhD, was to study the intersection of thematic and gameplay genres. However, I soon found semiotics to be a more interesting and less well-trod path. My thesis ended up being a very substantial development of the work I started in my “Meaningful Play” article: a semiotic framework capable of analysing the initial composition and interactive configuration of game music separately (because there are some quite different processes going on in each). I was quite impressed by the idea of the player’s authorship of their experience—a concept which is not new in studies of games, but which had yet to be fully applied to game music, and which gets really interesting when comparing gameplay to other forms of play. With the exception of some work on Microsoft Flight, all of the analysis and writing I’ve done over the last five and a half years has made it into the thesis in some way. However, there are several avenues of investigation that came up during my study that I didn’t have time or space to pursue. I dropped four potential chapters, and still nearly hit my word limit.

In between afternoon naps, I’ve been trying to think of things to do with my reacquired freedom. I’m presenting a conference paper in December, but I’ve decided not to do any academic work until September to give myself a break. I’ve been reading for leisure again, which is nice. I’ve got time for photography, including astro and analogue. And there’s a mountain of unplayed games in my Steam library to play through. But I’ve also completed my strategy of encouraging thesis progress through self-bribery. I found that I was much more likely to write when I set myself goals with tangible rewards, and for the ultimate reward I decided to aim for a MIDI controller. I’ve been itching to make music, to play some piano, and even to compose. So I’ve bought a device with plenty of scope for productivity and experimentation, and am having quite a lot of fun playing around with music again. I might even try my hand at making some game music—coming at my object of study from the other direction, as it were.

Anyway, thanks for reading up to this point. I plan to keep writing (who knows? I might even do so more frequently), because games and music are excellent things. Somehow, writing my thesis hasn’t crippled my ability to enjoy either. I think that must be some kind of miracle.

Don’t Leave Things for Later

Leave a comment

Don’t leave things for later.

I’m nearing the end of my thesis. After I finished my literature review chapter I did an audit of what’s remaining. I rediscovered some parts of chapters I had left ‘for later’, things that I didn’t feel like writing in more detail at the time. Having expected to be wrapping things up by now, I’m strongly yet ineffectually rebuking my past self for my inaction. Instead of methodically checking references, spelling, grammar and fonts, I’m frantically writing, splicing, deleting and correcting.

Don’t leave things for later.

One of those things is my EVE Online chapter, which needed a lot of work. In the course of patching up the holes, I’ve been observing how much EVE has changed over the last year. Having not played it much since my corp lost its wormhole, I’ve missed a fair bit. DUST 514 is no more, Valkyrie and Gunjack are released but unattainable (VR hardware is not cheap), and EVE being what it is, both the game and its players have continued their evolutions. EVE is no longer a familiar place in a distant sky.

Don’t leave things for later.

Games change, they grow old, they die. They get reborn as curios, as museum pieces, as academic objects of study. Or they’re forgotten. I stumbled over the Microbee Software Preservation Project while I was researching dead and dying games for a paper on Microsoft Flight. I had pretty much forgotten about the Microbee until that point, but I had been thinking for a while that a preservation project for Australian video game music would be a worthwhile endeavour. Who else would do it? There are Australian game preservation efforts, and video game music preservation efforts, but not much overlap. And game hardware is the limiting factor—the computers that run them, and the disks and tapes the software is stored on. These are becoming rarer each year, and while much has been preserved by fantastically awesome volunteer types, there is still a risk that much could be lost.

Don’t leave things for later.

Retro Adventures

1 Comment

I recently stumbled over an online community dedicated to the Microbee, an Australian computer made in the 1980s, called the Microbee Software Preservation Project. This made me very excited. My Dad owned a Microbee when I was little, so it’s one of the first computers I remember (though by the time we could play games he also had a 286 PC which saw more gaming use). We had a version with a hard drive, but some of the more basic versions would run solely off floppy drives or cassette tapes. Our Microbee didn’t survive one of my family’s relocations (I think it had stopped booting), which is a great shame because it was a pretty fun little thing, in its way.

I remember a couple of games. There was a brick, ball and paddle game, which was fairly challenging because the computer would only respond to your key presses pretty slowly. The game I spent most time on was called Jeskil’s Revenge, a text adventure written in MicroWorld Basic by John Maling in 1985 (according to the source code). I played this a lot after I claimed the Microbee as my own in my early teenage years, and I always got stuck. I even printed out a copy of the source code to try to find my way through like a 1337 h4x0r, though from memory it didn’t help.

There are several Microbee emulators developed now, one of which is online: NanoWasp. This has Jeskil’s Revenge as one of the ‘tapes’ you can load and play. So I played it for the first time in about 20 years. Having recently played Colossal Cave Adventure (sometimes just called Adventure or ADVENT) on one of my Raspberry Pis, it was interesting to compare the two. Jeskil’s Revenge tells you which commands you can use up front. The world feels smaller (though I seem to remember getting lost in it well enough), though a little more descriptive; Adventure has some moments where the descriptions shine, but many of its descriptions seemed more functional. Or perhaps I’m just less skilled at imagining underground spaces than windswept cliffs. Jeskil’s Revenge is also time-limited somehow (I’ve never hit the limit though). Oh, and it pretty much never gets the ‘your’/’you’re’ distinction right. Perhaps it’s an example of grammar being sacrificed to save memory? Not sure. Anyhow, I’ve played it through to the point where I’m pretty sure I’ll need to use pen and paper to map the maze (if it’s even a maze); I’ll have to do that when I have free time again. Also, I’d love to port the game to a modern platform to bring it to the masses, but that’s definitely a post-thesis project.

Another fantastic thing is that the Microbee brand has been resurrected. The folks at Microbee Technology have got things going again and have produced some Microbee kit computers that are compatible with the old machines (though they’re sold out at the moment, and have been for a while if forum posts are any indication). Pretty excellent. I’ve been looking a bit lately at game preservation and thinking about preserving Australian video game music somehow; it’s interesting and potentially really useful that there’s an option that slots between using old hardware and using an emulator for the Microbee platform. I think I might get one of the kits someday, learn to solder, learn to code, and go to town.

Literally a Long, Long Time

Leave a comment

Last night I finished the first complete draft of the literature review chapter of my thesis. It’s 10,455 words long, and according to my versioning system it’s the 20th draft file. The first draft file is dated 26 August 2014.

Writing a literature review is an interesting exercise. In my experience at least, there’s not a great deal of official information out there about what a literature review is, or what it should contain. I’ve found it a constant challenge to find out what’s required of me throughout this PhD adventure (pro tip: try not to be left off the mailing list when you start a new degree), but even accounting for that there’s a dearth of information on literature review formats or expectations. Perhaps it’s the relatively self-explanatory title of the concept. “A literature review is… a review… of the literature…? Duh.”

Anyway, early on I was dreading the thought of the anomalous excercise of writing the lit review. And when I started, I kept getting hung up on it. So many times I’d start doing work on it, then flounder so completely that work on the whole thesis would stagnate. This is my excuse for the chapter taking almost three years to complete. Three to four years is the regular timeframe for a full-time PhD in Australia, and while I’ve been part-time since early 2015 this chapter has still been an excruciatingly long endeavour. When something is repeatedly difficult, it becomes difficult to even pick up your work on it, let alone to get it finished.

Something changed this year, though. Or started to change last year. I took some time off work mid-2016 so that I could get deeper into the study mindset for a while, and wrote 20,000 words in a month. So, I did it again late-2016 and it didn’t work quite so well (not sure why). I tried it again over Easter and got sick twice in two weeks, the frustration of which seems to have extended my fervour for thesis work beyond the typical pattern (finally!). But something that did happen in these attempts was that for some bizarre reason I was kind of having fun.* There is an art to collecting, collating, and presenting information concisely. It requires a certain amount of creativity to determine what to include, how to include it, and how to relate it to everything else that’s included. Ludomusicological semiotics draws on a lot of fields — semiotics, musicology and game studies at the very least. The process of diving into each of these fields, threshing the salient points from the gritty details, weaving them into a coherent representation within 2,000 words or so, then dashing on to do the same thing for another entire body of work, is kind of a rush when it’s done at the pace of the final stages of a PhD.

But I think I also just enjoyed seeing a snapshot of the full context of my work. In a young field, it’s easy to feel as though you need to justify your choice of study before you can even discuss it. Reviewing the literature gave me a perspective on my work that relates it not only to the ludomusicological literature of the last decade and a half, but to the literature of several well-established fields that go back much further. The most encouraging part of that is to see that my work is not an outlandish endeavour; similar things have been done before, in similar ways and for similar reasons.

But, said work is not finished yet. There’s still a fair bit to do before my submission date (early August), and I’ve no doubt it will not be fun. Bloggings may well be as sparse as they have been lately. But hey, the end is now certainly in sight, and there’s one less seemingly insurmountable hurdle in the way.

 

*This statement is possibly the nerdiest thing I’ve ever written.

New Year News

Leave a comment

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!

Pwnmusic