What’s different about music in games and dynamic media
Music can be thought of as notes/sounds over time.
Compared to other audiovisual media, such as film, video games are dynamic and interactive.
- dynamic: a film is the exact same each time you watch it, whereas a video game can be wildly different on each play-through. A play through may have variable durations rather than fixed duration. This has different implications for scoring. With film, you know that you may have a definite amount of time for a particular section, but this is variable with games.
- interactive: games respond to player input
As for the dynamic part, thinking about the actual constraints in this way yields some observations on one of the common assumptions about music for video games.
Scoring for a variable amount of time
We can explore the full range of implications of these factors across a number of posts, but the main topic here is the "variable duration" part i.e. that a section of gameplay may not have a fixed time duration. With a film, you might know that a sequence will last exactly X mins and Y seconds. But with gameplay, the player might spend 10 minutes, 2 hours, have a break in between, etc. They may pass an area in one go, or be exploring, or just be stuck on a section of gameplay.
People might often list one particular example of making game music being different to film music, that "it must be loopable". But this doesn’t necessarily have to be the case, if we reflect on the factors above.
The actual underlying constraint is that you don’t know how long the player will spend on a part. This doesn’t mean that the music has to loop for the whole time. There are a number of examples where music doesn’t loop constantly, off the top of my head:
Minecraft — when you’re wandering around the world, there is silence by default until sometimes music comes in. In this case, it is certainly dynamic because with each play, you’re going to have a different gameplay and musical experience, with some random factors at play for both.
although, it would be interesting to consider music that has more layers and is built up, the more complex a build gets. And there is sparser music if you’re just wandering around.
Sky: Children of the Light — if you’re sitting still for a long period of time, the music will fade out. It will fade back in again once you start moving. This is both dynamic and responsive to player input — the music reflects player interaction with the world
This allows for much more deliberate usage of music while also making space for silence. I suppose to roughly quote some observations of Finnish culture, "silence is part of the conversation". It may make for more appreciation for when the music comes in, rather it possibly becoming a bit repetitive.
Looping is not necessary
So sometimes looping is assumed to be necessary, in response to this variable time factor, when it doesn’t have to be.
One side effect of looping music is that it can become repetitive. But you might find that you don’t need to deal with this set of circumstances if you discover that looping may not be needed for a particular case.
Another assumption associated with looping is that when you "die" in some games that have looping music, and have to restart from the beginning of a level or from a checkpoint, the music often starts from the beginning. This often makes for a disruptive musical experience, particularly if you are having to restart a lot.
An example where at least the music doesn’t start from the beginning, when you restart a particular section of gameplay, is noted for a particularly challenging level of Ori and the Blind Forest. The music continuing, without stopping and starting, can play an integral part in making the experience flow even while the player is restarting sections of gameplay.
[…] Two, is that the music, which is incredible by the way, doesn’t reset — it just keeps going, which makes the failed attempts flow together as part of the set piece.