How video games save my life

***UPDATE: according to Extra Life, the entire run of the marathon, which was far more than just the RT and AH guys (I didn't explain all of it, but figured you'd see it with the link to their site), had 29,000 participants raising $3,404,486. WOW. That's INSANE

For a break from all the seriousness about the music industry for a different sort of serious.

For the last 25 hours, Rooster Teeth and Achievement Hunter put on a continuous live stream in support of Extra-Life. Extra-Life is a marathon of gaming that donates the proceeds to the Children's Miracle Network. On top of that, RT put up a poster for sale of the AH gang for $10, with the proceeds going to Extra-Life, and Matt Hullum, one of the top brass, put up matching funds for a fifteen minute period, which was a direct donation of just shy of $22K. Donations are still coming in, but the site currently says they've raised ~$185K, and Jack said the poster sales were in the 15,000 range (I'd have to go check the video), making for at least another $150K raised through the sale of the $10 posters.

First off...wow...Any time I see events like this, I tend to get a little bleary eyed and feeling all the feels. For those not in the know, I am a cancer survivor, ALL (Acute Lymphoblastic Leukemia), diagnosed about a month after my 8th birthday.

So, yeah, it's a little personal.

Surviving cancer does not define my existence. Neither do the kidney stones I got repeatedly during that time, nor the fact that I obviously have a less than stellar immune system since I get horribly sick several times a year (as has happened this past week). However, it obviously plays a role in my day to day life, whether I'd like it to or not.

And one bit that's a part of my daily life is video games.

I was diagnosed by my family doctor when I didn't feel like staying home while my mom took my brother to the doctor. He noticed I looked "a little pale" and had lost weight. So, he ran a quick blood test. All I remember from that first conversation was him telling my mom "I've already called Riley in Indy. Go home, pack your bags...he'll be there for probably at least a month. Leave SOON, today if you can...I know it can take a while to get things in order, but, do it quickly." I think we left a day or two later.

Somehow, in those two days, I went from feeling a bit tired and incredibly hungry (I remember eating 5 meals a day that summer. Not snacks, but full on MEALS) to being beyond weak. By the time we got to the hospital, I couldn't walk. I still had no idea what was happening, just that I was sick...my Mom more or less dragged me into the ER.

Life is a blur after that. I remember having lots of blood taken, and wondering how much blood my body had. I have a cyst on my hand from my first IV. There's a small scar above my heart from the catheter, though at this point it's barely noticeable. I was in and out of fever, and had a central line implanted. My mom told me stories about things that happened, ice baths and the like, but I don't remember any of it.

What I DO remember, was the NES.

My roommate was nicknamed Trojan. There was an NES game called Trojan, which was where I thought he got the name. Turns out, it was a bit more complicated--something about his urinary system not being properly formed, born with some of it on the outside...and he was in the hospital for his last set of operations to fix everything. The nurses joked that, not only did he play that game a lot, but he'd be able to use a Trojan after this was over.

It was that NES the brought us together, made us forget for the hour we had it where we were and why were there. Trojan taught me to play. Two kids, playing video games and laughing. Trojan was the game I remembered the most from the early times. Later, when I wasn't staying in the hospital but coming three times a week, with a long stay on Friday, I remember playing Gemfire. I loved Gemfire so much that my mom went and found it for Genesis. Yay for cross platform games! I still have it as a ROM, and pull it out when I want to play a quick strategy type game. It's more straightforward than Romance of the Three Kingdoms, and not as huge as Heroes of Might and Magic, but it's that style of game.

At home, I played games almost constantly. My dad and I played a lot of NHLPA '93 and later '94. This was pre-season mode, so my dad made an 80 game schedule for my team (in '93, I was all about Detroit. But after the expansion, I switched to Tampa Bay. but the team in NHLPA '93 was so bad, I couldn't deal with it). We kept track of all of the stats--and that's when I got hooked on stat-tracking sports, which led to Strat-O-Matic baseball being a big game in my life, and short-lived fantasy seasons, where I normally placed really highly...but I got too busy for the rotating daily line-ups of baseball, and fantasy football never interested me as much.

I was an RPG nut--I had played and beat Phantasy Star II-IV on Genesis (II was insanely hard and long! IV was almost too easy. III was the nice medium), Shining in the Darkness (never beat it), Landstalker, Beyond Oasis, Shadowrun (repeatedly!), Sword of Vermilion (so unique!), Exile, Warriors of the Eternal Sun, Traysia, and Light Crusader. Side scrollers like the Sonic games, Rocket Knight Adventures, Shadow of the Beast (Talk about a bad port, so hard!) and many more were "light" games, and always the NHL franchise...and a little Tony La Russa Baseball with it's season mode!

Playstation brought my FFVII, VIII, and IX; Parasite Eve; Xenogears (my vote for best RPG, yes, ove FFVII); and hosts more (Lunar, Arc the Lad, on and on). Later we had Dreamcasts which brought Skies of Arcadia, Shenmue, PS Online, Time Stalkers (another unique and difficult title!).

Later came a PS2 (well after it's release), an XBox 360 (less than 2 years ago), and, now...mostly retro gaming on a beat up laptop.

Why the litany? To show a point. For me, video games were about immersion, a life wildly different than my own. To this day, I'm not a huge fan of FPS games that take place in a realistic world. Give me Elder Scrolls games any day. Sports games let me do what, at that time, I couldn't really--I had played hockey till I got sick, and there was no way I was getting on the ice when I was anemic. That took a few more years of recovery. The same with baseball--while I could play, it took a few years before I could REALLY play. There were plenty of times I had to sit the bench and only bat...and sometimes even have someone run for me. It was obvious my tee-shirt had a pouch on the inside to hold my catheter. And when I tripped on a bag once, my mom came sprinting on the field, less because she was scared for me, but because she knew everyone else would be freaking out. She picked me up, dusted me off, and promptly told me to "stop being so clumsy! You'll make everyone worry!" And we laughed...of course I'm sure she was as worried as everyone else, but she never showed it (Yes, my mom is one of those saints).

To this day, video games are my way out of this reality...they help me forget how hungry I am when I'm running low on food and money (the grad student/adjunct life is NOT a glamorous one...and I can't even look at Ramen without getting queasy anymore). And it all dates back to those moments, when I was sitting at home, often mostly alone with my dad in the next room (who, at the same time I had cancer, developed histoplasmosis, and a host of other issues caused by an autoimmune disorder that went undiagnosed for years, even after getting rare disease after rare disease). My mom had to work, since my dad's disability pay was a lot less than his active pay. I wasn't alone, in the sense that, in case of an emergency, someone was around...But I also knew how to dial 911, just in case...

Video games became my morphine. Later in life, when I got "too busy" for gaming, I switched to cigarettes and drinking: neither are as healthy as video games. I've since quit smoking, and nearly quit drinking. I've reached the point where most hard liquor just doesn't sit well in my stomach, and I'm picky about beer...plus, it's all really expensive in Sweden. So, I had to go back and find another way to relax, let me brain work out its issues on its own without the interference from my conscious thought.

Video games.

Yes, I am a musician, and music is fun. But music is also horribly personal. When I'm performing, writing, or listening to music, my soul is bear. When I'm feeling vulnerable, music isn't where I go, unless I want to stare at my wounds. The same goes for a lot of my writing (which is why the libretto is moving slowly these days). Books are good retreats, but I've become so out of touch with reading for fun thanks to years of school and research, that it's sometimes hard to just sit down and enjoy a nice fantasy romp. Hell, sometimes I'm not even sure WHAT there is--it's why I bought old books I loved, and read a huge amount of David Eddings this summer, and then tackled some Tad Williams.

And, again, it's fantasy and sci-fi that draw me in, the worlds unlike what I'm dealing with. But video games have an ability to be so immersive, to bring the player into the world. In Mass Effect, the player becomes Shepherd. The same in the Elder Scrolls games. In Civilization, you're some omnipotent being directly influencing all the strategy, building a world to your choosing. And in the well written games, you want to save the Princess, your father, the kingdom, the world, or yourself. You become the action.

For many, music is this same experience--it can transport you to another world, usually a very personal world. Where video games allow you to leave, music acts as a mirror, forcing you to see yourself in a personal journey. In video games, there's still a sense of separation: while I AM Shepherd, I am NOT Shepherd--our stories are the same only in this brief time. Music, with it's reflection of the self, is always your story, somehow told by someone else, who is leading you down a path of self-discovery...

Yes, that is a Romantic view of music, but it's also fairly true as far as cognitive research has shown. And it's where I get into so many seemingly semantic arguments. Music doesn't tell "a" story, it tells "your" story. Even the most specific instrumental music, mimicking real life sounds, and trying to create a direct metaphor, get switched in our own consciousness. For all the open-ended games out there, there's often a "final boss" or an "overarching plot." There are small stories and big stories, but there are stories you are directly interactive with--you know what the characters say, the words have specific meanings based on context and societal decisions, and the direction you take is laid out from a series of possibilities, carefully determined by a writer. Music is more a sand-box, where you're dumped into a general biome, with a few tools, and more possibilities than their are mobs. You can tell the passage of time (sun rise, rhythms, meters, durations), tell specific elements (trees, chord progressions, a creeper, a repeated and developed motive), and take the journey (even if you take it in a formalist style, as I often do).

In closing THANK YOU JACK PATILLO, THE WHOLE ROOSTER TEETH AND ACHIEVEMENT HUNTER GANG, AND THE ENTIRE RT COMMUNITY! I know I'm far from the only kid that had video games enter their lives at these key moments and become our coping mechanism. To see gamers come together and use that power to give back to the community. Hospitals always need the money, especially to help lower costs and help kids whose family may not have the means to deal with treatments.



And a final note to all the musicians. This blog has talked a lot about the music business recently. One reason is because the talk leaves a horrid taste in my mouth, and I think we, as a community, need to focus on the mission of our art first. So, here's a quote from Pauline Oliveros:

If you are a composer, give priority to community building over career building. Find was to collaborate, serve the field, and make it good for your colleagues as well as yourself. Question your relationship to the form of music you are writing. Are you listening to your inner voice and answering it's call? Are you expressing what you need to express or what you have been taught to express by the canon of men's musical establishment? Of what value is the technique and form you have learned to the expression of what you feel and hear as your own voice in music? How would you like for your music to function in your community? In the world?

Take a tip from RT, AH, and the entire gaming community--they did something amazing, and changed lives. Let's do the same.

Storytelling in various mediums

   For those not in the know, I'm a bit of a gamer. I grew up playing AD&D and other pencil and paper style RPGS. This list includes GURPS, Shadowrun, Rifts, Star Wars, Call of Cthulhu, Paranoia, and others. I was quickly known as a rules snob, but I wasn't really--just if you were going to use the core rules, you had to use the rules. If the DM was running a story where the core rules did not apply, then I was all for whatever rules the DM. Heck, I was the guy that knew the 2nd edition grappling rules (the ultimate in nerddom right there).

   I didn't play the games for the rules. I didn't play them to drink and eat pizza--that came much later. I didn't even really play them for the social interaction. I didn't have a "gaming group" and then my friends. The groups were made up of my brothers, their friends, and later on my friends. I knew these people pretty darn well, went to movies, the pool, hell I lived with most of them at one point in college.

   I played these games because I love stories. Oh man, do I love stories. I've read constantly since as long as I could remember. My parents had books, one about gnomes, another about trolls, and all sorts of other stuff like that...I remember reading those with my brother...I remember him teaching me to read with Go Dog Go when I was 3 years old. Not shitting you--it was before I starter pre-school even. He was always like that, trying to teach me shit too early.

   But I was hooked on the stories. By 8, I was reading Tolkein. As I laid in the hospital for weeks on end, I'd read The Hobbit, The Fellowship of the Ring, and then onto whatever fantasy books my brothers would bring me. Having cancer was a pain in my blood (Leukemia), but it gave me time to read. And I devoured fantasy novels whole.

   Around the same time, my parents got us a Sega Genesis. I played three types of games: sports, strategy, and RPGs. The Genesis, sadly, didn't have a huge body of RPGS, but I played a bunch of them: all three Phantasy Stars (just the 3 Genesis titles, not the original), Traysia, Shining in the Darkness, Beyond Oasis, Shadowrun, Sword of Vermillion, Exile, D&D Warriors of the Eternal Sun, Light Crusader...Most of the big names. My favourites were by far the Phantasy Star games, but they were all great. They all had interesting stories (Ok, Light Crusader didn't really, but, I'll let that slide). The depth of the Phantasy Star games was insane--a coherent story ranging across four separate titles that were complete unto themselves, but amazing when stuck together. I empathized with the characters, was drawn into the action, and loved every moment of it.

   They were like well written novels. They drew me in the same way many authors did, ranging from Tolkein to Eddings to R.A. Salvatore (him not so much anymore. DRIZZT IS PLAYED OUT ALREAD!) to Terry Pratchet. I was drawn in...

   Games I play now, I'm not drawn in. I've got a pile of games for 360 that I've started and just shrugged. I finally got around to beating Rage, and while the story was at times interesting, it was unfulfilling by the end. The only two series/games that have really drawn me in? Mass Effect and Elder Scrolls.

    Beyond those five games (and the poorly put together ending of ME 3...and to be honest, I played Oblivion on PC first) I haven't found a single game that actually drew me into the story. Sure, there have been fun games to play--going through Gears of War 1-3 in multiplayer was fun, and Dark Souls makes me hate and love my life--but those are mostly game play things. They're fun to play, shoot, strategize. I've still got a couple sports games (all 2-3 years old, of course), and I inherited X-COM before my roommate destroyed it...

    But this post isn't even really about video games...

    It's about story-telling. We all know books tell stories. Theatrical productions do as well--another things I've seen/participated in more this past year than I have in many years. Video games also tell stories, and I think we're seeing a swing toward how the stories are told being far more important than the stories themselves. This is not to say how the stories are told isn't important. No, it's a wonderful balance between the two that makes a truly outstanding game.

   But, what about music?

   There's a current trend toward using literary theory when dealing with music. Susan McClary is one that jumped onto the band-wage early. If you haven't read her book Feminine Endings or at least the most famous bit where she analyzes Tchaikovsky's Fourth Symphony, you should totally do it. This link will get you close on Google Books. Click on "did you mean Tchaikovsky, which is exactly how I spelled it...silly Google...It's pg 69 onwards for a bit.

   Large areas of musicology came into popularity thanks to McClary being unafraid to go where others dared not tread, grabbing from literary theory and throwing it onto music. It was all highly post-structuralist...kinda. maybe...I mean, mostly. Researchers these days take a listener first approach...well, sorta...except for when the composer says something, then that's important, right?

   But I digress from the problem. Research in musicology and music theory is suspect quite often. I'm absolutely no different in my own writings. But, one thing many people against the movement say is "Music cannot tell a specific story. There's no such thing as straight or gay music, masculine or feminine, or even some the deeper ideas of the struggles. It's not possible because music is abstract--researchers are just picking a theory, and forcing a piece into it."

   And, to an extent, I actually agree with those naysayers.

   There are a lot of philosophers that have tackled the issue of music, meaning, and emotions. Peter Kivy, Stephen Davies, Jerrold Levinson, Nelson Goodman, and many more. Just hit up Stanford's philosophy site and check it out. The one interesting thing in all these guys who do not agree at all?

    Music is not a language in that it lacks semantics--music has no meaning on its own.

    AH, and that, my friends, is the crux of my problem.

    You see, when I listen to music, there is no "story." I can read the program notes for, say, Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima, and listen to the piece, and try and figure out what bits fit where. The name itself implies a meaning that may or may not be in the piece itself. This is a type of psychological priming. We are given a context before hearing the piece, and that context creates the pieces story. There's one problem with priming, in this case: does it prove that the music has a story, or does it lead the listener to a story?


 
 Then we have reference. Any easy composer to grab for reference is Charles Ives. When I listen to a piece of his, say, Piano Sonata No. 3: Concord: Mvt. III-The Alcotts, I hear the references: notably Beethoven's 4th Symphony and The Bridal Chorus from Lohengrin. Those references mean something personal to me--Beethoven's 4th was the first piece I really analyzed compositionally, and the Bridal Chorus because of its association with weddings. Take into account the priming with the title, named after Amos Bronson and Louisa May, and split into 2 sections forming a large AB form (one for each), the piece definitely creates some sort of narrative. But what is that narrative? I've listened to this piece many times, and love it, not for it's loose narrative and association to the Alcotts, but because it is a beautiful written piece. But is it narrative? Can a researcher create a narrative from what is presented musically? Maybe, with enough research, tons of connections could be made between the quotations and the Alcotts. But the ones I've read so far haven't convinced me yet.



    There's a great book out by Lawrence Zbikowski called Conceptualizing Music. In it, Zbikowski breaks down a lot of how people understand sounds, mainly from a stand-point of cognitive schemata. Basically, humans like to group things based on different categories, all overlapping into giant networks of WTF. We're a jumbled mess. There's also a great article by Ian Cross and Elizabeth Tolbert called "Music and Meaning." Both of these show just how complex this problem really is.

    All this to get down to a single point: can a piece of music, without words, tell a story, without psychologically priming the listener? Can I play a piece of music, written to my ear depicting very specific things, and create a story that can be read by people, and understood without priming or ubiquitous use of reference (which would lose meaning over time anyway, as the social contexts of the music/sounds will change over time)?

    And does it even matter?

    Pierre Schaeffer wrote about "reduced listening" in electronic music. The idea being that while musique concrete used real worlds sounds, such as train sounds in his Etude aux chemin de fer, that the listeners were not supposed to listen and say "OH, TRAIN! We're going on a train ride!" but attend to the sounds themselves as musical.



    John Cage also wrote and spoke about how all the sounds around us could be musical. Does this mean listeners were meant to not think about the relationship of the sounds? This falls into another few philosophers/linguists mentioned in the earlier article by Cross and Tolbert: Frege and Peirce. I know Peirce's ideas on semiotics best, so I'll explain briefly.

    Peirce come up with this idea of there being a signifier and signified. So, in the case of Schaeffer, a listener would hear a train sound. This is the signifier. What is signified could be "train" or "travel" or "industry." There are lots more levels regarding different types of signifiers and signified words/sounds in Peirce's writing, but this is a glib bit.

    So, in non-electronic music, researchers can deal with semitotics. For instance, in Ives, a researcher could, as I mentioned earlier, look at all the different references made by Ives in the movement. Easy enough, there's a book called All Made of Tunes that lists them all. The researcher could then easily go through the history of the Alcotts, their collective writings, etc, and find semiotic bits. Basically, the idea I mentioned before, but fitting within a specific theoretical framework. Honestly, I'd be surprised if NO ONE has done this yet. If so, any of you reading can feel free to write the paper--just give me a shout-out somewhere.

    But, this still raises a question: without all that knowledge, what is the story? And can a piece without all the priming of say Ives, through quotation and writing, tell the story?

    Do we hear Susan McClary's interpretation of Tchaik's 4th without her bringing it up?

    Storytelling is a delicate thing. It takes a certain amount of world-building, careful planning, and good syntactical skills to put together. The medium itself alters how story's are told: books, plays, video games, AR (augmented reality, which I didn't even touch), paintings, movies, and music all behave differently and are understood by the receiver in very different ways. All these mediums have unique challenges.

    And I look for a great story and storytelling in a video game. It's why while the game play of Call of Duty can be fun, I just don't like those games. I'm not drawn in. But, in music without words, do I care about story-telling?

    No, not so much. I don't listen to a 40 minute symphony and try to imagine a story through the whole thing. I don't listen for the history of the composer, the influence of other composers, or all the possible quotations. Try listening for all the quotations in Ives' 4th Symphony. It makes the piece much less interesting, at least for me. I'm just...listening.

    Not everyone listens that way--I accept that wholeheartedly. And I don't think taking a post-structuralist literary theory approach to understanding music is wrong, in some absolute sense. I just think that, sometimes, it comes down too much as taking a theory, and forcing a piece into it, rather than the other way around. Post-structuralism is nice because it lets a researcher say "What I hear is more important than what the composer wants me to hear!"

    But then, as a composer, I know very few composers that really want you to hear anything specific. We use program notes not as a "You must hear this!" but as a way to help listeners experience something when hearing a piece they may only ever hear once.

    It's all troublesome--the lack of good stories in video games, the difficulty in transmitting ideas across mediums, shoehorning theories meant for one medium into another medium that doesn't behave the exact same way in our brains. And I haven't even gotten into the amount of cultural and social priming we go through thanks to movies (high strings playing fast passages = terror? Thanks Bernard Hermann for making Black Angels either more poignant or more trite, depending on who you ask).

    This is a long post, I know. And there will undoubtedly be more, as I work through this little conundrum. Heck, there may even be a GUEST post! First for everything, right? Or a drunken live blogging session. Who knows?

    But, sometimes, it's important to think about how we experience our surroundings, and what that means to us.