lIt used to be so much fun tuning in on TV to the Proms and seeing a concert devoted to video game soundtracks. While game concerts have been a thing for over a decade, the recognition of this festival was a turning point. Watching conductor Robert Ames and the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra perform thrilling renditions of scores from titles as diverse as The Legend of Zelda, Journey and Dear Esther was a moving example of how the sounds, sights and ideas of video games escape the cultural dead end. . pocket they once inhabited.
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Successive generations have grown up with games, and so the medium’s aesthetics and conventions seep into the wider cultural landscape. I recently looked at the growing phenomenon of video game soundtracks. For modern listeners, there is no snobbery in listening to game scores as entertainment in its own right.
Louise Blain, the presenter of BBC Radio 3’s Sound of Gaming, told me she would like to communicate this. “Game music is inexorably linked to our emotions in a unique way, but vitally it can also stand on its own, and we can listen to the craft and feelings the music evokes,” she said. “I recently presented an orchestral performance of Gareth Coker’s scores for Ori and the Blind Forest and Ori and the Will of the Wisps and then had a few people approach me to say that they’d never played the games, but they were in tears. listened to the music. . There is real power in it.”
Fashion and fiction watching games
This month also saw the release of Gabrielle Zevin’s beautiful novel Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, which follows the fraught relationship between two game developers as they work on a series of projects together. But this isn’t a novel about technology, it’s about the fragile beauty of friendship and how we inspire each other to be creative. Thematically, it has much more in common with the films Loving Vincent or Girl With a Pearl Earring than with, for example, the game Ready Player One. In recent years, we’ve also seen Amanda Craig’s novel The Golden Rule and Raven Leilani’s Brilliant Luster, both of which turned video games into ambitious, grounded literary narratives rather than escapist fantasies.
It was also fun to see the worlds of video games and high fashion collide and cross-pollinate, which would have been completely unimaginable a few years ago. From Louis Vuitton, who features a Final Fantasy character in his ads, to Dior, who recently designed a vehicle and outfit for racing game Gran Turismo 7, fashion houses unabashedly borrow ideas and even cultural compliments from the game world.
It’s exciting that gaming is permeating the wider landscape in almost stealthy ways. For two decades, video games and their worlds have been used in horrific movies and science fiction novels as cautionary metaphors for the decline of civilization into a dehumanizing online existence. The downside, of course, is that we now have billionaire tech bros asking how to turn games like Fortnite and Minecraft into hyper-monetized consumer metaverses. Until this happens, we can enjoy the cultural rise of games; their music, their stories, their visuals, reaching out into the world and letting that world reach back.
What to play?
I am a big fan of management simulation games so I recommend it two-point campus, in which players build and run a university. Just like its predecessor two point hospitalit’s full of wacky humor, but it offers a deep and rewarding challenge and contains some great ideas, such as the heavily disguised spy school and the archeology department that willfully steal ancient artifacts.
Available on: PC, PS4, PS5, Nintendo Switch, Xbox One, Xbox Series X/S
Estimated playing time: continuous
What to read?
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During the pandemic, the video game industry proved remarkably resilient, with publishers posting excellent results and games such as Animal Crossing, Call of Duty, and old-timer Grand Theft Auto V selling well. With a recession looming, the story may change. GamesIndustry.Biz is watching Activision Blizzard‘s difficulties related to other accounts of declining sales.
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The Commonwealth Games have started esports as the competition category this year, with organizers claiming the aim is to make the event more appealing to a younger crowd. The observer has visited.
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Crime writer and avid gamer Chris Brookmyre just published a new novel called The Cliff House, a multi-narrative thriller based on a disastrous bachelor weekend on a remote island. While reading I could imagine Super Heavy Games making this one of his brilliant horror adventures, along the lines of The Quarry and Until Dawn.
What to click?
Streaming: the best video game adaptations
Venba, a video game about the emotional resonance of food
A midlife crisis in space: The Alters is a science fiction comedy starring hapless clones
Skate Story: not your average skate game
Ask block
This week on Twitter, Dan Chambers asked the apocalyptic question: What do you do when you feel like you are slowly losing the love for gaming?
This has happened to me a few times so I can answer from personal experience. My first suggestion is to try playing on a platform that you haven’t played on before. As a teenager I played mostly arcade style shooting and fighting games with the occasional puzzle game and got tired of it by the time I was in college. Then I discovered the PC with its online functionality and a large number of management sims and real-time strategy games and I was back in. For example, you don’t need to buy a new PS5 – just go on eBay and try one Wii Uor a Sega Saturnor a Game Boy Advance and you can unlock a whole approach to games that you never thought of.
Otherwise, try a new genre. Elden Ring was a revelation to me as I’ve never been to Souls games; and titles like Unpacking, OlliOlli World, neon white, Not for broadcast and Trolley Problem Inc got me thinking about games in different ways. And discovering and supporting small games on digital platforms such as Steam and Itch.io can bring a sense of ownership and investment, which can rekindle the fire.
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