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Smiles Like a Reptile
By Corvus | January 21, 2008
Deep within the rhythmic heart of the game soundtrack lies the proof of my thesis that story has less to do with the author’s narrative and far more to do with each audience member’s unique experience of it. I have a variety of videogame music in my library. Scattered among the Burl Ives, Parliament, Gothic Archies, Wu Tang Clan and Tom Waits lurks Peter McConnell’s awesome Grim Fandango soundtrack, the voluminous Wind Waker soundtrack by Kenta Nagata and a handful of other gems I’ve found over the years.
Strung out on lasers and slash back blazers
Ate all your razors while pulling the waiters
Talking bout Monroe and walking on Snow White
New York’s a go-go and everything tastes right
I listen to my playlist on random and when a videogame tracks pops up, it never fails to bring me right back to the source of it. Invariably I can picture exactly what was happening in the videogame when I first heard the tune. But the most visceral music/videogame connection I have is with a game that doesn’t even have a soundtrack–Zork II: Wizard of Frobozz. The connection is such a powerful and disruptive one that I find I can no longer have this track in my collection, lest it derail my entire day.
The Jean Genie lives on his back
The Jean Genie loves chimney stacks
He’s outrageous, he screams and he bawls
Jean Genie let yourself go
I played and replayed Infocom games incessantly in my final year of high school on my Atari 1200XL. I stayed up late into the night, often in an …altered state, eyes glued to the screen, hands lazily crawling the keyboard, listening to David Bowie, Boomtown Rats, Iggy Pop and the Sex Pistols, wandering the textual corridors of worlds external to my own pernicious imagination.*
Sits like a man but he smiles like a reptile
She loves him, she loves him but just for a short while
She’ll scratch in the sand, won’t let go his hand
He says he’s a beautician and sells you nutrition
And keeps all your dead hair for making up underwear
In Zork II there was a room with a lizard head mounted on a door. In order to pass, you had to feed the head a bag of candy. This allowed you to unlock the door without the lizard snapping at your fingers. This lizard head captivated me.** In stellar display of Jungian synchronicity, whenever I was in this room, one particular song was playing on my jam box.
The Jean Genie lives on his back
The Jean Genie loves chimney stacks
He’s outrageous, he screams and he bawls
Jean Genie let yourself go
And now when I hear David Bowie’s Jean Genie, I don’t just flash back to that room in the Zork universe. I flash back to a sequence of specific moments in time when that room and that song corresponded. I can feel my old room around me–bookshelves full of sci-fi novels, toys and Omni back issues, walls covered in posters, cards and action figures in wall-scaling poses. I can see my midnight snake plate on the floor next to my computer, peanut butter and jelly residue, banana peel and a glass bearing traces of orange juice. I can hear the cicadas outside the window, endlessly repeating the last three-syllable word to run through my thoughts.
He’s so simple minded he can’t drive his module
He bites on the neon and sleeps in the capsule
Loves to be loved, loves to be loved
But most disruptively, I briefly become that angry and despairing teenager again–fixating on this image of a living lizard head mounted on a door. This is the power of storytelling–the combined forces of interactive storytelling and musical storytelling in action. The music forming a socially resonant bridge between my youthful angst and the videogame’s power to act as metaphor. This was not a combination any storyteller came up with. No composer carefully matched the melody to the scene or sculpted a situational sound loop to blend with the rest of the music.
The Jean Genie lives on his back
The Jean Genie loves chimney stacks
He’s outrageous, he screams and he bawls
Jean Genie let yourself go
Would it be possible for a videogame composer to orchestrate such a deep personal resonance? It’s certainly possible, but I don’t see it as being likely. Soundtracks are created to support the narrative of a game and the videogame industry doesn’t tend to produce the sort of socially relevant narratives you find within a culture’s music.
Go
But someday, perhaps. Someday games will intentionally speak for a generation, rather than at it. Someday games will intentionally speak to the isolation of teenagers, intentionally express the latent rage and frustration, intentionally address the feelings of powerlessness and marginalization. And when they do? Lookout world.
Go go
*My desire to escape my own imagination at that point in my life is a critical component of this connection, not to mention my developing personality. I don’t know if I’ll ever write about directly about the need here, but I write about it indirectly with practically every post.
**It makes an appearance in one of the Infocom inspired comics I drew at the time.
Tagged:Blogs of the Round Table, david bowie, soundtracks, zork ii. | 1 Comment »
January 26th, 2008 at 10:08 am
Corvus,
I totally agree with you. Our own, real, human stories will always be more compelling than any fiction could ever be on itself. The combination of subject and object creates a whole new narrative, existing uniquely for each one of us.
Stories change with the way we perceive them. It’s a topic I’ve just been writing about.