Music and Video Games - Stuff I'd have never heard if I wasn't a gamer.

When it comes to music, I like a pretty wide variety of different things, but I don't spend a whole lot of time listening to the radio or watching music channels on TV (not that most of those ever have any music anymore.) As the content of this blog would suggest, I spend quite a bit of my time playing games. Going through the contents of my iPod, I realized that the source of a lot of my favorite music is something I liked when hearing in in a video game once, and then I looked up the artist and purchased albums or individual tracks. As soundtracks for geeky films and TV can only provide so much in terms of exposure to new music, and tabletop roleplaying and fantasy novels don't (typically) have a soundtrack at all, I'm glad to have so many artists that I was introduced to primarily through PC and console games. I'd like to run down a few of those now.

Artist/Song: Bang Camaro - “Push Push” (Lady Lightning)

Game: Guitar Hero 2

"Trogdor" was another great bonus song from that game, but I was already aware of it at the time.

I was first working at a video game store when I encountered the Guitar Hero games, and I was terrible at them. When Guitar Hero 2 was released, our store got a preview copy with a few songs for the in-store demo station. In times when business was slow, I played the hell out of those few songs, and ended up pre-ordering and purchasing the full game when it released for the Xbox 360. I carved through the catalogue of songs in that game bit by bit, unlocking all the bonus songs and being able to play almost every song on Hard. One of the more fun ones to learn was the Arena-rock styled song from Bang Camaro. I don't play much guitar hero these days, but I still listen to that song now and again.

Artist/Song: Louis Armstrong - “A Kiss to Build a Dream On...”

Game: Fallout 2

I'd heard of Satchmo before Fallout, of course, but in the same way I'd heard of Jelly Roll Morton, Bing Crosby, and other artists who I could name but didn't really “listen to.” The amazing opening for this game impressed me so much that not only did I reload it many times to watch again, but I eventually picked up a CD of Louis Armstrong's recordings from the Decca sessions. This CD is representative of a lot of the commonly recognized “greatest hits,” and though I've ripped it to individual MP3s by now, I can say that the gravelly voice and amazing trumpet skills of this musical titan are a major part of any shuffle rotation.

Artist/Song: Alizée “J'en ai Marre”

Game: World of Warcraft

Yep, that is a specific dance move from a specific singer.

Funny thing about this one is, I didn't encounter French Pop star Alizée through her music, at least not initially. As people (or at least, most guys) who have played WoW for any significant length of time would likely recognize, the French pop singer is the inspiration for the female Night Elf dancing animation. In one of the many videos showing the WoW dances and their real-world counterparts side-by-side, I noticed this one and curiosity sent me to Google to find out who she was and what her music sounded like. Surprisingly, I found a few songs I liked quite a bit without any videos of her dancing required, even though I don't speak French near well enough to understand them.

Artist/Song: Poets of the Fall - “War” and “Poet and the Muse” (as Old Gods of Asgard)

Game: Alan Wake

I've mentioned these guys before. Since encountering their music in Alan Wake, the Finnish rock band Poets of the Fall has become one of my very favorite bands of all time. I haven't been to a concert in years, but if these guys have a tour that takes them anywhere near Chicago, I may have to clear my schedule and score tickets. They appear throughout the game both as themselves, and performing two songs as the fictional Nordic Metal Band from the 1970s called Old Gods of Asgard. (Video above is an "Old Gods" power ballad.)  Most of their stuff sounds like a blend between Jethro Tull and Queensryche, clean vocals and dark undertones in the music. Outside of the songs from the games, I am a huge fan of both the newest album, Twilight Theater, and Carnival of Rust from 2006. They also wrote and performed the closing credits to Max Payne 2.

Artist/Song: Jonathan Coulton - “Still Alive”

Game: Portal

Even people who have never tried Portal have likely heard the closing credits song over and over again. The clever lyrics, darkly humorous and in keeping with the tone of the game itself plus the incredibly catchy tune got many geeks to play the song to death and memorize all the words. Mr. Coulton wrote the song, but didn't perform it himself. A little digging online reveals a career built on funny songs with geeky themes, from Zombie Office Workers trying calmly to draft a memo to get the humans to let them in (RE: Your Brains,) to a young nerd who dreams of the day in the future when he can become a cyborg supervillain with a lab in space, because he is humiliated by a girl he likes now (Future Soon.) I've heard most of his albums, and the songs are catchy, well performed and genuinely funny throughout, so long as your sense of humor is twisted.

There are scores of songs from the music games like Rock Band and Guitar Hero that I left off, mainly because most of my favorites from that genre are tunes I already knew about before the games featuring them. Also worth a brief mention is the track from Portal 2, “Exile Vilify” by The National. I played that song again and again to the point of my wife yelling at me right after hearing it. More than one of the Skateboarding games on consoles have had songs on their soundtracks that I've since tracked down, and the Grand Theft Auto series has great music on the various in-game radio stations as well.

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Delicious Cake. Portal 2, and Valve's recent ARG on Steam

So the geek news of the weekend, right up through today was the release of Portal 2, and the Alternate Reality Game that allowed for a (very slightly) early release after all was said and done. ARGs, when done right, can incorporate fake websites, chat clients with lots of players and game elements pretending to be players, social media accounts, YouTube Channels, and the like. The idea that the “game” is played by a large fan community as a whole, and the line between where the game ends and the real world picks up blurs a bit. This makes these games great for marketing or building hype for a product.

There's Science to be done.

The ARG is a really interesting concept. It isn't an electronic game, though computers, cell phones and other gadgets are frequently used. It isn't a roleplaying game, usually, as the participants interact with our world as themselves. The best ARGs have a puzzle or mystery designed for a large communtiy of players, and clues or pieces of an ongoing narrative can be anywhere, depending on the geographical scope of the game. The movie “The Game” with Michael Douglas is a thriller involving a rich businessman that gets into an incredibly elaborate ARG, though it wasn't referred to as such specifically, and differs from the normal structure by the game being put on for a “playerbase” of one. I've personally been involved in several bachelor parties that were organized as an ARG for a single player, and they've been a lot of fun.

A screenshot of the early stages of "i love bees", the Halo 2 ARG from 2004. A boring website about bees is taken over by... something else.

The show LOST added detail to its complicated story and gave fans something to do between seasons with several ARGs, Halo had the “I love bees” ARG, Trent Reznor created one called “Year Zero” to promote a Nine Inch Nails album, and these last few weeks, Valve launched their ARG for the release of Portal 2. GladOS, the insane AI running the Portal show, appeared to compromise Steam accounts, hints were dropped and a countdown started ticking. Once the timer reached zero on Friday, the weekend's planned activity for ARG participants was announced. GladOS was rebooting her systems to restart the Portal Test Environment, but she needed extra processing power to do so. She selected a group of games made by indie game studios, sold on Steam (of course) that players needed to work on to give her the power she needed. The Prize: an early release of Portal 2.

Fans initially loved the game, and were drawn in. The theme of Portal lends itself very well to this sort of activity, as the actual video game is framed as a series of scientific “tests” run by a computer program in the first place. A collection of indie games collectively known as “The Potato Sack” was released on Steam as a special offer on April 1. Strange symbols began appearing in all of these games, new streaming content was added to each and parallels could be drawn between the unusual symbols and similar glyphs on other websites and in real world locations. Cryptic messages found on blog posts and hidden in audio files were deciphered, Potato Sack games began to subtly change, adding Portal-themed elements. All the clues pointed to one thing: GladOS was waking up, trying to reboot.

Cryptic clues led players deeper into the mystery.

A countdown started, and when the clock ran out, a website called GladOS@Home was launched, a mock distributed computing network that told players that by playing the games in the Potato Sack, GladOS would come online, and if it was done by enough people, the reward was an early release. Players bought the sack in droves, and coordinated efforts to play them, filling up a progress bar on GladOS@Home and earning “potatoes” on their Steam profile. The speed at which the progress bars filled was slow. Quickly, fans realized that the ARG was not going to unlock Portal 2 over the weekend, and the backlash started.

By the time all progress was complete, Portal 2 launched about 10 hours ahead of schedule, and some Valve fans felt that their loyalty was abused to sell more games on Steam. Hardcore players, who collected every single potato from all of the games did report receiving the Valve Complete Pack, a collection of every game the company ever released on Steam. Skeptics had warned early on that any early release of Portal 2 might expose Valve to legal action from Sony, Microsoft, or brick and mortar retailers, and cynics accused the company of “rigging” the numbers behind the completion timers to prevent any significantly early release from occurring.

GladOS@Home in action.

Now that everyone who owns a copy can play Portal 2, the dust is settling. Fans are starting the debate over whether this experience was successful or not. The people seem to fall neatly into two camps. One side claims that Valve used its fans to sell a lot of extra games on Steam, and the whole thing was a marketing stunt in poor taste, damaging the company's image to its fans. The other perspective in the discussion says that Valve created an optional exercise for Portal fans to participate in together, play some games they might not have otherwise, and support independent game designers to boot... it isn't the company's fault that players assumed that “early Portal 2 release” meant “over the weekend”.

I'm not playing Portal 2, as I rarely pick up titles until they go on sale now, but I've followed this saga pretty closely, and I tend to agree with the second, “pro-Valve” group. If anything, a large social experiment where the results and rewards weren't exactly what the participants thought they would be is in keeping with the Portal theme. Most of us learned from the first game, after all... that The Cake Is A Lie. What do you think?

Delicious and Moist.

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Blog Gadgets

The SixtyOne. Part Internet Radio, part... MMORPG?

I've written before about my new daily routine as an Unemployed Geek, but I've left out an important part of any given day... my music. I've developed my musical tastes over the years to be something... unusual, as I listen to a little bit of everything, from Top 40 radio, through classical, nerdcore hiphop, Australian Folk-Rock, Christian Country Acid-House, Blues, Oldies... I could fill an article just listing genres... it'd just be boring. My musical taste was once described as “somewhere between eclectic and schizophrenic,” and I particularly like wildly different mixes of music with jarring transitions between songs.

NOT on TheSixtyOne... Unfortunately... after learning about these guys from playing Alan Wake, this Finnish Rock Band became one of my favorites.

My tastes mean that I like a constant influx of music I haven't encountered before. This isn't always easy, especially on a very, very limited income. I've tried a lot of streaming internet radio stations, like Pandora and Last.fm, and I like a lot of what I've heard, but most of it isn't new to me, and my tastes confound the matching algorithms and I don't get quite the right mix. One day, browsing the internet, I discovered a page featuring “websites you should visit, if you don't already.” The hook for one of them in particular drew me in.

Kill 16 indie-rockers and bring me their Vans to complete this quest.

Thesixtyone.com was listed as a Pandora-style site with a focus on new music and... gaming elements? I raised an eyebrow. Sure enough, the site had daily quests, an experience point kind of system, and even achievements. Dialing in on two separate elements of what I like on the internet, blending them haphazardly and making it all work, somehow? Yes, please.

The blend of music on thesixtyone isn't for everyone. There is a LOT of indie-rock, chick rock and other “white boy college radio” stuff on there, not a whole lot for, say, a heavy metal fan. If you like The Decemberists, Tetrastar or other similar artists, you'll find this site is targeted at you. I managed to also find quite a bit of nerdcore rap/hip-hop I'd never heard of, and the entire catalogue of Jonathan Coulton (Of Portal's “Still Alive” closing credits fame) is up there.

The cake may be a lie, but check out his other stuff... this guy is hilarious and amazing.

Some of the tracks on the site are available for download, and about half of those I've encountered don't even charge for the privilege. For those who feel strongly about artists getting paid for their work instead of supporting the recording industry, this site is real solid on that front, with a higher percentage of any digital sales going directly to artists than most other sites I've encountered. If anyone starts using the site and wants to add me as a friend, I'm on there, of course, as DocStout.

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