How should the International Court of Justice (ICJ) address UN General Assembly (UNGA) resolutions? Outside internal organisational matters, these resolutions are formally non-binding, soft law instruments. However, they have played an important role in the Court’s decisions, especially those concerning the self-determination of peoples. The contribution of resolutions to this right was first recognised in Namibia in 1971.1 In Western Sahara in 1975, the Court used three resolutions to effectively define the legal context.2 The Chagos Advisory Opinion of 25 February 2019,3 though, has taken this reliance even further. In this opinion, a single resolution, the Declaration on Granting Independence to Colonial Countries and Peoples of 1960,4 was central in establishing the applicable law. Moreover, it assumed this pivotal role despite multilateral treaty obligations under the UN Charter that were both relevant and binding on all states concerned.

It is fascinating to watch first-time video game players. These initiates into the gaming world make obvious the learning processes that occur when we become familiar with the rules and conventions of the medium. A few years ago, I had the opportunity to observe one of my close friends undergo this education when he decided to purchase a Wii console. I had not known him to express any particular enthusiasm for video games before, but like many Wii owners, he was attracted by the unusual control interface and the accessibility of the console. One of the very first games in which he became heavily invested was Resident Evil 4 (2007).

As his familiarity with the console, the ‘survival horror’ genre parameters and this particular game grew, he quickly learned how to utilize a certain aspect of the game to help him play – the music. Resident Evil 4 uses a dynamic music engine that alters the music when the player's character is ambushed and attacked by zombie-like adversaries. In the early part of the game, this ‘danger’ music will not cease playing until the threat has been eliminated. My friend, the gaming neophyte, unimpeded by the lack of any formal musical training, recognized how to use the game's music to his advantage. He explicitly vocalized how he knew that he had not neutralized the enemies in a given area, even if order had apparently been restored to the avatar's immediate location, because the ‘danger’ music was still playing. With the possibility of fatal future ambush, he knew to be attentive and to seek out the enemies before continuing. He would frequently explain his process to me (watching his play), making comments to the effect that ‘The music is playing, so there must still be zombies here.’ He improved his game performance and chances of winning through using the information communicated to him by the music.

In the last chapter, we discussed how music is part of the way that the virtual world of the game is constructed for the players. We began to consider how this can inflect the way that the player engages with the game. Pursuing this idea further, in this chapter, we will focus on music that provides gameplay-relevant information which players may use to enhance their chances of winning or achieving a better score.

As soon as we begin to engage with the task of learning more about video game music, it becomes apparent that this medium brings with it a certain set of challenges. Some of the issues are methodological, such as the analytical approaches we use to investigate the musical substance of the game, while others speak to more fundamental questions – for example, how do we use the video game as a musical source? The first part of this book is dedicated to dealing with some of the most significant practical concerns about studying game music, while the second part focuses on critical ideas and perspectives that are useful for (and have arisen from) such investigations. Chapter 2 will consider the methods of analysis, but before we can begin to decide how we are going to interrogate the sources, we must first establish the nature of the materials under discussion. To begin we must start with a very basic question – ‘What music is in a video game?’, or, more particularly, ‘What music can we examine when we discuss music in a video game?’

Music in Games

Perhaps the most straightforward way to outline the kinds of musical cue typically found in games is by considering the expected musical content of a game. Figure 1.1 is a generalized model of a mass audience PC/console video game. This figure of the musical architecture of a level-based video game has been informed both by my own experience as a gamer and by instructional texts that have been written for aspiring game composers by industry professionals. Not every type of musical cue identified in the diagram will be evident in every game and this figure does not showcase more unusual musical programming or game structures. Nevertheless, this abstracted model represents a standardized practice and it is useful for identifying the most common musical elements of games, since it shows the types of cue normally included in games. Even if the figure does not accurately match all games (casual handheld games are particularly likely to depart from this model), it distils the archetypal grammar of the mainstream video game.

It is traditional for books about music to begin with a pithy quotation or an endearingly humorous anecdote to elucidate the central thesis of the volume. There will be a few anecdotes and many more quotations to come, but for this book on a non-traditional popular music, it is appropriate that I buck the trend and instead offer something in the modern aphoristic vernacular: an internet cartoon (Figure 0.1).

David Soames's ‘The Ultimate Combo’ still brings a smile to my face, even after years of familiarity with the cartoon, since, like all of the best jokes, it mischievously suggests more than it explicitly states. Soames's illustration satirizes the ‘combo’ – a phenomenon (particularly prevalent in fighting games) whereby players may deploy a particular sequence of commands in quick succession to increase the cumulative effect of the avatar's attacks. The fighter in the cartoon is thus able to produce progressively more elaborate assaults upon the unseen opponent, to the point of conjuring a fireball. In the fourth and final line of the cartoon, however, this complexity, comically ad absurdum, has been translated into a rather more benign manifestation.

Why should the last line of the cartoon link music and video games? And, furthermore, why is this funny? It might be the case that part of the humour comes from an implied linguistic pun. In English, amongst other languages, the word ‘play’ is used both when describing the action of performing using a musical instrument and for engaging with video games. Perhaps ‘The Ultimate Combo’ is linking the two senses of the word ‘play’ through deploying a pun – what Arthur Koestler described as ‘two strings of thought tied together by an acoustic [or homographic] knot’. But maybe these are not actually quite so separate meanings of the word ‘play’. Unlike, for example, the famous pun-based exchange in Airplane! (1980), ‘Can you fly this plane and land it?’/‘Surely you can't be serious?’/‘I am serious, and don't call me Shirley,’ this case of ‘play’ is not a homograph or homophone, but the same word, common to two different but related activities. ‘The Ultimate Combo’ suggests that there are not hard and fast constitutional differences between the play of music and the play of video games as we might imagine.

In the last chapter, we discussed interaction as a quality that distinguishes video games from sibling moving-image fiction media such as film and television. Games share this interactivity with musical performance, for which it is a prerequisite for musical output; as schoolteachers are fond of saying when reprimanding unruly students, ‘instruments don't make sounds on their own’. We will deal with theories about play more generally in the epilogue, but first, this chapter explores the intersection of musical play and game play. I here consider the senses and situations in which to play video games is to play music.

Musical Interfaces and Musical Performance

As we saw with Loom (1990) in Chapter 3, it is not uncommon for games to involve virtual musical (especially instrumental) performance. In Loom, the players’ musical activity is part of their interface with the game world and it is an unavoidable part of the gameplay. One cannot play Loom without playing music. Throughout the video game landscape, there are many more examples of such musical interaction. Perhaps one of the most famous incarnations of musical performance as a game interface is in The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time (1998). The hero, Link, plays the titular instrument, directed by the player using pitch-assigned buttons on the gamepad. Much like Loom, the player learns particular melodies from other characters throughout the game, which, when played by Link, have certain effects, such as calling the hero's horse, changing day to night, prompting rain and so on. To play the song in question, the player does not need accurate rhythms – it is only the order of pitches that is required – nevertheless, once a recognized pitch sequence is input (representing the first part of the melody), almost like an auto-correction system in a word processor, Link will subsequently play the melody with the correct timing and complete the tune that the player began.

One might cynically view the musicality of the Zelda ocarina as entirely irrelevant to the game mechanic – it might as well be a random string of button-presses. Two aspects of the game counteract this perspective.

I am not a murderer. At least, I do not think that I am a murderer. After all, video games are not the same as real life. When I shoot an enemy henchman in Tomb Raider II (1997), no-one actually dies. There is no funeral for the dedicated employee, no sympathy cards are written and no-one reminisces with humorous anecdotes about the good times had in the sparkling company of ‘Goon A’. I am not responsible for a death, I do not have to stand trial and justify my self-defence, because my name is not Lara Croft and the enemy is fictional. My murderous actions are not real.

But, as game theorist Jesper Juul found out, once we start to investigate games in detail, the boundary between the ‘real’ and ‘not real’ becomes a little more difficult to determine. Evidently, games are real things that exist in the world. Winning a game is also a real event. Juul concludes that the rules that serve as parameters of the game are real, though they are invented and virtual. Physical manifestation is not a criterion for being real – ideas and prejudices are real, even if they are not concretely incarnate. T.L. Taylor has described how real cultures can be created and real friendships forged inside multiplayer online video games. Such games blur together offline and online ‘spheres’, since ‘[w]hat happens in virtual worlds often is just as real, just as meaningful to participants’ as experiences outside them. Rather than considering the rules of a game (the mechanics of gameplay, such as how players win the game and the modes of interaction) and the fiction of the game (the worlds and stories presented by the game) as separate, Juul emphasizes the link between rules and fictions, not least because it is through the fictions that the player comes to understand the rules of the game:

The first part of this book discussed the practical aspects of analysing video game music. Now that we have examined the ways in which we can access and begin to investigate the musical material, we are in a position to consider critical and conceptual approaches to the music of games.

Over the following chapters, we will visit some of the most pertinent and prominent features in the critical landscape of video game music. Some of these sites of inquiry present themselves readily: the border of game music with film music, for instance, is an almost inescapable aspect of engaging with game music. Others, however, such as the notion of playfulness, require a little more theoretical legwork to access. As we traverse the conceptual topology of game music (in itself a playful exploration), we will remain grounded in the texts of video games. The games are at the heart of these discussions and rather than engaging in theoretical abstractions we will always be concerned, fundamentally, with how we can use these concepts to further understand video game music.

These chapters are, of course, a tour of the favourite sites, views, texts and obsessions of your guide-cum-narrator. But to admit my bias and forfeit any pretence at objectivity is not to discredit my arguments or choices. In fact, it bolsters them. These are the ideas and texts that have been most convincing, rewarding and useful to me, in my continuing project of understanding game music. These are the concepts that ring true for my experience of games and it would be disingenuous to claim that subjective fun, play and enjoyment should have no part in the study and discussion of game music. This is, after all, the primary reason why we engage with games. I submit my gaming/musical experience as evidence and offer these discussions as new ways to understand, and play with, our games. Disclaimers dispensed with, we begin our exploration with a concept and experience familiar to all gamers: immersion.

Immersion and Texturing

As players, we want games to be more than simply interactive. We long for those times when a game is so utterly absorbing, we lose track of time and our surroundings – we prize games that give us that rewarding sense of deep involvement in a fictional construct and gameplay mechanism.