'The best game soundtrack would be the one that never stops through the whole game,' said one composer colleague of mine. But what if that's wrong?
Ben Prunty is the composer whose music you've heard accompanying the death of your crew in FTL: Faster Than Light. His column for PC Gamer covers the role of music in games.
Imagine a simple, reasonably well-lit living room. There are no characters in the room. Now imagine that breezy, fun, bouncy music is playing, like say, something from the excellent soundtrack to Dream Daddy. You look at that living room, you expect some interesting characters to appear and you might have entertaining conversation. Witty dialog will be exchanged. It'll be great.
Same image, completely different feelings. All directed entirely by the music. The music told you what to expect and, indirectly, how to feel. We call music non-diegetic, which means it exists outside the world of the narrative, in the same way that a narrator is outside the story. I like to imagine that the music sits outside the game with you, the player, gently offering encouraging advice.
It's an incredibly tense experience. And there's no music at all. Not in the title screen, not when a monster appears, nothing. There are only sound effects. This is actually related to a key part of the game's design: verisimilitude. The experience is not that you are controlling an avatar who controls these robots. You, with your keyboard and monitor in front of you, are directly controlling the drones.
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