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Risk and Trivial Pursuit
An chapter from the book The Fat Man on Game Audio: Tasty Morsels of Sonic Goodness.
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by George Alistair Sanger

ATELY, OUR BUSINESS has generally tended to play it safe in the audio arena. I expect that phrase, "play it safe," to stab like a sharp wooden stake into the hearts of the "Bad Boy" game developers. Like a long nail. Maybe nine Inches. And well it should, too.

We garners are nasty, rough, and evil. We're about blood, speed, adrenaline, breaking the law, killing the monster, and getting the girl.

But we're scientists at heart, aren't we? And we really, really would like to be filmmakers, some of us older guys, wouldn't we, really? C'mon, admit it. At least we long for the legitimacy that filmmakers have. I can tell that we like legitimacy, because when we get little pieces of it, we throw off our bloodied helmets, leap to the top of the mountain, circle our splintered clubs over our heads, and roar victoriously to the sky.

"Our industry makes more money than film and television combined!!!"

"Our' ads are ON TEE VEEE!"

"We used a full orchestra on our game!"

"I can't believe I used some of the very same extras Steven Spielberg used!!!"

Guys, these are impressive achievements, but they are not things that seasoned, confident film people, or barbarian warriors for that matter, say. These are things that scared insecure people say when they want their dad to like them.

You want to be compared to Movies? Okay, try this. Once upon a time, the film industry was in that position, too.

Legitimacy was a thing of the future. Working in The Cinema was considered to be not unlike working in The Pornography. "Moving Pictures" were a haven for desperate actors and broke entrepreneurs, and for many of these, it was precisely not unlike working in The Pornography. Known stage actors who were reduced to the level of working in film would often deny it, using a different name for the two endeavors. It was common to hear that an actor was working in film "only until something legitimate comes along."

In this way, we are like The Cinema. Shout that from the mountaintop.

And in our striving to become more and more cinematic, we have taken some of our attention from gameplay and focused it upon some of the outstanding aspects of that noble, flat, tall, and two-hour-long medium. Not "outstanding" as in wonderful. "Outstanding" as in like a sore thumb.

Black screen with white letters.

A low, throbbing single note builds in intensity. A deep voice begins speaking, "In a World..."

A scraping, screeching sound effect makes us leap from our seats. The orchestral score hits really hard! The car drives really fast.

The Chick is HOT, and man, she says sassy things, and it turns out she can FIGHT, TOO!

The gun points in the guy's face.

The computer-generated alien's jaws open. Look! See how well they can render DROOL now!

Sudden silence...

A drop of blood lands on a white wedding veil.

The screen explodes, and all is quiet. The deep voice is back.

"Kiss-Kiss, Bang-Bang."

"Coming this summer."

"From We Know How to Make Trailers so that Somebody Off-Screen Can Make a Pile of Cash Films."

This is the sum total of what we have picked up from decades of the cinematic art.

There is more to movies than kiss-kiss, bang-bang. There is emotion. There is depth. There is social change and the responsibility that goes with causing that change.

There is the fact that people have given their lives to the medium.

There is innovation -- the kind that can only come from risk. And the kind of innovation we see in the great movies is the kind that can come only when many people have given their entire jives over to a medium.

The Cinema can make you cry and change the way you live. Can The Game do that? Not by imitating the worst part of the crappy trailers from the last ten years, it can't.

I guess it would come across well to the scientist in us if I were to say that, particularly when it comes to audio, we game creators can focus fairly well on an object and we can note fairly accurately what it currently is like. In other words, we can notice its position. But we often ignore its velocity, forget about its acceleration, and are surprised to find that there is a formula that governs its motion through space.

Let's imagine that a game's spec calls for "some John Williams, maybe Danny Elfman" (assuming you're not John Willams -- John, if you're reading this, this does not apply to you), then you've got a very good starting point. If you treat that as your stopping point, too, you might be able to schedule things pretty well. Pop out a little John, whip up the invoice, connect the dots, bada-bing, bada-boom, done. That's how we do it in The Games Business.

A product made this way could turn out good, and often does, but the odds are very much against its turning out great. Do you have a favorite Elvis impersonator? Is he a truly great musician? Do you have a favorite Beatles cover band? Did they change your life or the course of a generation? John Lennon or maybe George Harrison once said, and I love, ironically, to say this in an accent, "They can't be imitating us, we don't wear Beatles wigs."


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