In The Rise of the Videogame Zinesters, Anna Anthropy defines a game as “an experience created by rules.” While the rules themselves can be simple, the interaction between them is generally more complex, and this is partly what makes games interesting. Anthropy uses the schoolyard game of tag as an example, which has an extremely simple set of rules and a huge range of possible situations not strictly dictated by the rules.
This got me thinking: By this broad definition, is a piece of music ever a game? Certainly some pieces of music seem to have game-like properties, proceeding according to an internal logic which could be expressed as rules. Phase shifting in minimalist music, in particular, has a similar relationship to simplicity and complexity, where you can understand the process and still be surprised by the musical results of that process.
Writing music, too, is often like a game. The exercise of four-part voice leading is certainly mediated by rules–or are they guidelines? Regardless, considered as a game, its reward structure seems to be broken, because you can follow all the rules and still generate a musically bland result. What makes a Bach chorale compelling seems to have an orthogonal relationship to the rules. Does this mean we’re missing some rules, playing the wrong game, or is it something mysteriously else that we should be considering?
Maybe writing music is more like simultaneously writing and playing a game: generating sets of rules, deciding if they are fun or not, accepting or rejecting them, and then starting over. When rules create beauty, you win!
What about listening to music? Some composers embed secret data in their musical materials, like the A-B-H-F motive hidden in Alban Berg’s Lyric Suite. From a narrative gameplay point of view, solving this puzzle is extra satisfying because it contains an emotional revelation about the life of the composer (A.B.) and his semi-clandestine affair with Hanna Fuchs-Robettin (H.F.). But this game, too, is kind of broken, since you’re unlikely to make this discovery from listening alone. It’s really only possible through research and score study, which isn’t accessible to most listeners. However, you can certainly enjoy listening to the Lyric Suite while blissfully unaware of these undercurrents, as generations did before Berg’s motivic agenda was revealed. So, there’s a kind of disconnect between music-as-music and music-as-game that seems unbridgeable.
Nonetheless, I think that certain aspects of my composing have been informed and enriched by my experience with games. One thing games excel at is exploring issues of choice or player agency. I think about listener agency a lot, and ways to give listeners multiple valid paths through a piece. This is hard, and I’m not sure it’s even something music is very good at! A great deal of music seems to be more cinematic or novelistic in its aims, subtly or overtly guiding you to particular emotional points of inflection, which might be roughly analogous to narrative peaks and valleys. I’m not knocking this approach at all–it works!–but I’m always looking for ways to make music a more ludic experience, where the listener is presented with choices. (And I’m interested in narratives, too, that have that ambiguity.)
The danger of this approach is that the result may come off as thematically confused or oversaturated. Games are always negotiating this trade-off. Some opt for a more cinematic experience, with a linearly constructed series of set pieces, while others are more like a sandbox where players are free to explore. But I find myself often dissatisfied with the pure sandbox experience; on some level, when engaging with a work of art I want to be guided by a strong authorial voice.
In music, counterpoint is the most obvious way to introduce multiple paths while maintaining that authorial control. But establishing equality between the voices in a contrapuntal texture is difficult; at any given time, one voice usually dominates. Textural or stylistic counterpoint, where two or more “complete” musical settings are simultaneously or subsequently juxtaposed, is another way to bring about a kind of ambiguity. It also introduces what I might call “counterpoint of meaning,” for lack of a better term. When Charles Ives’s Second Symphony quotes “America the Beautiful” in the midst of an otherwise unfamiliar musical landscape, are we meant to take it sincerely or with a dose of bitter irony?
This game, too, requires culturally transmitted information–we have to know the tune–but at least that knowledge is easier to come by.
With the holidays upon us, many of us musical types have been doing some last-minute shopping, racking our brains to think of any gift that is sufficiently cooler than a treble clef paperweight. So it seems like a good time to bring up IV-V-I, a new harmony-based card game created and designed by composer and educator Rafael Hernandez. The idea behind IV-V-I is easy to grasp: using their available cards, players compete to build the best phrase (where “best” means most daring and elaborate, not just technically correct), and then seal the deal with a cadence.
While one of IV-V-I’s strengths is how accurately the game captures the challenge of harmonic part writing exercises, the addition of several unique gameplay elements makes for a level of strategy and fun that far exceeds what can be derived from standard harmony exercises. Players compete with their opponents to score the most points with their phrases, yet they can also play “part writing error” cards to nullify an opponent’s points, or shake things up with “style cards” which have a global effect on gameplay; Beethoven, for example, doles out extra points for “special harmony” cards while that rascally Shostakovich makes part writing errors a virtue.
These details make for a rich and immersive experience that manages to teach and hone some of the most complex elements of music theory without becoming pedantic. Players are allowed to expand phrases from either the left or right, which provides for more playing options, as well as provoking a way of thinking seldom encouraged in classroom harmony exercises; and most importantly, the communal and interactive element of gameplay ensures that what might be many players’ first attempts at composing will be enjoyable and provocative.
In IV-V-I, it’s easy to change the game’s level of difficulty with a few house rules: the more complicated cards (augmented 6th chords, for example) can simply be pulled from a beginning deck and subsequently introduced at a later time, while more advanced players can ratchet up the intensity with additional restrictions. See below for a video clip of gameplay (other demonstration videos available at the IV-V-I website):
