Classical Music, Bluesky Threads, etc... (May 2025)
Hello everyone. It’s been some time since I’ve posted here! Things have been quite busy on the game development side with Angeline Era and Danchi Days and the upcoming summer showcases. Things are calming down somewhat (although Angeline Era release is quite on the horizon (sweat)) so I’ve been trying to get more into writing. This post is a Grab Bag of sorts - summarizing some bluesky threads i made, going over some interesting reading i’ve been doing, and a mini-essay on classical music at the end as well as discussion of a Liszt piece I like.
bluesky threads
Here are a few bluesky threads I tweeted of game-related things on my mind that I haven’t had time to expand on. These tend to be relatively unrefined thoughts, but you may find them interesting (as did I!)
“Inverted Earth”: Games as “Human Potential Annihilating Device”
A QRT on joey schutz’s post on game design and addiction (it itself a response to Addiction by Design, a great book on casinos and addiction!)
I’d like to write more about this at some point, but I also want to do it a bit delicately (and positively), so it’s been a process
Game Development as the process of being a “Desire Magician”
Balatro, Nubby and Caulkgames (“Games that fill up small gaps in free time / life”)
America’s Mystery: It created some great game design and also some really Bad Game Design
Why Are Art Styles From 80s-00s Considered Dead Ends In Games
Is Shohei Otani a Modern Saint? Why do I see him so much in Japan?
i played the kings field games and Man do we need more FPS games with non-point-click-shoot controls
Can you make a fun 1st person action game without guns or being an action rpg
interesting reading
Espen Aarseth and “metachronotopes”, considering games as novels
Espen Aarseth - Cybertext (1997) - Perspectives on Ergodic Literature (has some writing on early text adventure games)
Related: Mary Ann Buckles’ "Interactive Fiction: The Computer Storygame ‘Adventure’" (1985) - a thesis on Colossal Cave Adventure that also looks into why people liked it
Related - Thomas W. Malone’s “What Makes Things Fun To Learn? A Study of Instrinsically Motivating Computer Games” - an interesting paper (from 1980!) where the author programmed various versions of breakout missing features like score - or even the ball bouncing lol - and measured participants’ reactions. I haven’t read too much but it’s been interesting so far to see such an early (in the history of games) study
Yuk Hui - art and cosmotechnics. I don’t understand a lot of this book, but there are some interesting moments where some stuff does click into place. There’s some discussion of Heidegger and “loops” and cybernetics that led to some of the above ideas on caulkgames
Klaus Theweleit’s Male Fantasies (which I found via hearing about Cruelty Squad / Psycho Patrol R)
Susan Buck-Morss’ “Dreamworld and Catastrophe” (on soviety/USA film and history and some of the theory behind that)
“The Shortest History of China” and “24 hours in ancient china” were fun china-related reads, which are a part of a general interest in Chinese history I’ve been exploring (stemming from a general interest in the Central Asia → China transmission period for Buddhism)
stephen gillmurphy on games - "the most basic belief in videogame spaces: that what we're doing is basically good, that everything will work out in the end. what kind of games would you make if you no longer believed this was the case?"
(This dovetails (I have been using this word a lot this week) with various thoughts about kill gameplay by Fellow Gamers sylvie and droqen, as well as a talk by Karina Popp at NYU, livetweeted by Naomi Clark)
Also llaura’s recent essay on game design
liz ryerson on aftermath of gamergate
em reed’s novel More bugs (set in the US suburbs!)
the end of gameplay (droqen’s new game)
Offline
More stuff than I could reasonably summarize, but here’s a few fun things.
A perfume bottle museum! (Scent museum in Beppu japan). I love small-scale sculptural work, from these hypercommercial objects to stuff like mingei crafts. If you’re ever in Tokyo, be sure to see if there’s a (free!) exhibition at the Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum of crafts societies - always something inspiring there.
weird beach near Fukuoka. It started raining pretty bad after we were a ways out on the coast LOL
I got to go to a Kidzania (a theme park of sorts where kids roleplay having jobs. They open it to adults a few times a year. Basically a roleplaying experience! I was surprised how much wearing uniforms makes you feel certain ways.
danchi days mascot Moro-Q at a danchi museum!
danchi days team trip to “living relic of the Japan bubble period” Atami city!
Classical Music Recommendation
This was the original point of this post.
I was making bagels and listening to some music and it gave me the idea to write about some of my early encounters with classical music. I know some people enjoy hearing about my OSTs’ influences, but I rarely draw attention to classical music which I think underlies everything I write. I like music and sound a lot and I guess always have.
One of my favorite childhood hobbies - which I realize I never really shared with ANY friends outside of at home with my sister - was poring over Noteworthy Player transcriptions of vgmusic.com midi files. Here’s the only video of a NoteWorthy Player song playback I could find (lol).
Many MIDI files at the time were weirdly transcribed and could end up garbled, so there was a frustration if the playback didn’t sound quite right… a weird piecing together of what the song ought to sound like.
I also liked printing out game sheet music, trying to play them on the piano, or looking at the ‘read-along’ scores on music- scores.com, a website where you could find songs by instrument, or composer, or skill level. There was a similar enjoyment to looking at the “hardest songs”, as the fun of perusing the Really Hard Songs in Dance Dance Revolution).
Classical music, as an “Object” is interesting. The Classical Music that I tend to like (roughly from the 1800s on) feels a lot more like paintings, murals, or picture books... (see: 1800s Program Music) you listen through it and certain things stick out or catch your attention. The structure of a Classical piece (that I like) is kind of freeform. Most songs do stick to a set of ideas enough that each idea recognizably feels like part of the song, but unlike more common song structures today (verse-chorus, etc), classical music tends to meander more, repeat sections a lot, and sections don’t have as many conventions for length. I like this image-like quality to the music, whether or not the song was intentionally trying to describe e.g. a story. Classical music is probably part of what forms my base skepticism in production-heavy, clarity-and-loudness-focused polish in pop music. Those things are tools, for sure, but not really goals, for me, at least.
It may come from how the quality of what makes a classical piece interesting comes down to the emotional and physical qualities of how the song is interpreted by the performer. Keep in mind that there’s no canonical ‘studio version’ of any classical song, since it’s all based on interpretation of sheet music by the performer!
Anyways, I thought it could be an interesting exercise to discuss some of my favorite classical pieces from childhood, with some personal historical context to them. These pieces aren’t particularly obscure but I figured a good number of readers probably haven’t heard of them, so let’s begin!
Liszt - Mephisto Waltz No. 3 (1883)
(In case it goes down, this is a video of Mephisto Waltz 3, played by France Clidat)
Wow, I didn’t know this one was written so late in his life? Liszt (1811-1886) is a composer who, in the memey way, was known as a playboy and showoff with Big Hands… My friends would mention how you need Big Hands to play his music. Whether this was in college or elementary school. I was very in to trying to play Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2, although it was beyond my skill level, there’s a lot of fun to be had in slowly playing segments of passages.
In middle school or something, one talented friend was playing Mephisto Waltz No. 1. In times before and after class or after school, or during a lunch break, sometimes we’d be hanging out in the music room and ask friends to play some of a piece they knew or were working on learning. Mephisto Waltz 1 was so interesting that it got me to looking up the score of the song, and somehow running into what must have been a midi file (or mp3) of Mephisto Waltz 3.
As the name suggests, according to Wikipedia, Mephisto Waltz (at least the first) is based on the 1836 verse drama Faust: here’s a note from the score of Mephisto Waltz 1:
There is a wedding feast in progress in the village inn, with music, dancing, carousing. Mephistopheles and Faust pass by, and Mephistopheles induces Faust to enter and take part in the festivities. Mephistopheles snatches the fiddle from the hands of a lethargic fiddler and draws from it indescribably seductive and intoxicating strains. The amorous Faust whirls about with a full-blooded village beauty in a wild dance; they waltz in mad, abandon out of the room, into the open, away into the woods. The sounds of the fiddle grow softer and softer, and the nightingale warbles his love-laden song.
Mephisto Waltz 3 came some decades later. Why do I like the song? I could get into the weeds with particular music theory-based analyses, but I’ll keep it Readable. There’s a real playfulness to it, and whimsy in its emotional qualities. Certain melodies reoccur in the song but in different contexts - sometimes as a really light, dainty staccato (e.g. 0:28, short, quick notes), other times as a very dreamy and loud legato (smooth, connected notes). So it gives this airy, fairy-like feel. Intoxicating and seductive (5:15), as the above passage indicates. Sometimes grand (4:38), sometimes mysterious (5:55). And there’s plenty of unusual sonic textures, like the fluttery passage at 2:40. I like hearing instruments pushed to strange places through methods of articulation (how the note is played, physically, which translates to emotional qualities). There’s moments that feel like realizations (7:00), questioning…
It also kind of reads like a romantic love-esque song to me The song has a lot of recurring melodies but pushes them to all sorts of emotional situations, and the resulting complexity parallels the ups and downs of life and the real world.
I really value that kind of complexity and ambiguity in music, which is why the collective whole of game OSTs are valuable to me. I like making music because it’s so easy to capture a complex set of emotions or feelings and just put it into sound, and as it turns out this works great in the context of games!
One song that I think shows some of the classical influence is Angeline Era’s overworld theme. Angeline Era is very much a game that feels breezy, cheery, and playful, but with dark and serious plot developments that slowly come to the surface. To me this song captures a lot of that - there’s just a touch of anxiety and seriousness to the song (0:40), but it feels very heroic and jubilant, relaxed and reflective at other times. You could call much of the song “laid-back”, but actually each section and how it approaches and showcases this “laid-backness” feels quite different.