NPR Covers Video Games Live
By Andrew on Sunday, August 5th, 2007 at 7:14 PM PST In Gamer Life
It continues: video games clashing with culture. Or, at its very best, video games are infusing with what we know of as acceptable and “normal” cultural trends, creating a more commonplace name for words like “Wii” and “PS3.”
National Public Radio put together a nice bit about the Video Games Live concert which took its tour through Washington D.C. at the end of June. And of course, NPR singled out the enthusiasts, which may or may not give an accurate depiction of everyone who might like to sit down and enjoy some beautifully performed video game music.
“I’m Ness from the Super NES game Earthbound,” eleven year-old Josh, who dressed in a striped shirt and baseball cap, told NPR. “It’s a game about crazy things; you attack hippies with baseball bats. I brought a baseball bat, but they wouldn’t let me come in with it.”
Bat-toting kids weren’t the only highlight–there was also a fully-costumed Mega Man who joined in the fun on-stage. But what I found most interesting about the coverage was the quote from the composers and organizers of VGL.
“This is the reason why I say if Beethoven were alive today, he would be a video-game composer,” Tommy Tallarico said in the article. “He wouldn’t be a film composer; that would bore the hell out of him. He’d be in video games. He was always cutting-edge, he was always ahead of the curve. His whole thing in music was to control the emotions of the person listening to it: He’d be a video-game composer.”
Little by little, video games just may be creeping toward a new perception which will allow for some interesting new opportunities, I think.
via Video Games Live.
Mmm, the statement about Beethoven is hard to qualify. In general, it’s hard to take anyone who lived centuries ago and put them in a contemporary context. Beethoven surely was innovative, but so we’re a lot of the composers in the canon of classical music. A lot of Beethoven’s music was personally inspired too, and he wasn’t as likely as some other composers were to set music to existing works of art (literature, paintings, etc.). I’d also argue that controlling the emotions of the person listening to the music was the “thing” of all the Romantic era composers to follow Beethoven.
But I understand what Tallarico’s getting at. We’ve got critics out there who just hastily dismiss video games as a genre lacking in artistic and aesthetic value. It’s a fine thing that we have figures like Tallarico and Gregson-Williams who give this genre an authoritative voice.