Between Beats

The traditional relationship between music and game is subsidiary, even subservient. We can see this in how often music and sound come last in the development process, in how, as students of game studies, we so often ask “how the music supports the game”: The game guides the music; the music does not guide the game. To someone who thinks in music and sound before images or even gameplay, this is an unfortunate situation. We constantly adapt our music to games, but can we adapt our games to music?

One might immediately think of the rhythm game. Surely the game is played to the music, and not the other way around. But I find this assertion hollow; the game is, in fact, still a coercive force. The music must be legible: If the player cannot understand the music as a mechanic, it is a failure of design. When we force the player to adapt to illegible music, the opportunity to experience flow is reduced to trial and error. It is memorization of a score.

In other words, you can make a beatmap for anything, but this doesn’t mean it will be fun. On the extreme end, we can imagine a rhythm game set to pure noise: What scaffolding is there to map inputs to? But even more digestible genres can make for a poor rhythm game; the polyrhythms and frequent time signature changes of genres like progressive metal or math rock can make for just as chaotic an experience. If the song does not submit itself to the rules of good gameplay, even the most skilled mapper will fail to produce anything satisfying.

Further, gameplay in rhythm games is rigid: Either the player is accurate, or they are not. We strive for the perfect full combo, the elusive state of total rule-following. These rules are bound by those digestible norms of Western music—tempo and time signature, sometimes melody—that can be conceived of as gameplay, which allows them to be reanalyzed, abstracted, and further rigidified through a lossy mapping to physical action. While it may appear that the rules of music drive this mapping, I would argue that it is the other way around, and that the rule-bound nature of (certain) music simply makes it conveniently mappable to an equally rule-bound game state.

Freeing the player from the constraint of perfection does not necessarily create new opportunities for play. Rather, the additional degrees of freedom often obfuscate the relationship between game and music. Consider 140 (2013), which I will describe as “rhythm-adjacent” for the way in which game state is directly tied to musical state. As the player moves through the game, they collect musical cues that serve to both unlock and signal new mechanics: Platforms that appear and disappear to the beat, hazards that slide to the melody, weapons that fire at measured intervals.

To the player, it may appear that the world moves to the music. But in reality, the music moves to the world: Platforms, hazards, attacks—all of these are foundational components of the platformer genre, and the game has simply found musical rules that happen to suit their behaviour. As above, the music succeeds in its effect by following the rules of good gameplay, which it is able to disguise as following the rules of good music.

Meanwhile, the player is disembodied, distinct from the realm of sound, yet remains beholden to it. “Optimal” play is, as in a traditional rhythm game, both necessarily timed to the music and constricted to one particular path. That you can wander off this path only serves to conceal the regimented nature of the game behind a false impression of discovery. In the end, we are not much better off than before; the music has only the illusion of primacy.

Are musical and player freedom at odds? Perhaps this is the wrong question to ask. After all, we might say that the wish for total musical freedom—for absolute play within music—is, like total player freedom, an unreasonable end. Even free improv moves within constraints: Genre, audience, time, place, other players’ abilities and habits. Freedom is a lopsided goal: We’ve mirrored the extreme ludus of the rhythm game’s perfection with an extreme paidia. A game wholly adapted to such music, if such a thing were possible to develop, would be only spontaneity.

So what can we hope for? If games are composed—compositions—can they not be in conversation with their music? If attempting to make game and music consonant with one another necessarily results in the subjugation of one to the other, what happens when we allow them to be dissonant?

I would like to consider two more rhythm-adjacent games: Super Hexagon (2012) and Everhood (2021). Although both games may appear more rhythm-like on the surface than 140, it is rare that optimized movement coincides with the rules of beat or melody. Instead, while the music leads developments in positive space, the gameplay unfolds freely in negative space. This separation of positive and negative space opens up a gap between forms—a dissonance—that creates new opportunities for play in both music and game.

In Super Hexagon, the player must evade an endless series of (mostly) hexagonal walls. These walls move inwards toward the player’s position at the center of the screen alongside—but not precisely with, and sometimes counter to—the music. Rather, with the goal of perfection no longer demanding a precise mapping between game and sound, change in the game environment seems to flow through the beats. Musical developments provide information about the game state, yet also stand on their own.

The player, meanwhile, may only exist in the negative. Movement is fully independent from both environment and sound: Rather than interacting with the world, as in 140, the player must move between its gaps. Within these gaps, though, the player is free to choose their path—their response—which may follow the music or disregard it entirely. Indeed, achieving flow in Super Hexagon seems to necessitate a complete mental decoupling of music from game, inviting the player to sit in this dissonance rather than rejecting or reconciling it.

In the RPG Everhood, battles unfold to music in a way that is visually similar to a typical rhythm game. The player moves from side to side on a grid, and as the music progresses, obstacles advance toward the player in time with (but sometimes out of time with) various musical cues. As in Super Hexagon, these obstacles are meant to be evaded, bringing gameplay into negative space. However, Everhood highlights this dissonance further by allowing for a singular positive interaction from the player: Destruction.

The only non-evasive action the player may take is to strike, which can be used both to destroy the obstacles that threaten the player and to use those obstacles against your assailant by launching them back. The choice to wield this power is explicitly given within the game’s narrative: In choosing it, the player chooses to respond to the dissonance between music and gameplay with the exertion of their own will; in forgoing it, they choose the more difficult path of moving alongside it, of existing in that difficult gap between art and game.

Everhood further takes advantage of the simultaneous disembodiment of and dependence between music and gameplay by playing with illegibility. More difficult battles at points forego consistent tempo, rhythm, or melody, allowing the music to play within the space it has been given. This illegibility in turn deprives the player of the scaffolding they may have come to expect from more typical rhythm games. Yet, as in Super Hexagon, the player may find that by absorbing the music as a meaningful, yet independent entity, these segments open up the deepest opportunities for flow, allowing them to converse with the game’s musical choices while freely responding to its challenges.

The relationship between music and game exists just as much in the gaps it creates as in its harmonies. When we attempt to fit music to game or game to music, one is subsumed under the other in the name of “agreement”, but a true conversation requires the ability to disagree. If agreement is impossible, then the independence of both parties might at least be maintained under disagreement. It is within these disagreements that the relationship between music and game becomes something that we can question. When we conceive of sound not as a backdrop, nor as mere feedback, nor even as gameplay, but instead as conversant with our game and its gameplay, we open up new possibilities for play—on the part of both our art and the player’s response to it.