It’s an interesting point about not being good at providing interactive narrative (which goes back to the old ludological argument, that try as you might, video games don’t wind up as “narrative play” rather than much more simplistic constructions with narrative trappings) and instead focusing on obvious strengths. But I wonder if your point about “the purest expression of video game as art” maps closely to games that evoke a state of flow (usually more about muscle memory and instinct than contemplative thought). Then again we’re wading into highly generalised and ambiguous terms here…

The Bit.Trip games are the opposite of improvisational — Runner occasionally lets you take an alternate path, but with Beat there’s just one place for your paddle to be at any time, unless you’re just letting something go. I really have no idea how freestyling works in Parappa — my entire experience with it is using a video of the driving test to entertain my son and annoy my wife — so I shouldn’t front on it. I only played half of Epic Sax Game, and it’s neat how it pivots from Guitar Hero to free-form improv, but that puts it on the opposite end of the spectrum, at least some of the time. (And in the studio phase I managed to get an A+ by not playing a note.)

The reason I said Beat was the purest expression of video games as art is, video games are not really great at providing interactive narrative. What they are great at is getting you to move in certain ways, which means they can be more like music and dance than film or fiction. Most twitchy games seem to be “see threat, react to threat” or “see path, plan for and execute path through,” or sometimes “work out pattern to get through threat” (again, I don’t play these games much, so I’m talking smack), but Bit.Trip Beat trains you into a groove; there are lots of parts where the only way you’re going to get things right is if you’re moving with the beat. And you don’t get to choose the beat, but if you look at video games this way choice isn’t at the heart of interactivity anyway.

Myself, I am a slave to the Humble Indie Bundle, because they let me load up on all sorts of games for a reasonable amount, and also because they work on Macs. More blather soon.

On the text interactivity thing. On one hand, I wonder if we’re perhaps too attuned to the detail and clarity of the word to become convinced of such automated responses. But look over here, on the other! Façade!

I don’t know why I do this to myself, but, uhhh you’d recommend Bit.Trip Beat then? Am I imagining a connection here between Bit.Trip Beat/Parappa and Pippin Barr’s Epic Sax Game, as the latter is really about improvisation than performance?

“But if the sounds are responding to the player’s action, and the player is free, then you have to feel free to welcome dissonance.”

Yes. It’s interesting, though, how Proteus gets away without coming off as wildly dissonant. Perhaps when these things come together we don’t hear the chaos but instead feel the activity; we become fans of Lewis and Behrman.

The George Lewis/David Behrman thing is something I’ve been thinking about, with reference to text games mostly but obviously it’s more applicable to music. Both of them have developed improvising computer systems that respond to input from live instrumentalists. Here’s a bit of Behrman’s work. Here’s a chunk of Lewis’s (the piano on the right is being played by the computer).

They seem to me to take opposite approaches. Behrman has his players use a restricted vocabulary, six pitches according to the liner notes of the album, which ensures that the piece is reasonably euphonious and meditative; the computer’s fairly guaranteed to hit something that goes with whatever live the musicians are playing.

Lewis’s music embraces dissonance and unpredicatability. Some of it may sound like straight-up chaos; but it’s not (you may have to trust me on this) and it’s not so completely unlike the music he plays without computers. (Example.) The computer’s music can only make sense within a tradition where you expect some musical clashes, and you expect the musicians to go their own way some of the time. You just can’t, at least not right now, write a computer program that will react the way an improvisor in a fairly traditional medium would. No computer will jam out on “I’ll Remember April” with you. It just wouldn’t sound natural. (This is especially notable if you can find anything with his earlier program “Voyager,” which uses a whole sampled orchestra, but I couldn’t find anything with that on the web.)

Which made me think about interactive responses to text: Traditional interactive fiction takes something like the Behrman approach. It restricts the range of possible inputs so its replies have a chance of making sense. If you want to allow free text input, you’re going to have to move to something avant-garde; we can’t do natural language parsing and replies, but we might be able to come up with something that finds things in text input and responds to them in its own way. It just won’t be anything like a natural conversation. You can’t expect a traditional story out of a computer, but you might be able to come up with something that picks up on the resonances and themes of what you say, if you drop the expectation for a traditional story.

Which is all a long way off anyway. But Kanaga’s post makes me think that maybe the same stuff applies to procedurally generated music in, ah, interactive experiences. Something like Bit.Trip Beat (which I just got and which I can give you another argument about how it’s really the purest expression of video games as art) keeps the sound to a rigid pattern, and you contribute to it by hitting the beats at the right time, or not. Probably Parappa is a better example of that, since it gives you more freedom in Cool Mode from what I understand, but it’s still locked to the beat. Whereas it seems like Kanaga wants us to open our minds to some crazy hacked-up rhythms; his remix of EXO was pretty dissonant even for me. But if the sounds are responding to the player’s action, and the player is free, then you have to feel free to welcome dissonance.

Anyway, this post seemed lonely, so I figured it was OK for me to blather a little.