i’m currently watching my way through the aforementioned gdc talk and it is extremely illuminating when trying to answer the question of why the whole project feels so comprehensively empty…i guess i kind of knew all of this subconsciously just because i know how game dev works and i know how making music works but it’s interesting to hear it all laid bare like this
even starting from the absolute beginning where there’s a history of this nebulous concept of “virtual identities” it’s clear that this person had never performed their own material live in front of people, like, ever, before setting out to make this thing…the concept of a virtual identity AS DEFINED IN THE TALK is so vague as to be almost meaningless because it encompasses basically every performance ever done by anyone, and yet the talk doesn’t even begin to draw on the rich history of identity and performance and how they’re intertwined. like how can you not even mention elton john or bowie, ballroom culture or dance culture writ large? the concept is literally defined as a character who is fictional presented as though they exist in our world even though they’re operated by people who have their own distinct identities and this is the kind of thing that is thought up by someone who has never ever had to put themselves out there in any significant sense, because of fucking course who you put on stage is (consciously or not) not who you really are, that’s the entire point of a performance??? so suddenly it makes sense why every character’s identity is paper thin, the director doesn’t know what identity even is when it comes to performance
and then the rest of the talk breaks down into a nuts & bolts postmortem-y thing about how they did all the cool stuff of taking the game people and making them /real/ and it just feels like the game dev equivalent of taking an entire year to develop the lore behind everything involved in your music project before you’ve even downloaded the crack for FL studio, developing a musical and performative identity means getting in the woodshed and just trying it out over and over again in front of different people in different ways and adjusting as you go along! there’s a section in the talk where the concept of like, having to make things up and keep stories and internal lore straight and stuff like that is treated as some big revelation instead of the fucking obvious stumbling block anyone working on this kind of thing would know to avoid if they’d even tried to play instruments in front of their friends a single time
so what becomes obvious during this whole thing is that there’s like, nothing there? the band stands for nothing, none of the songs cover any conceptual or emotional material that hasn’t already been covered by an emo band by kids in modesto, and the game doesn’t have anything to say about what it means to be creative in whatever postcapitalist hellscape we live in because it is never something that the director of this game ever really had to deal with as far as i know? when this game was first announced i loudly declared (in response to a line in the trailer about one of the characters not knowing what to make the music “about”) that music doesn’t need to be “about” anything and that’s what makes it fun, but what I did not quite understand at the time was just how much fucking work would go into making “nothing” like this. i think about the last of us and how the guy made a ton of people do a bunch of work to say “being a dad…is HARD” and again this is the equivalent except instead of parenthood it’s about making music, and the entire “point” seems to be wanting to play shows at big game awards shows which is fine if you didn’t pay a lot of money to dozens of people to work on a project for 5 years in order to do so? just start off at dive bars playing to 2 people and the sound guy as god intended, coward
it extends to the music itself too - i know people in the bay area synthwave/synthpop scene that kind of suffer from this same problem of having to put themselves ALL THE WAY in the music in every single song because if they don’t do that then it exposes the fact that it’s just kind of shitty synthpop. but because the vocal performance isn’t strong enough to stand out on its own it has to be completely surrounded and overwhelmed by the production elements, which all point to purity ring’s worst album another eternity but without any personality, so what comes out the other end is this completely frictionless music that feels like what I imagine is a low budget chainsmokers if i had ever known what a chainsmokers song sounds like
i guess i wonder why anyone would snitch on themselves so comprehensively but then i realize if i say any of this stuff to people in The Industry i will be cast off even further than i already feel like i am so joke’s on me WHOOPS
