Mood is part of a game. Music is part of mood. If you want think of it that way, I could see where you're coming from, but I just don't believe it works that way. Creating the mood is not the composers job. Not only does it require the designer to properly set it up, but most composers are not given any sort of license to do anything out of the designers vision.Iblis wrote:
I agree that you can achieve mood in any number of ways, but you said:
Which seems to argue:The point of a composer in a game is to help mood. That has nothing to do with game design.
Music is just there for mood, therefore it's not part of game design.
Which makes no sense. Why is mood not part of game design?
The music in a game is not a priority, and so it should be something done in the last stages. It's just like people with the OHR that haphazardly throw a textbox and a song and a walkabout graphic and a script into their files at random intervals. If you focus on all the wrong things at the wrong time, it's going to be overwhelming/ineffective way to work. Also, remember the monetary concerns. The shorter time you're involving a composer, the less they can expect to be paid.
Also, as I can speak from experience, it's much easier to compose something after you see what the hell it is you're composing for. Seeing the game in a complete state will yield better music than haphazardly making "sad" and "happy" music. The composer is not contributing to the story, so why include them when scenario hasn't even been fleshed out yet? The composer should see the end product, so that they can anticipate what the audience will see and expand upon that. Based on the input from the director/designer and their own experience, they then go off and create the score for the film/game.
As an example, say that we do include the composer from the get go. Alright, so there's going to be this big chase scene. The designer explains how it's going to be. The composer goes home and starts to work on this thing. The design changes in scope because someone decides that chase scene needed to be comical. The composer scraps all of that work and starts a comical one. They put it together, and find out it's too short, because it's impossible to time a scene in the beginning stages. The composer goes off again. Then the designer feels it doesn't quite work, and scraps the entire scene.
How wasteful would that be? Remember that composers will generally sign contracts in which they are paid by the amount of music they write, not by what is left in the game/film.
This contrasts with, say, a musical. The songwriter(s) need to actively be part of the creation of the product, as their songs directly affect the flow of the piece. But even then, most good songwriters won't write songs until a portion of the libretto is done, because haphazardly writing songs and fitting them in won't work.
So yes, music matters, but it has very little bearing on the actual game mechanics itself. It may be a part of the design of the whole, but, as far as I'm concerned, it's very much a removed process, and for all these reasons, it turns about better that way.
EDIT:
I just read over all of this and saw I wasn't too particularly clear. Music is definitely something for the game designer to have on their minds, but it is not their job to create the music. That is the role of a composer. So, to be a bit more clear, composing, or conceiving music is not a part of game design. Defining the mood of a game is part of game design, and the designer may wish to help push the composer in the right direction, but ultimately, it is the decision of the composer as to what the music is, not the designer.
A designer can say, "Let's have happy music here," but that's really the only extent that a designer can give on it. They can be more verbose, and give directions such as, "I wish for absolutely gleeful music here, because character A just got married, and perhaps we can have some of Character's B theme in there to foreshadow the marriage's demise," but that's it. They've thought up ideas about what they want, but they're not actually acting on them, or even remotely designing the music. They're just giving very broad implications as to what they want.
So I guess what's more clear is that composing music has nothing to do with game design. Music placement to promote mood does have something to do with game design.