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Trigger Happy
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The best videogame scores circumvent this knotty
problem altogether by not attempting to be continuous,
film-like soundtracks at all. Instead, music is used as
another kind of atmosphere-heightening information.
The rather beautiful title music of the Tomb Raider
games features undulating orchestral strings with a
lovely oboe tune. But within the game, the mood and
instrumentation change dramatically, according to the
fictional context. The celebrated Venice level of Tomb
Raider II, for example, features a superb piece of
pastiche baroque. In these games, music’s appearance
is much rarer than it is in your average film, and when
the speakers burst into a fast cello motif or a clatter of
electronic percussion, you know that something
exciting is going to happen and you look round rapidly
for an enemy to avoid, or watch in awe as another
fabulous vaulted ceiling stretches up above you, and
then the music fades away again, leaving you with the
drips of condensation from the walls or the rumbling of
some ominous nearby machinery. When music in a
game is this good, less is often more.
So music in a videogame does not work in exactly
the same ways as music in a film. In a game, sound can
be functional, a means of providing information that the
player then acts on. But what about the visuals? Do