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Last semester, one of my friends asked me to take a video game music class with him. I was hesitant at first, but I soon decided adding a two-credit course couldn’t hurt. Now I’m no musical savant. For although I may listen to music, ranging from pop music to classical, I’m unable to, in a learned fashion, explain why my musical choices are excellent or worthy of your praise.

Interestingly, before this class, I would occasionally listen to film scores but never before had I considered music from video games. Of course I knew the legends of musical scores like the Mario theme, but what of the effect of music on games? What about how themes are constructed? Leitmotifs? What are those? All these questions!

Through the semester, all was made clear. We learned about how the original sounds were created on limited hardware, how video game scores handled the problems that came with looping, and we spoke with current video game composers like Austin Wintory (flOw and Journey). Speaking with industry professionals was an absolute treat. Although I’m not an aspiring composer, I sat there, thinking, “I wish this happened in other classes.” There was something rather candid about talking to a giant head projected onto a screen in the basement lecture hall at the art museum. It was a conversation, not some form of high profile celebrity interview. We learned about the normalcy these composers came from. How they were just musicians who managed to get involved in a growing market.

“A friend told me I should try video game music.”

“I was composing music for commercials at the time when I discovered I could make video game music.”

The video game is probably the most immersive medium available to us today. As technology advances, it would seem immersion is the one thing that is continuously amplified. Another immersive medium, movies, incorporated music, photography, and writing in a way that was new. Then video games included another dimension, the active participation of the audience while also including new technologies. Amidst all this, it becomes harder to focus on one particular element amidst the clustered form. But perhaps it is necessary, in such a complicated form, to focus on one thing and build from that point. Wintory told us that Journey was developed based on his composed music. The levels and the animation, the lighting and the gameplay mechanics, all of these things revolved around what Wintory was composing for the game. Oddly enough, by leading with one element, everything else forms in a cohesive manner. All it takes is one recommendation, and you enter into a complicated world that just clicks.

Another aspect of the course I enjoyed, although I didn’t partake in the exercise, was the chance to compose music for an EECS class that had developed their own video games that semester. Now I understand that organizing interdisciplinary opportunities is a logistical nightmare for professors. However, when it happens, it’s priceless.

I cannot say that I’ve started playing more games because of the class. But I’ve started to revisit nostalgic video game scores. More importantly, what I learned about the processes of composing video game music has affected my approach to writing as well.

No medium seems to be alone nowadays.

Today’s blog post is going to be pretty modest because I’m not sure what to write about. I have ideas swirling around in my mind, and tons of things I could write about, yet I’m somehow coming up empty for one main thing I want to delve into. See, I even included a picture of an empty notepad, shamelessly picked from a cursory Google Images search, to represent this post. Oh well. I’m just going to touch on some random things I’ve been up to and thinking about.

1. Recently my high school closed down, so I’m trying to tackle a big piece about what the school meant to me. I started writing it today and I was originally actually planning to use that as my post today. But I realized how hard it was to sum up four years, especially because those years were so huge for me—they were like a whole other life. It’s strange to think about those years as only a fifth of my 20-year life. It seems more like 45%, with college being another 35% and my pre-high school years being the 20% that I don’t remember as well and can’t analyze as deeply.

2. God, journaling is great. I’m perpetually behind in journaling because I write such verbose descriptions and it takes so long, but I’ve taken some time lately to catch up a little, and it’s been so rewarding. Seeing those pages full of text is nice to begin with, and having my stories out there in writing feels cathartic, even when they’re relatively mundane stories.

Whenever I’m feeling really bad about something, whatever it is, writing it out helps. It makes my emotions feel clearer and more logical. It helps me make sense of whatever confusing mix of emotions I might be feeling, and I’ve had a lot of that lately. As unhealthy as this sounds, I think I might start focusing more on journaling even if it means spending less time studying. It’s worth it for my mental health.

3. I’ve been thinking about one of the most differences between TV/film/novels and reality: reality doesn’t have as much big confrontations. That’s not to say there isn’t conflict in real life, of course, and in the right hands, the smallest of conflicts can become enthralling in writing or onscreen. It’s more to say that in real life, there are little simmering tensions and passive-aggressions, whereas movies use big, dramatic confrontations where all the emotions come out at once. Characters are dramatically brought together with grand romantic gestures and first kisses in the rain. They’re brought apart by cataclysmic shouting matches.

And sure, maybe I’m only describing the most melodramatic, cliché devices, but still, even the best stories have to fabricate big confrontations out of necessity. It’s just how things are; no one wants to see a romance movie where two best friends have feelings for each other but literally never act on them, instead just secretly pining away for each other, being jealous of each other’s partners, and slowly accepting that they’re never going to do anything about it out of fear that it’ll ruin the friendship. (I guess you could point to the general critical success of “Drinking Buddies” to prove me wrong, and good point, although I found the ending of that movie lacking for this precise reason: there’s no catharsis, and it doesn’t act on that building up of sexual tension.)

Good stories make a promise to the audience at the beginning—“this is going to blow up eventually”—and fulfill those promises. Aside from radical stories that purposely set out to subvert expectations, stories don’t tend to be set on ‘simmer’ the entire time. There has to be change.

I was thinking about this because of various times in my life when a confrontation seemed inevitable. To improve a certain friendship, I could’ve called out a friend for something shitty they did. To move past an object of my infatuation, I could’ve told her my feelings and accepted the result, whichever way it went. But so many times in my life, I’ve eschewed those big confrontations. Sometimes it probably would’ve been healthier to have those confrontations—but movies paint them as happening so much more often than they actually do. And honestly, sometimes I’m glad I didn’t confront somebody about something. Confrontation isn’t inherently the right choice. As unpleasant as it sounds, sometimes burying your feelings and letting them shrivel away can be the right choice. Especially as you get older and it becomes necessary to be a little fake once in a while.

Here is part 2 of the list of books that everyone should read. These were curated with the help of friends, so some of these, I haven’t read, but do intend to.

1. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou
   • This deeply personal novel follows the struggles of abandonment and sexual assault. It conveys the extreme struggles that a person can overcome, even when forced to deal with them at a young age. This novel also sheds light on societal issues, such as racism, that we should be actively learning more about. It is a strongly affecting novel that leaves the reader a different person after completing it. This slot also stands for other Maya Angelou works, such as her poetry or Letter to My Daughter.
2. Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
   • This novel constructs a narrative in which the protagonist stand on the wrong side until convinced his convictions are wrong, something that we all can learn from. Taking pages from both Nineteen Eighty-Four and Brave New World, we are introduced to a dystopia were comforts rules all, but a tyrranical government enforces the comfort. From this, we can learn what it means to change and how censorship can influence us all.
3. God of Small Things by Arhundati Roy
   • In this piece, we follow the lives and relationships of a single family as they struggle to grow into new people. This is the only novel by Arhundati Roy, but its universal themes catapulted her into literary history. Throughout the novel, we are wretched back and forth from present to past as we learn that family is the strongest influencer we have and how the past does truly affect who we are as people.
4. One Hundred of Solitude
   • This novel is based in a genre that is potentially alienating to most american audiences, magical realism. It follows the rise and fall of a single town. It has a great protrayal of love and how it can be corrupted. It also uses the cyclical nature of history to show us how mistakes can be repeated and how they can affect us. In addition, we can all learn from its use of literary devices and its amazing word play.
5. The Giver Lois Lowry
   • Seeing a theme with this list, this is yet another coming-of-age story. Also this is another one within the dystopia genre. We follow the protagonist as he comes to slowly learn that his society is not what is was always presented to him as. From this novel, we can learn that it can be beneficial to question our society and the rules that are set in place. We can grow and change and leave behind the places in the world that hold us back.

The world has become a scary place. Now, I do not know if the world recently underwent a major transformation that turned it from the safe bubble of general contentment that I knew as a child or if things have actually gotten worse, but I have never been so scared of listening to the news. I love politics, not the political nonsense and gridlock that has become synonymous with American democracy, but the intrigue of elections and the psychology of why people believe what they do. I enjoy being informed, reminding myself that the world is bigger than Ann Arbor, Michigan and that the United States is only a small part of collective whole. Yet, every time I turn on the news I am bombarded by story after story with a very clear message: terrorists, global warming, school shooters, Democrats, and Republicans are all coming to get you and there is nothing you or anyone else can do about it.

Being a worrier, I find myself thinking about everything that could go wrong all too often. I consider where I sit in the computer labs on campus and always know where my exits are, I am tricked by packaging that says “Natural” and “Organic” and I have found myself looking over my shoulder as I walk through a deserted parking lot after a long night in the lab at the slighted rustle of branches. Through all of the media hype, fear mongering and the concern that lingers in the back of my mind, there is one place where I have always felt that the trajectory of the world is not a downward spiral, and even if it is, that we can fix it.

There is something about the music school on North Campus which insulates it from the rest of the world. Perhaps it is that it is on North Campus – an entire bus ride away from classes graded on a curve – or that it is small enough that every music student at least vaguely recognizes another, or maybe it is the music itself. The idea that while music is performed in every language imaginable, at it’s core music is universal and greater than it’s sum of parts. The notion that a performance can provide a respite from a world on the brink of disaster, and the knowledge that performance has served that same purpose for the past 1,000 years.

There are days when the media gets to me, days when the stress of an upcoming exam is overpowered by the unpredictability of a world that I cannot control. Those are the days when I feel blessed to have found a home on North Campus because there is something about the pond sort of shaped like a piano, and a building that is supposed to look like piano keys that blocks out the uncertainty, gently reminding me that as long as we have music we can survive another 1,000 years on the brink of disaster.