James Cavin Writes

For my birthday, my brother gave me a MIDI keyboard controller... and a head cold. …The world is not prepared for the sheer volume of hallucinogenic-rock-organ-synth-space-electronic currently barreling towards it. To get into the right mind space, I've been consuming a steady diet of cough syrup, 9 Inch Nails, and the GameCube soundtrack to Metroid Prime (supplemented with hourly naps and the occasional foray into Vangelis and/or ambient sound scapes from Thief: The Dark Project. Oh, and Conan the Barbarian.) It's been an interesting time. For the longest time I thought of music as a kind of alien, magical world that belonged to other people – I could enjoy the things that came out of it, but to venture into it myself was totally impossible. This might still be the case, but I've got enough cough syrup and overdrive buttons to not notice. Seriously, you can hook an amp up to anything in here. Oboes, clarinets, saxophones, NOT...

Bam! Pow! Zap! Other sounds of beeping and blooping digital destruction! From Spacewar! all the way back in 1962 up to the present day, an overwhelming number of videogames are devoted to (or heavily feature) violent combat of some kind. It's something for which modern social critics and game designers often feel a kind of shame. “Surely, this is what's holding us back from true respectability as a grown-up medium,” we whisper in the shadowed booths of hookah lounges and bratwurst bars*, "This must be what makes us not quite as good as movies. Why are we so devoted to violence?” *Or wherever we hipsters nest these days. It’s easy to write this off with a simple "because teenage boys are the primary demographic, and teenage boys are awful." However, I think there’s a little bit more going on under the hood here. A quick aside: What do we mean when we say “game”? For our purposes, I'm go...