Trigger Happy
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
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