By the examples given, Google is an instrument, a comparison with which I agree.

Someone above almost hints at my initial response to the concept — shouldn’t we be instrument-makers? To me, especially in the online context, the game environment is an instrument with which other people should be able to create their own stories. My barometer for the success of an online world is whether, and how many, people are inspired to create their own stories with the material. This is one of the ways in which game worlds — or worlds of any kind, for fiction, visual art, music (there are world-creators in all art forms — Hemingway’s Spain, for instance, is not my Spain or your Spain) — elevate above the existence of a single piece of art. Games are, or can be, especially apt at creating worlds because they necessarily simulate across four or more dimensions of our perception of reality.

But I think a lot of this is noise in the wake of MJ, too, and it isn’t terribly useful to speak specifically about him yet. I think he is both drastically overhyped and drastically underappreciated, paradoxically — to the poster above, there are a number of MJ tunes I can hum, but they are not the ones most people are aware of (“You Are Not Alone” comes to mind — and “I’ll Be There” has been covered numerous times, if you’d count that) — these simpler songs of his are buried beneath the juggernaut of his incredible performances. The problem is precisely that he was such a fantastic performer that he could pull off in performance something that is utterly mediocre — but that doesn’t mean his stuff IS inherently mediocre. It’s also surprisingly complex (lots of key changes, big range), which means it’s difficult to perform, and not everyone can do it. But I just got done watching the repeat of the Michael Jackson “night” from American Idol, rerun last night (a high school acquaintance of mine was the 2nd place guy, so I’ll sit through rubbish to watch him perform), and it’s a strong illustration of his musical legacy, and what can and doesn’t work in repeat performances. (David Cook’s performance of “Billy Jean”, if I dare bring up another AI performance, is a stunner, and gets to the heart of that song very well while being nothing at all like MJ’s performance of it.) It will take a long time for these alternate interpretations of his music to move out from under the shadow of his stage presence.

But, to close off this already too long-winded post, it’s an interesting question, and certainly much of the mainstream industry, like any popular art business, has a “music production” element to it — the honed capturing of an easy and moving moment without requiring the work the performer took to get there — but games themselves, when explored for the essence of what a ‘game’ is, express through active simulation a distillation of pure experience, and this itself is what music does in its way, so I don’t think it can be confined to being either music production OR songwriting, though both are involved in the creation of excellent examples of the craft.

We’ve all got a bag of orchestral tricks, production tricks, etc., and they are vital to making a hit dance number, but the guys in Nashville have it right because they force you to sit and play it on the guitar with a dry vocal. If that works, then it is a good song.

Where I think Raph is going here and it’s been said many times before, there is a difference in a good song and a hit. The trick is to become a ‘standard’, a classic, to last past the summer cycle and become a permanent fixture in The Real Book (a famous compendium of jazz standards), the song has to be both. And possibly with the exception of Billy Jean, that is where MJ doesn’t make the grade in my opinion.

And then there are titles like Metaplace, Second Life, City of Heroes Mission Architect and Spore Galatic Adventures, where they give you a piano and a stack of blank staff paper and say, “okay, hot shot, show us what you can do”. I like that

Michael Jackson’s work reminds me of any number of titles with excellent production values, visually stunning, executed with a slick dazzling brilliance, and it’s only when you start playing that you realize that they skimped on the writing, and the story behind all the flash is a little threadbare and shallow.

The math behind games and music quantify according to different principles but in an abstract sense they share the relationship to the players of both games and music. Since the borders of where the term “game” ends is diffuse we can also consider games to contain large structures, kind of as equivalents to pipe organs where each pipe may be considered as an instrument of sorts and the keyboard is some kind of master instrument.

How music production relates to game production is a lot easier. Both are about making sure that the people who are working on the product are competent and performing their best as domain experts. Game design is one of the domains in a game production, one which has a lot of influence over every other domain. To “prove the point” so to speak I present this plastica production: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fdgUCZtqTd8

Since the format of games, in comparison to music, is rather non-standard there is a lack of the metaphorical musician to play on the instruments. The designer needs to scores for his own instrument to fill that lack. Where standards have emerged the designer appears to separate from the “musician” and for these cases the metaphorical musicians become what we are familiar with as “level designers”, “weapon designers”, “quest designers” etc.

This leave the songwriter somewhere along the roadside. The songwriters role fits with several slots in the game production puzzle, which commonly is a lot larger than the music production puzzle.

I think (if you read my recent bit about Jackson) his success was almost entirely in the production. I didn’t want to understate how important Jackson was in my little ‘homage’ though, but really it was Quincy Jones that nailed Jackson’s career.

And that’s why I love, above all other types, orchestral music; complex salad. There is a space for simple music, simple games, but I think there’s much more for the player (listener!) to TASTE in a complex arrangement of ingredients!

It’s like Jackson was a beautifully rich soil that simply needed the right person to plant the right seeds.

Anyway, it’s 4am and I’m rambling. RIP, Michael!

Still, studio-based or not, he did have that knack.

(Which isn’t to say Blizzard doesn’t innovate.)

“The goal is not (necessarily) to create great songs, but to create hits.”

This is different than much of the game industry?

For example, Tetris, when it first came out, felt to me like an entirely new instrument or musical style being invented. Like when I first heard rap and hip-hop… yeah, there was music (graphics) and words (controls), but they were used in such a novel way.

On the other hand, I love Desktop Tower Defense… but it feels like a great cover of an old favorite. Nothing really new there… just executed really well.

I’d also caution away from the musical analogy too closely, as the pop music industry (at least in the US) has been governed more by marketing laws than artistic ones for the last 50 years or so. The goal is not (necessarily) to create great songs, but to create hits. Go back and look at the charts [http://www.popculturemadness.com/Music/ is a great resource for that] and see how many of the top 25 songs from 1950 you recognize. “Cry of the Wild Goose” by Frankie Laine? “Rag Mop” by the Ames Brothers? Lordy.

I agree with some of the other comments here; I don’t think MJ was a great songwriter. I’m not even sure he was a great musician. He was a fantastic performer and marketer. He broke some important color barriers, had a great voice, could dance like nobody’s business, and was (arguably) the first true star of the music video format. Nothing wrong with any of that… but Jonathan Coulton (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v4Wy7gRGgeA) has written 10x as many good songs as MJ.

If MJ was a game, I think he’d be Everquest. A big deal, yes. Very shiny. Very pretty. Very fun. Not a ton of substance, and along comes WoW… and…

That would be an interesting survey, Raph… “What video game best embodies Michael Jackson?”

On the other hand, there are patient professionals who still write out the complete score, hire the performers and drive it all straight to two studio mics stereo. These are the cats that make a mindblowing shakie.