Interview with David Kanaga
David Kanaga is a composer and game developer of games such as Proteus and Oikospiel.
This is part of the interview series for my Handmade Pixels book.
The interview was conducted on September 19th, 2017.
| Jesper: | How do you describe your role? Are you a composer, or? |
| David: | Yes, I’ll stick with that more and more, since it’s an easy answer. |
| Jesper: | What kind of composer are you? |
| David: | If someone asks, I'll say "I write music for video games." If they’re interested in more detail I might say, "I do interactive music designs, and it's really more about designing the space and how the musical interactions work, than just composing the tunes, though I do that too." And then if they’re still interested I might say, "I'm interested in the general structure of how the interactions woven into a tapestry are sequenced, one after another, composing a sort of melodic line of shifting interactions..." |
| Jesper: | What do you make? The things you make, what would you call them? |
| David: | This last thing that I did, Oikospiel Book I, I called a dog opera. It’s a playful way of setting the preconceptions of the project, because if I say I’m making musical video games, people think it’s like Guitar Hero. If I'm talking to someone that has a musical interest, using opera as an inlet is weirdly an intuitive way of describing it, because it points to the relation of music to text and image, if not, in my case, interaction, or play (which “dog” points to). Even for folks without the music interest, the name relates to the sprawling texture of space opera, which is itself a name derived from horse opera (part of the mammal opera superset which dog opera is also a part of). |
| Jesper: | You didn't say you were making games, just now? |
| David: | Oh, I'll say that, absolutely. I do say that I work with video game music all the time. Particularly a few years ago, the “game” word interested me a lot. When there were all of these formalist and anti-formalist arguments, that excited me, because I wanted the word “game” to mean anything that is playable and interactive. Regarding computer games (which I like as a concept better than “video games”), I settled on a formal atom from Alan Turing’s famous computation paper, where he draws a distinction between automatic a-machines (which are what have since been wrongly universalized as THE Turing Machine), and “choice” c-machines, which don’t move forward until an external operator has supplied a decision. And while I hardly think that computer games are all about conscious choices, I do think that Turing identified the atom of computer interaction-affordance which should ground at least one aspect of the formal project, the free play of the game. In any case, I had more of a polemical stance then. |
| Jesper: | You wanted to expand the word? |
| David: | Sure, in a way. Though also more modestly just to de-Anglicize the concept. In a number of non-English languages, the words for game and play are identical, or at least much more explicitly related to one-another, which makes a lot of sense to me. |
| Jesper: | A lot of your work certainly challenges some of the expectations we might have for things called “games.” But you also distribute your work in game channels. You put things on Steam or Itch.io and you send things into game festivals. What does “game” mean for you? Is it important for you that your work is considered a game? What's in it for you? |
| David: | Well, having just mentioned all that formalist stuff above about Turing, and preferring ‘computer games’ as the broad term... I think that the work I do really isn’t so radical as to press up against the outer boundaries of that form, and my work is obviously categorizable as a game, and even as a video game more than any other sort. I’d guess that many people who haven’t been schooled in game culture dogmas would look at it and they'd say, "Oh yeah. That's definitely a video game." It’s video because it's on a screen, it has a significant video component. And it’s a game because people are actively playing it with a controller, the definitive way of experiencing it is to play it, as a first person experience, as an experience of touch, etc. |
| Jesper: | You did the music for Proteus. That was challenged by some people as being not a game? |
| David: | That’s right. That was an exciting time, because Proteus got wedged into all the highly-charged pseudo-formal discourse, and Ed [Key] and I thought that it obviously belonged as a game. The argumentative energy around all of that has dissipated since then, or maybe gone into hiding/coagulated in the more aggressive-bigoted gamergate-adjacent battlefield, but I really did like the formal debate, and remain committed to the idea that a game is just about some thing’s affordances for interaction, and if you're playing it, then it's a game. At least, I’d say this is the case ecologically speaking (whereas economical approaches are the ones which privilege rules). It's a very broad definition, but I thought that that was more relevant to the materiality we have available when we work with video games. I thought that definition was more helpful in terms of not blocking off the play of the imagination. |
| Jesper: | Also, Proteus is much more game-like than people give it credit for, or than it was advertised, because you definitely can complete it by going through all the seasons. I was surprised when that happened, because I was expecting something less game-like and less completable? |
| David: | Yes, it definitely has that progressive element to it, and you could economically think of there being a goal, reaching the end. But I like to think of that as a kind of more neutral phase shift instead, like water, which can be ice, liquid, steam. Proteus can go through the seasons and return to the menu screen. This is almost like insisting on thinking of it as a toy, though. I think there's something to the distinction between game and toy, where toys have affordances while games have rules. I’d call toys ecological games according to this conceptual schema. But what are commonly called toys are usually simpler, single-phased, than the forms I’m interested in - which brings to mind another phrase I’ve liked to use, “operatic toys.” To suggest toys that shift, at small, medium, and long time scales, having the kind of multi-temporal textures of a developmental piece of music. |
| Jesper: | Are such toys more expressive? |
| David: | Yeah, I think they're more expressive, maybe both for their author and player. If people were saying, "I'm writing a book about toys and how all books are toys," then I'd say, "Okay, oh that sounds interesting." But if it's toys and we're talking about yo-yos and cars, I would be much more interested in a theory of toys that was from yo-yos to the Bible. Books are operatic toys, ecological games with a rich time dimension. |
| Jesper: | Do you see yourself as part of a community? A game community or a game developer community or a game culture? |
| David: | Absolutely a culture and different communities at different times. Though maybe it’s really like a small society more than a community per se, the game developer world; it’s a bunch of interlinked communities. And then I'm kind of introverted, so I typically spend more time one-on-one with friends and collaborators, and little floating micro-communities. I think this game world that comes together at various festivals is like a traveling state. In some ways the the gravity of the conference world is more of a state than a community or a society, because it’s so formally organized by the “citizenship” and rhythm of the conference. It’s kind of a non-national state, a little ‘pop-up’ state, like Starbucks’ pseudo-state sprinkled around the world. |
| Jesper: | Will you ever say that you're an indie game developer? Does that word mean anything to you now? |
| David: | That word doesn't mean a whole lot to me. I'll certainly say that to people if I tell them I do video game music or I make games and they say, "Oh, have you worked on anything that I may know?" And I say, "Well, do you follow indie games at all?" And if they say yes then I say, "Well, maybe." And if they say no I say, " Probably not." It's definitely a useful hook for some people but I don't think that word is evocative for me. |
| Jesper: | Are your games indie games? What's a prototypical indie game for you? |
| David: | That's the thing. Indie Game: The Movie canonized that word in a big way. People talk about triple-A indies. The movie had Braid, Super Meat Boy, Fez. This was around the financial crash, and paints a dream of Entrepreneurialism, so that context seems relevant. Braid came out then, and Meat Boy too. It was a time when it was still an offshoot of the Silicon Valley sort of railroad tycoon energy. I think indie has come to have more industrial overtones to it. When I did Oikospiel I wanted to sort of play off this triple-A indie idea. |
| Jesper: | Triple-I? |
| David: | I've heard people say triple-B too. Indie is a whole society of many different things going on. But amongst other things, Indie Game: The Movie did kind of give it this big-stakes big-success feeling. |
| Jesper: | And I guess it also froze in time. There's a documentation of one idea of indie that we now can go back to? |
| David: | I imagine it alludes to indie music and indie film, neither of which are particularly helpful concepts to me, and also evoke a certain period of time, which feel like 1990s indie film or early 2000s indie music. |
| Jesper: | Some argue that independent cinema started just after World War II with the breakup of the studio system, so it's highly contentious. But I wanted to ask you about Oikospiel, because I found it interesting as a lot of your own other work has been abstract or experiential or musically experiential. But in Oikospiel there's an explicit theme about worker's rights. As far I can tell, it's your most openly political work, but it's also the most surreal one I've tried. How does that play together? The political aspect and surrealism. Do they support each other, are they at odds? |
| David: | It was such an intuitive piece to work on, and it was so strange that I was working on that while Brexit happened, Donald Trump happened, and there were these surreal politics that were just ripping their way into the world when I was finishing working on it. Surrealism of course means “above” realism - it doesn’t dispense with the real, rather it sits grounded on the real, and articulates this ‘outside’, which might be the more freely associative realm in which our unconscious dwells or whatever. It’s also the realm of ideas, which form the intentions and goals we move toward. It’s only a naive realism which isn’t able to incorporate the surreal as a part of its fabric. Of course, the original era of surrealism, between the world wars, was a haunting period of history. I don’t know if there may be some kind of demonic spirit lurking whenever the surreal becomes an insistently legitimate and necessary category of a realism. When I first had the ideas for Oikospiel, it was very much political ideas that energized the work. I wanted to make something that resonated with my values, that was propagandistic, pro-Worker, pro-Earth, etc. This really pumped up my energy. But then once I got to work, I was sort of inwardly forced to reckon with something that seems true to me, that art in general is not about propagandizing. It's about putting ideas or materials into play with one another, with all the uncertainty that play entails, which can certainly have political resonances, and can pose questions, but which shouldn’t be definitively answered in the way a piece of propaganda does. But I did have these ideas that were very explicitly about workers' rights, global warming, and their relation. |
| Jesper: | And the Koch Brothers? |
| David: | Yes, and the Koch Brothers. When I got down to working on it, I was using the [Unity] Asset Store, playing the role of a happy capitalist, thinking, "Oh, I need a new scene, so I'm just going to go buy it. And I want more stuff in." And it was all just piling on, excess on excess. I could be inspired by some word, some symbol, and then I could go buy it. It’s like a non-verbal library of signs, the asset store, very powerful. And creates a kind of “cost” of a text, which is very interesting.. I found myself being a kind no-borders AnCap Koch brother, with an insatiable appetite for cheap labor (assets), and gleefully generating so much CPU heat, the computer as a microcosm of the Earth. But also working very hard, and resentful of some of the tasks I set myself. I found myself trying to occupy both roles, playing both Capital and Labor. I was financing my time with royalties that I'd made from past work, mostly Proteus, and then I was working hard and long on it, and trying to be aware of occupying both those roles. It was weird, almost like method acting. I think part of the the surrealism just came out of the necessities that I was working on. If I wanted to get a town, I got a particular town on the Unity Asset Store with a different art style than the other objects, so there's always incongruous sorts of levels of fidelity, of style, which feels like a jagged mesh of worlds interpenetrating one another. |
| Jesper: | Is there wordplay involved in your searches? I was reading a quote where you talked about, "The image becomes a word, becomes a commodity." |
| David: | Yes. I was fascinated by language in all of this. Oikos is the Greek root of eco in economy and ecology, so there was a whole pun network that grew from that, and then opera means “works” in the plural, so that was the workers - “operaism” is also an Italian workers movement. What I was talking about in that quote is that almost like writing an engine for poetry, I would create like a cluster of words, just like signifiers that I wanted to put together into an image. I would literally just be able to type those words into the Asset Store or the TurboSquid search and then buy the words [assets]. It would start with a signifying idea. It would first be a dream image maybe, not necessarily words. And then I say, "Oh, that has a word," like house, flood, storm. And then I would search for those things. A storm has clouds, has rain. I’d buy some rain. That costs $15. There are the clouds that cost another $5. The city cost $30. |
| Jesper: | There is one thing I found interesting about your process: If you go to IndieCade and to perhaps a lesser extent IGF, there's a lot of focus on games as personal, made by a small team being creative and being able to express an artistic vision and so on. So there's an emphasis on a romantic idea of the artist. When I read about your process with Oikospiel, it sounds like an anti-romantic strategy where you try to depersonalize the act of creation. Because it's a system that's doing the work and you're toning down your personal voice. Do you feel it like that? Or is that an off-beat interpretation of it? |
| David: | I think that's a fine interpretation. There were both strong tendencies towards and away from personalization. Just the fact that I was dealing with music, which is my home base, that creates a really emotionally-charged kind of environment for me, that created all of these personal emotions. And then that I would be trying to integrate some of my economic stresses and overwork stresses, which contributed some personal themes. But yes, grounding the project on the House, the oikos - our shared Household, the Earth - is explicitly impersonal, our collective project. And then moving up from this ground, I really enjoy trying to find an impersonal network of concepts or of associations that doesn't feel like it's purely idiosyncratic, which feels almost objective, growing out of the ground. When I was doing this stuff with the Oikos and the eco and then those plug into opera, it turned into something that may read as a very idiosyncratic web. But as I put it together piecemeal it feels very automatic, like I’m tracing the outline of an already existing form: opera means work, so of course we're dealing not only with musical opera, but also with workers' rights (which also resonates with the Econ of Eco). And of course, not only with that, but with energy science because work is the unit of energy transfer. And then not only with that, but of course we're also dealing with heat, because heat is the dispersed form of work that's all wiggly. Step-by-step it feels very impersonal and rational, but then it creates this monstrous web that once you zoom out from it, it appears like an idiosyncratic personal thing. |
| Jesper: | I am wondering about the use of labels. What is the strategic point in saying that something is a game? What expectations does this feed the viewer? But it also applies to the word opera – when you call your game an opera, that suggests a certain structure. And you're going to have a libretto to go with it. But it's just not what you usually consider a libretto. To a lot of people, I would think opera signals something stuffy and highbrow, but yours is crazy and wild. What does it mean to call this work opera? |
| David: | That word was the most inspiring thing. Most significantly, the fact that it means works in the plural - as opposed to opus, which means a singular work - inspired the freely differentiating wilderness of plural game forms I settled into. I was working on the idea from at least around Proteus onward that anything using interactive materiality can be considered a game. And then once I had these tools, which Fernando Ramallo had made for me, which allowed me to stitch it all together without using code, I decided, I want to allow that any possible form that I'm able to make can have a home in this game. No borders. If I were a skilled programmer I would also allow for the game to have all kinds of everyday utilities - spreadsheets and financial trading software, and it would have a word processor and an airline flight reservation machine, an OS kernel, whatever. Speaking of, there’s also the Opera --> operating system pun. And the model of the OS as the form of idiomatic computational opera. So I also thought of myself as working on an OS. But a wilderness OS rather than the typically bureaucratic model. The OS welcomes home anything that interactive software is capable of. Again, the Turing c-machine is the only law. I want to see how far I can pull my available materials in many different directions using the tools I have, to convey that idea of plurality that's implicit in opera as opposed to opus. So that was one thing. And then there is just the fact that it’s scored with a non-stop barrage of through-composed music, operatic pastiche, and it just felt like a proper opera to me in that I had all these disparate fragments that I brought together, governed ultimately by the spirit of music. What brought them together was an intuitive musical work that creates a surreal narrative and game experience, but for me felt smoothly woven musically. |
| Jesper: | That makes sense. But about opera: remember when people were making rock operas? |
| David: | Sure. |
| Jesper: | One of the reasons they used the word opera was to signal, "I'm so educated and there's an overture and everything." It's a way of signaling inclusion into an imagined pantheon of high culture. And I can't figure out for Oikospiel if that comes out as ironic or serious. |
| David: | That's cool, I'm glad. I'm obsessed with that kind of effect. |
| Jesper: | Good. |
| David: | It definitely feels like both to me too. I might be working and there's some absurd thing I got from the Asset Store, and I put it in and it's just full of ironic feeling. But then I get used to it and then it becomes serious. Or maybe vice-versa. It's both of those things. I read Don Quixote while I was working on the game, which is a spectacularly playful book, and it feels like it’s bouncing between ironic and serious all the time. Or I don't even know if it's between ironic and serious, it's really more like it's both simultaneously. Oikospiel is poking fun at opera because it's so crass in certain ways. It's all these cheap materials stuffed together, but I was also trying to take it quite seriously, and I learned to really appreciate opera too. Opera, traditionally for me, in all of its bombast, felt weird and alien, but I started to really appreciate it, at least some of it. That was something that I wanted to respect in the game too, poking fun at opera, but also trying to create a similar emotional and mental state to what I got from experiencing the operas that I was interested in, which are all strange too. The genre itself is strange and wonderful. |
| Jesper: | Are these newer operas? |
| David: | Mostly older. I love Monteverdi operas, and this is why Orfeo has an homage in Oikospiel, aside from the obvious Orpheus connection. Those are some of my favorite pieces of music ever, the writing feels so closely grounded to non-operatic music, very richly, emotionally felt music, with fantastic pre-baroque polyphony, the independence of melodic lines and its rich social feeling. The madrigal tradition, etc.. There’s a book, “Singing games in Early Modern Italy” which gives an interesting ludic perspective on that time & place too. While Oikospiel was an opera, it also looked like what people call fake games or asset spinners: derogatory term for games that use things from the Asset Store and then repackage them. I wanted to be close to this rich pathos, and also to this cheap stuff that some people think looks so cheap that all it deserves is disparagement. By the end of working on it I felt, "This definitely looks like a triple-A game." And then it's also a dog opera, like horse opera was an old western genre and space operas like Star Wars. |
| Jesper: | Concerning another label, when you make generative music, you don't call it generative music, but interactive music? |
| David: | I don't know what best to call it, because I think generative music is typically more concerned with a single algorithm and what emerges from that one algorithm. Interactive music is more about interaction the whole time, where Oikospiel has non-interactive passages too, and is more algorithmically diverse. |
| Jesper: | Do you see yourself a part of a history of, say, generative music. I think you mentioned John Zorn at one point. Do you see yourself as part of that tradition? |
| David: | John Zorn's Cobra game is really inspiring, I love it. I played that with friends in college. Also Xenakis, he writes about game theory and music, though I think of his ‘game’ approach as more explicitly economistic. Zorn’s Cobra is a legitimately delightful game that I think anyone, even non-musician, might enjoy playing. It's for any kind of noisemaker. It has a fun set of mechanics that allow for rapid flux in a group of players. And he has another couple dozen game pieces too. That's the only one that I was able to find the rules for. I was certainly inspired by that stuff, but I think the work that I do has more computer game genes in it, so to speak, more c-machine. Something like George Lewis’ fantastic interactive-improvisation software work, like Voyager, is maybe more closely related. But I’d love to see a software anthology of all of this late 20th century music, to help demonstrate its play-aspect to a broader audience who may think of it as primarily meant for listening. I like to imagine big epic triple-A game productions that instead of being military shooters are just bizarre assemblages of forms learned from this whole tradition of 20th century history of interactive and computer arts massaged together into a kind of Balzacian history of the second half of the 20th century, as lived on the machine. I think an algorithmically-reduced Cobra is part of that fabric, too. |
| Jesper: | I think a rich patron is needed for that. |
| David: | Probably so, or maybe just a rich enough asset store. |
| Jesper: | Many high profile indie games have a fairly recognizable visual style, often about imitating other styles. Often you have a modern computer that imitates pixel art or imitates paper or imitates painting or imitates crayons. Do you think there is an parallel indie musical style? Do you see yourself as embodying an alternative musical style to mainstream or traditional video game music? |
| David: | Maybe, I enjoy the freedom of being able to pretty much do anything stylistically, to do what feels right. But I guess I don't think about how I'm situated culturally a whole lot, except in Oikospiel I liked the idea of doing orchestral music because that's a big selling point in triple-A games. It's fun to do stranger work with the orchestra than other games are doing. The orchestra meaning my keyboard. |
| Jesper: | That’s funny because Braid had violin music. You could make the case that that game is a little too literal in its ambition, because it has violins and painting. And I think the music I've heard from you is more out there, a little more modern, and more eclectic. |
| David: | Oikospiel also has violins and painting. Of course, I do try to apply a lot of similar ideas we’ve discussed with the game’s symbolic forms to working with music. Even just the idea when you said, "I don't know if this is serious or ironic." If there's something that sounds weird and funny in a way that would almost feel like, "Oh, we should get rid of that." If something feels corny I think that, "Okay, maybe we can amplify the corniness so it's both funnier and more melodramatic." It’s a constant back and forth. |
| Jesper: | Video game music tends to be very, "Here's a set of chords and here's a melody that's on top of it that's not too prominent, otherwise you would go crazy from it." And your music is a bit more free floating and broken up into bits. |
| David: | Absolutely. Even just from the requirements of putting together interactive music, it's all modular, so I exported all into little bits and Oikospiel probably had around 800 sounds, and they get recombined in different ways. I love doing that because I think my dream is always that with musical changes that reflect changes in play too, not only are you playing but there's a sense that the music itself has a playful, natural spirit to it. |
| Jesper: | Thanks a lot, David. |
| David: | Thank you.
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