Introduction to Me
Who am I? What am I doing here?? What's going on???
Hey!
I got the idea from a friend to start this blog. My goal: practice my writing. My plan: write a bunch of stuff. My hope: have fun.
I’m a musicologist—that’s fake Greek for someone who likes to think and write about music. A lot of people think that means I write music. Sometimes I try doing that, and I do arrange music. But no, I write—and read a lot—about music. I love music history in general, but I’m super interested in the phenomenology of music (fake Greek for the study of how music is experienced). Even more specifically, I love thinking about the experience of play and playfulness with music. Whenever you talk about a musician performing, you generally say they’re playing music in the exact construction that you would use to say “LeBron James plays basketball.” In the same way that I love playing Baldur’s Gate 3—even if my MacBook can barely manage to put two pixels together—I also love playing Weber’s bassoon concerto. That act of playing is what really draws me to music and to being a musicologist. And since I primarily talk about music within video games, I’m also a ludomusicologist! That’s super fake Greek for a video game dweeb who likes to think and write about music. That also means I get to say wild things like, “Wow, I think that’s really ludomusicologically and phenomenologically significant! At least to me and me only in this exact moment.”
And I don’t just think and write about video games, I play them too! I always have! Some of my earliest memories of video games were with 2005’s greatest hit: Jakks Pacific’s official Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith Plug-and-Play with five epic games built in. If you didn’t know Darth Vader was a featured player in Revenge of the Sith, the controller made sure you knew:
I was three years old when my parents made the sound investment of purchasing this incredible controller for my sisters and me. The arcade era of video games was slowly dying out, but this Plug-and-Play let you pipe the joy of five arcade-like Star Wars games into your very own CRT TV. One of those games, “Droid Invasion,” stole most of my attention. I could have been playing the rogue-like “Grievous Onslaught” in which Anakin Skywalker battles Super Battle Droids and Magna Guards on his search for the imprisoned Chancellor Palpatine during the Battle of Coruscant or even the shoot-em-up, bullet-hell “Coruscant Attack” in which you fly Obi-Wan Kenobi and Anakin’s starfighters and take down Vulture Droids. “Droid Invasion” had my heart. In it, you play as an Episode III, Jedi Master Obi-Wan Kenobi. Is he on Utapau fighting General Grievous or duelling Anakin/Darth Vader on Mustafar like he did in Episode III? No. He’s actually back on Naboo fighting B1 Battle Droids in a battle he didn’t even take part in from Star Wars Episode I. But that’s fine because eventually you do get to go to Geonosis and Mustafar, and it just was really dumb fun to block laser blasts with Obi-Wan’s lightsaber for hours on end.
Is there music in any of these games? I mean, there are some crazy sound effects, but music? No. I don’t know how my parents put up with me playing these games for as long as I did. Maybe getting me off that mind-numbing game is why my dad pirated LEGO Star Wars II: The Original Trilogy (2006) on our PC. That game was vastly better, not just because there was actual thought behind the game design, but it was backed by John Williams’ masterwork music from the Star Wars saga.
I don’t just play Star Wars video games, though. Over the vast and very many 23 years of my life, I’ve developed a fondness for pretty much everything published by Nintendo, most especially the The Legend of Zelda and Super Mario series. It’s not Nintendo, but I’ve recently been playing a lot of Larian Studios’ Baldur’s Gate 3. The original Baldur’s Gate and Baldur’s Gate 2 are waiting for me in my Steam library. Maybe my MacBook will be able to handle those games a little better. You can probably look forward to me talking about playing as a bard in my first play-through of Baldur’s Gate 3. There’s so much music to be heard and performed in this and nearly every video game since you could bounce a square between two lines in Pong (1972).
If you like music, video games, and music in video games (or anything that I wrote above), maybe you’ll the stuff I write, too.
So… I’m going to try to post at least once a week on a topic that I either found interesting throughout the week or just something fun. I should probably post on a regular day each week. Let’s say Monday, since that’s today.
All the best,
Will
/Post note: I love this typeface!
Can’t wait!