Column: Music or Game?

Illustration by Joshua Armitage

Sorry for the delay (been relocating to Washington DC) but here's my latest column for Dummy (click here to read), entitled 'Music or Game?' about musical games and game-like music, especially recent releases.

Music is always interactive, even when we just listen to it... Music is always a game, an adventure of the mind and the body and the wider cultural values they connect to.

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If underground music artists and fans are encountering games through Exo, underground games designers and fans, on the other side of the equation, have been making many more in-roads into music.

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Much like traditional music, the game [Proteus] has no particular goal other than the appreciation and exploration of the space it sets up, but to someone like me, who of late has been experiencing music by listening to gigs, records, CDs and mp3s almost exclusively, this fresh type of musical encounter, requiring a little imagination as it also does, felt quite enlightening. Now I can say that one of my most intriguing musical experiences of the year has been chasing a frog up a mountain.