Hi,
My name is David.
When I was in early elementary school, I wasn't allowed to have a game system, which, of course, made my desire for one all the more extreme. In fourth grade I got a N64, and I enjoyed playing Mario 64 and Banjo-Kazooie. In Banjo-Kazooie, I was always touched by the soundtrack that faded instrumentation around to fit the environment. When I was in fifth grade, I got Ocarina of Time, and that changed my life. It's still my favorite game. Some like to ask the question "when will we see the Citizen Kane of video games." Well, we saw it back in 1998.
That same year, Half-Life came out. Unfortunately, I didn't play it until 2005. Needless to say, when I finally did play it, I was so totally stunned by the opening tram ride that my life was changed again. I played that opening, and I knew that I needed to dedicate my thinking to video games and interactivity.
Unfortunately, I didn't know how to program. So I gave up on any ambitions of actually designing games, but continued to play them very seriously, and very critically.
My freshman year of college, I was taking a film class that assigned a 25 page paper about a topic of our choosing, and to make some bold argument about it. Naturally, I was excited to try writing formally about games, so I put together a thesis basically arguing the old "video games are art." Most of the argument was built on the idea that the post-war avant-garde spent a considerable amount of time dealing with audience participation, interactivity, open-ended structures, etc. and that video games are the current cultural medium that continues to explore these ideas. Basically, I was saying John Cage is art; John Cage basically made video games without the video; therefore, video games are art. Whether or not this is a flawless argument, it worked for the paper and it works for me.
Anyway, it was the process of writing the paper that exposed me to the world of indie games. I'd google silly combinations like "games + art", and go wherever that took me. I found that there was a pretty big subculture of gamers/designers on the internet who drew inspiration from such arty big-budget titles like Ico, Katamari Damacy, Rez, etc. These were games I loved, so I started to search out the smaller games that these folks were making. This led me all over the place. Notably, here, Jason Rohrer's "Arthouse Games," and the Braid Blog. I started reading it all regularly, just to try to stay up to date with what was going on.
Strangely, the first indie game that really grabbed me in a profound way was Rod Humble's "The Marriage." Regardless of its narrative intent, I fell in love with the plain graphics, and abstract gameplay system. This was a set of rules that was new and interesting, and the fact that there were nothing but shapes to interact with made the rules all the more interesting for me, because that's all there was! I am still very fond of this game, and abstract interactive experiences in general.
Around the same time, I got my first Mac. Backtrack. When I was in middle and high school, I used the family PC to make music in FruityLoops. A friend showed it to me at school one day in 6th grade, and I was hooked from then on. This became my creative reason for existence. I also got Sonic Foundry's Acid, so that I could work with audio. I was very comfortable with these tools throughout high school. Unfortunately, my PC crashed my senior year, and I stopped working with computer music for a bit. But here comes the Mac, back into the picture, which I got before going off to college. I had heard they crashed less frequently, which sounded nice, and I got it. Too bad I couldn't run FruityLoops and Acid on it. So, again, I wasn't making music on the computer for a little while, and then I decided to try out GarageBand. I had felt almost embarrassed to use it before this point, since it was such an entry level piece of software, I couldn't consider it a serious tool. But I needed to, so I did.
I had never really changed tools before this point, so I had never seen the effect that they had on my process. When I started using Garageband, around the same time I played "The Marriage," there were things that I couldn't do that I used to be able to do with Acid+FL; likewise, there were things I could do now that I didn't used to be able to. Basically, I had discovered a whole new rule set to work with in creating music. What this rule set is doesn't really matter; what matters is that I began to see all of the software I worked with as a video game. Garageband was a video game. Facebook was a video game. Wikipedia was a video game. OSX was a video game. etc. etc. ad infinitum. I realized, partly because of "The Marriage," and partly because of my switched music tools, that I was not just interested in video games in the traditional sense, but in any interactive rule systems. Indeed, I considered anything that fit this description to be a video game, and that made me interact with all software in a way that I enjoyed much more that just thinking of it as a tool. I started a blog the end of my freshman year, and wrote something to this end, and then stopped. I had taken my ideas from when I played Half-Life to their logical conclusion, and had decided that most everything was a video game. hmmm.....
So here I am, a junior in college now, joining TIGSource for the first time. I've read it pretty consistently, but just now thought it a good time to join the forums. I've been to GDC the past 3 years working as a CA (volunteer). I know I met some of you this last week, and may have given you my "Music For Games 2" EP. If not, my website is
http://www.davidkanaga.com/ and you can download that and any of my other recent music there.
I write music all the time, and I'm also very passionate about games (especially experimental ones!
If any of you folks out there like what you hear, I would most likely love to write music for your game!
Sorry this rambled on for so long. I've never written a little personal history like this, so it was really quite therapeutic
Also, I don't know how I didn't mention my love of "Electroplankton." Somehow, it didn't fit into the already fractured flow of my narrative, so I thought I'd bring it up now. It, Half-Life, and Ocarina of Time form a sort of holy trinity of games for me. No more thoughts on that now, because I'm starting to bore even myself (I should have put some pictures in here!), but I think about it all the time.
I'm excited to meet everyone here! Hope you like my music
- David Kanaga
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