Are you a hardcore 'gamer' or create music for 'puter games?

Aloha guys,

This question/topic came up in a topic in another forum.

Wondering how many Cubase (DAW) users actually consider themselves
hardcore ‘gamers’ or create music for computer games?

Does gaming; either creating them or playing them,
have much (if anything) to do with or have in common with
working a current modern DAW system?

I personally am not much of a ‘gamer’ and when I do play computer games
they are more along the lines of ‘Chess’ or ‘Myst’.
Slower moving more thought provoking ‘detective’ type games.

Thoughts? Real world experiences?
TIA (thanks in advance)
{‘-’}

I don’t play any computer games, but I think I should, just to hear the music people are writing.

I don’t consider myself a hardcore gamer (I rarely play online, for start), but I do like to occasionally play 4x games (Civ 5 and many space 4x games like Endless Space or Sins of a Solar Empire), flight simulators and generally simulators of something (SimCity etc.)

I have this wonderful rig in my studio with three large monitors and a pretty beefy GPU and I’ve got to use it for something other than just music software… :wink:

I’ve never written game music and generally I find it the most cliched of any type of soundtrack. With the usual rare exceptions, of course.

Haven’t played a game on computer for many years - but man I used to love the Myst series :slight_smile:

I could be considered a hardcore gamer, but I play competitively, which means I turn off all music :wink:.
(for who is interested, currently EU champion in Tribes Ascend Houseleague).

I have written music for a game once, that was a university project where we had to design and build our own game in java/JOGL in a group of 4. I took on the music of course, and wrote a dynamic piece which consisted of several layers that all played simultaneously, but the volume of each layer was dynamically controlled by the game, so the music could be intensified whenever the situation called for it. I talked to some game designers afterwards, and they were pretty impressed, they’d never done it that way. usually game designers just crossfade into a different track when they want to change the atmosphere.
The track is on my soundcloud, it’s not all that interesting musically but it fit the game well and was very interesting from the implementation perspective :wink:.

note that the actual fading in and out of the tracks sounded different than what you hear here, this is just the different loops that played at a fixed volume. The thunderous drums slowly coming in worked quite well when enemies approached :slight_smile:

I would consider myself a hardcore gamer.

I have dual monitors on my home PC (studio workstation) and a laptop on a docking station next to it. I can answer emails while galloping through the countryside playing Lord of the Rings Online all day long or do mindless quests while on conference calls and answering work-related IMs via Microsoft Communicator on my laptop.

:laughing:

All of that is while I’m in my PJs. Hahahaha

Lots of people actually do that butt naked. :laughing:

Wow much interesting post / topic!
I guess i would consider myself an ex hardcore gamer, i do still play on occasion, but i played more seriously a few years ago. Nowhere near the pro-leagues though. Many evenings have been spent in the deep dungeons of world of warcraft, in diablo II / III, i used to play a LOT of counterstrike, there’s starcraft II, and the list goes on :slight_smile:
I still have most of these games installed on the same laptop as i keep and use my DAWS.

As far as similarities go, both types of software make me wish i could buy a better computer, i think perhaps the most prominent similarity in the games i play and messing with a DAW is the neccessity in learning and using hotkeys in order to be effective. I suppose there are other similarities to games i don’t play, like attention to detail etc… I’ll let others weigh in on that…

No

Since my first Commodore VIC20 in 1983, I have never played a game on a computer. Playing Monoply with my kids was a chore…but it was my kids, so I smiled and played and, I never won :wink:

Commodore did have a “Christmas demo” that had a pretty classical piece playing, in 1980’ computer style music, that was fun to watch as it created a winter scene and then started snowing towards the end.

EDIT: found this after recalling a few things. http://www.howtogeek.com/99641/download-the-commodore-64-christmas-demo-from-1982/

OK, I’ve got to ask, what was the point of having a Commodore if you didn’t use it for games? It’s not like it could do much else… :mrgreen:

Did not the 64 take guys to the moon?
{‘-’}

Aloha D.

Thanks for that response.
That’s the type of info about which I was inquiring.

{‘-’}

Only if the Commodore people had a time machine… :wink:

That was an early prototype HP calculator. :wink:

I’m hopeless at games! :laughing:
The typical scenario is that every once in a while I try some free flash game for an hour or so and eventually I feel like I’m getting somewhere!!!
Then I look at my high score that has gone up considerably compared to when I started!
Let’s say I start my trial round with 500 points and after some practicing I’m up at 15000!!!
Beaming of self esteem I hit the button to publish my points at the top of the day score board and amaze the world. :sunglasses:

Then the cruel reality whacks me over the head with a skyscraper … the top of the day alredy entered is 32 768 145 . . .
. . .

:astonished:

:open_mouth:

:confused:

:frowning:

:cry:

Awww, wtf!!!

:mrgreen:

That’s stage 1 of gaming frustration. Stage 2 consists of playing a game for hundreds of hours against the AI, at settings that go from easy to very hard (usually over a couple of months.) Then deluding yourself that just because you beat the AI at max level, you are an actual champ. The reality check comes when you first go online and get your keister beaten to a pulp by an 8 year old kid… :laughing:

im a hardcore gamer I actually got to level 3 on sonic the hedgehog the other day and on the Snes nobody and I mean but nobody will ever be able to beat me at Mario carts on the ghost track , now you don’t get much more hardcore than that !!!

I used to play a fair amount of games, on various platforms. Some of the more memorable ones in terms of music: Metal Gear Solid (on PS2), and Tomb Raider 2 (PS). I don’t play much anymore, but once in awhile I buy a month’s worth of time and play WoW, which has some amazing orchestral music all done with samples