Monthly Archives: October 2012

Choosing the Soundtrack for Civ 4

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Kyle Roderick, a master’s student in music at Texas Christian University, recently contacted me with some questions about the soundtrack to Civ 4. I am sharing my answers here for anyone else who might be curious about how it was created.

Q. Why was preexisting music chosen to underscore the game? Why not have a wholly original score?

By choosing preexisting music, we were able to include pieces of the highest quality which also gave a historical flavor for relatively low cost. Creating our own score would have been expensive, required a lot more work, and would likely be much shorter in time. (We had almost no practical limit on how many historical pieces we could include.) Most importantly, Civilization games are improved by real bits of history, even if incidental, such as relevant historical quotations, the names of great people, accurate wonder visuals, and so on. Music was one more tool for us. However, we did write music for certain key parts of the game, such as the classical age, which has no preserved musical pieces. Also, we did commission a piece from composer Christopher Tin (my college roommate, by the way) for the intro screen, which became “Baba Yetu” and actually won a Grammy award, the first ever for a video game!

Q: Why this music? How did you go about choosing the pieces which would underscore the various game periods?

I selected the music based on my own collection of classical music. I spent a few months listening through as many works as I could while listing ones which might work well. I then added them to the game to see how they matched the experience of playing Civ. I discovered that many of my top pieces worked poorly because they had too much dynamic range – a great climax might work well in a concert hall, but it can be a little disorientating as background music during a turn-based strategy game. Thus, much of the soundtrack is built from dance music (such as Brahm’s Hungarian and Dvorak’s Slavonic Dances) or middle movements of larger concertos or symphonies (such as the 2nd movement of Beethoven’s 5th Symphony). One climactic piece I did leave in, regardless of how it broke the mood, was the final movement of Bach’s Double Concerto simply because I love that piece so much.

Q: Much of the music which accompanies the Medieval game period is from the real-world Renaissance, and the Renaissance game period is underscored by Beethoven, Bach, and Mozart. Could you comment on these perceived discrepancies?

Unfortunately, the best pieces (and especially my personal knowledge of them) are not distributed evenly across history, so I had to fudge the dates a bit. Design is a series of trade-offs, and – in this case – sacrificing historical accuracy for the highest quality of music made sense. Giving Bach, Mozart, and Beethoven their own era meant they get plenty of time to shine while still leaving room for the great Romantic composers. I was also unsure of what to include from the actual Medieval period, so this shift strengthened the whole experience.

Q: The modern era is represented solely by American minimalist composer John Adams. Why only Adams, were other composers considered?

The repertoire from modern period is much more varied than that of any other era’s, which meant that finding a consistent style and tone would be difficult. Furthermore, the chaotic structure and casual dissonance of much of modern music would be a difficult match for the mainstream audience of Civ. John Adams is a singular composer from this era; even though he is as well-schooled in minimalism as Glass or Reich, he composes with the heart of a Romantic. His works have a certain movement and thrust to them which makes them a better fit for the less experienced ears of the average player. By using only Adams, I was able to maintain stylistic consistency for the era while also finding a palatable way to stay true to the stylistic innovations of the periods.

I would like add that I will always be grateful to whoever at 2K Games actually approved by request to include so much John Adams. The price was not low, and it was certainly an idiosyncratic choice. I was somewhat expecting them to balk at it, and I’m glad they supported me. (I have similar feelings for them approving the Velvet Underground’s “Rock and Roll” as the background piece for the Rock and Roll wonder; so many other cheaper (or more expensive) paths could have given that moment a very cliched tone.)

Q: Saint-Saëns and Rimsky-Korsakov together are an interesting case. They feature one track each in the Industrial game period, both selections from larger works: the “Allegretto con moto” from Saint-Saëns’s Cello Concerto in A minor, and “The Young Prince and the Young Princess” from Rimsky-Korsakov’s symphonic suite Sheherazade. Why were these two tracks included? Were other composers considered for singular inclusion?

I played the cello from early childhood through college, so I have always been partial to pieces which feature that instrument. Furthermore, the Saint-Saen Concerto was probably most difficult piece I ever learned, so I wanted include something from it, and the middle movement made the most sense. I probably toyed with including something from his 2nd Piano or 3rd Violin Concerto, but the former is a bit too explosive and the latter is a bit too apocalyptic. As for the Rimsky-Korsakov, I wanted to add something from Sheherazade because it would provide just a dash of exotic (or, at least, exotic-sounding) music. “The Young Prince and the Young Princess” is a long, slow dance, so it was the best choice to maintain the game’s flow.

Q: Another interesting case is that of the inclusion of John Sheppard’s Media vita. Sheppard is a relatively obscure composer in that his significance is usually overshadowed by Thomas Tallis, whose works are not represented in the game. Is there some reason behind the inclusion of this track?

My knowledge of music from the Renaissance is quite poor, so I enlisted the help of my cousin Erik Anderson, who is a cello professor at Minot State University, and his wife Dianna, who is an accomplished pianist. They created a list of pieces and composers I should consider. As a result, I bought a bunch of music from this period, and the Sheppard piece stuck out to me because of its austere beauty and consistency with the period. I am actually surprised when I look back that I didn’t include any Tallis; I guess they just didn’t stand out to me for some reason.

Q: The recording of “Christian Zeal and Activity” was edited to exclude the sermon. Was this your decision? How do you feel about this significant alteration?

That old recording is an essential part of “Christian Zeal and Activity” (used to great effect by Scorsese in Shutter Island), but spoken dialogue would seriously damage the flow of a Civ game, so I had no choice. Indeed, I edited most of the Adams pieces to take out some of their more climactic or dissonant moments; “Harmonielehre” is missing its shattering opening, for example. Taking these bits out was disappointing, as I didn’t want to damage the structural integrity of the work, but also one of the many steps made to make Civilization 4 fit together as a whole, without any single element demanding the user’s attention over all the others.

Q: If you could go back and change something about the soundtrack to Civilization IV, what would you change? Why?

I am quite proud of how the soundtrack turned out; I often get compliments on it, and I certainly never would have dreamed that “Baba Yetu” would win a Grammy. Of course, I wish my musical knowledge would have been deeper and wider so that I could have built a more varied selection; I definitely leaned pretty heavily on Bach, Beethoven, Dvorak, and Adams. However, if I was to design another Civ game, it would be extremely difficult to go through the process over again and force myself to pick new pieces; I do view the soundtrack of Civ 4 as a piece of myself that sits inside the game, an enthusiastic jumble of my passions and my happenstances.

GD Column 22: When Digital Meets Physical

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The following was published in the Aug 2012 issue of Game Developer magazine…

If video games and board games are cousins, then they are starting to behave like they belong to the European aristocracy. The two formats are intermixing such that the artificial line separating the two is blurring, with many digital games now built to resemble board games. Consider the recent mobile games Cabals or Hero Academy; both contain the trappings of board games – including turn-based play, a shuffled deck of game pieces, a visible board divided into tiles, and transparent rules with no hidden modifiers – even though these games only exist in digital form.

Other, more mainstream video games are including select board game elements, such as the collectible card mechanic in Rage. The designers assume that the audience is familiar with board game conventions, so that including cards or dice can be just as useful as any other video game convention in helping players feel comfortable with the design.

Meanwhile, the collision of digital and physical gaming is changing the latter as well. More specifically, the iPad is revolutionizing the board game industry as digital translations of physical games are finally viable. The iPad’s features – a large, high-resolution screen, a touch-based interface, and (perhaps most importantly) a robust infrastructure for selling digital apps – are the perfect combination for digital board games. Eric Hautemont, the founder and CEO of the board game publisher Days of Wonder, expressed his enthusiasm for the device:

The beauty of the iPad is that you could forget about it. Meaning that when you put an iPad between two players, the screen is so well done that you almost forget there are electronics behind that. When you sit down to play Small World on the iPad, you stop thinking about it as an iPad game and just think of it as Small World. In the future, the question of whether something is a “board game” or an “iPad app” or whatever it will be in the future becomes a meaningless question.

Days of Wonder’s business experienced a significant bump from mobile. Since the release of Ticket to Ride Pocket on the iPhone, the boxed version of the game began selling more copies, by a sustained increase of 70 percent. Meanwhile, the iPad version is consistently a top-100 app, selling for a healthy $6.99. (One sign of the healthy iOS market for board games is how well they have maintained a high price point in a sea of 99-cent games; Catan and Samurai both sell for $4.99 while Carcassonne still costs a whopping $9.99 two years after release!) Indeed, since release, the digital versions of Ticket to Ride have outsold the physical one by 3-to-1, which raise the question of whether Days of Wonder is a board game company or a video game company.

Transparent Games

The success of digital board games means that they can no longer be excluded from discussions of video game design. However, as board games become increasingly digital, how do they still retain the traits of a board game? Can a board game still be defined as simply one with physical components? What about the aforementioned Cabals or Hero Academy, which exist only in digital form? What about the iOS game Assassin’s Creed Recollections, a real-time variant of Magic: The Gathering, which could not exist without a computer to handle the real-time interaction?

If the physical components are not necessary, then what is the essence of a board game? Why do some games fall into this category and other games do not? Perhaps what defines board games is not their physical elements but their absolute transparency, a philosophy that all a game’s rules should be visible.

This realization has important implications; if transparency is the thread that connects all board games, then transparency must be a major reason why people enjoy playing board games at all. Accordingly, transparency is then one possible source of fun in all games, and designers should understand the role it plays in their own designs.

For example, the Civilization series is essentially a giant board game that could only be played with a computer to handle all the calculations and record-keeping. The majority of game mechanics are clearly transparent to the player, from how much food a city produces each turn to how much time is needed to discover the next technology.

One area not so transparent was the combat system, still a black box to the player, leading to fears that a tank could lose to a spearman under the wrong circumstances. Civ 4 took steps to fix this problem by providing players with the exact probability of success for each possible battle. Civ 5 went even further, with a detailed graphical widget to show the estimated damage.


The combat systems of these games were still opaque to the average player (the hard-core, of course, reverse engineered the formulas). However, these features still honored the ideal of transparency by making the results of combat clear; the designers understood that transparency was an important virtue for the series, and the changes were well received by the fans.

When Digital Beats Physical

One of the most exciting aspects of the digital-physical merger is that some board games are greatly improved in the transition to a video game. First, digital board games require no set-up time or record-keeping, which means that games can be played much faster and in new environments; suddenly, Memoir ‘44 can be played in a coffee shop without scaring away the other customers.

Being able to play a digital board game tens, or even hundreds, of times transforms the experience. A heavy, card-driven historical simulation game like 1960 will probably be played only a handful of times in person, but the Web version allows finishing a game in an hour. The brevity and frequency of games lowers the pain of a loss, which means players can experiment with new strategies without fearing they are blowing their one chance to play the game that month.

However, one challenge of such frequent play is that imbalances are found much quicker than ever before. A Few Acres of Snow, Martin Wallace’s 2011 wargame on the French-Indian War, gained some notoriety for needing a quick patch to deal with a dominant strategy for the English known as the Halifax Hammer. This strategy emerged so soon after release because the game was playable for free on the Web; water found a crack that much sooner.

Another advantage of digital board games is asynchronous play. One of the challenges of board gaming is finding a way to get people together for long, uninterrupted blocks of time. Asynchronous play circumvents this issue by letting people run games at their own pace; the program simply waits for the next player to make her move.

One iOS game, Ascension, owes much of its success to getting this format right. The game was a competent variant to the seminal deck-builder Dominion, but Ascension met its greatest success when it hit the App Store. The developers focused on asynchronous play as not some unusual game mode but as a core feature of the game, enabling players to easily manage multiple concurrent games. Not every board game is ideal for asynchronous play (each turn needs to feature a significant number of decisions), but ones that are should find new life on mobile devices.

Analytical Fun

Whether played asynchronously or in single-player, digital translations can eliminate the waiting time associated with meaty board games. A certain type of Eurogame with little randomness and no hidden information, typified by Caylus and Puerto Rico, is painful to play with optimizers, who are unafraid to slow the game down to a crawl to ensure they make just the right decision. However, the negative experience of waiting for a slow player can often lead to the mistaken impression that optimization itself is not fun.

Optimization while under social pressure to finish faster may not be fun, but finding just the right move to handle a tricky situation is exactly why these types of games are so rewarding. Analysis paralysis, after all, is also known as intense engagement in single-player games! The problem with playing in person is not wanting to slow down the game while also fearing that rushing will lead to the wrong move.

Both asynchronous and single-player versions of board games solve this problem by giving the player all the time he needs to perfect his plan. Indeed, Puerto Rico comes alive on the iPad, shining as a tight, elegant game that can move at a comfortable speed when a single person gets to make all the decisions. Indeed, the popularity of cooperative board games in recent years, such as Pandemic and Ghost Stories, suggests a healthy market for solitaire video games with a board game soul.

This revelation underscores the value of decoupling the physical characteristics of board games from their defining feature – absolute transparency. The lesson for all designers is that transparency can be a virtue in almost any genre or format. Consider the natural tile-matching patterns in Triple Town, or the predictable enemy behaviors in Plants vs. Zombies, or the simple physical elements in Cut the Rope. These games don’t appear to be board games, but they all share the virtue of transparency.