Hear me out on this one! You’re just lucky that I’m not talking about Zelda DS for the fourth post in a row :)

Fumito Ueda and Co. at SCEA have created something really beautiful in Ico. This is probably a good indication that I’ve been lusting after electronic musical instruments too much recently, but I can’t help but think that this game, which has been lauded for its innovative and emotionally engrossing gameplay, gets much of its power by employing a concept not so different than that of a synthesizer.

In traditional musical instruments, a multitude of sound parameters are controlled simultaneously and intuitively by the abstraction of a physical interface. By simply banging on the keys of a piano, you are setting off a complex equation of harmonics, anti-resonances, and tiny musical demigods. I understand almost none of it, but I know enough to be thankful for the abstraction of the keyboard, saving me from tweaking each parameter of the sound individually. But, as with any abstraction, this convenience also limits the amount of control the user has. In this case, it keeps me from making a piano sound like anything other than a piano.

As anyone who loves working with synthesizers knows, this lack of control is in direct opposition to the nature of an analog synthesizer: synthesizers are essentially an open invitation to get in and muck with sound parameters to your heart’s content. I’ll agree that synthesizers are not without their own abstractions, but really, by breaking down sound creation from a physical abstraction to the components that actually shape it, they allow much greater control over the sound than traditional instruments. This property of synthesizers opens up their space of sonic possibilities to be significantly broader than that of a piano, and is why Ico is such an amazing game.

Ico breaks down an abstraction that had been pretty much taken for granted in traditional single-player adventure/puzzle games: that at a raw gameplay level, the player is a single entity, acting for themselves. Why do I find the switches in Myst? Because I want to progress to the next part; because I feel like taking on the challenge. It’s easy to see why this abstraction would be perpetuated throughout the ages - having a single agent acting in their own interest is something everyone can relate to, if only as a living organism. It is so intuitive that it doesn’t really even require any learning on the player’s part at all. Steve Krug would be proud!

But in Ico the player separates these normally grouped components, and it pays off in spades:

By breaking down this abstraction into components, then re-forming them into the game’s two main characters, Ico is able to incorporate a number of puzzles that could not have otherwise existed and boast an incredibly broad (for a puzzle/adventure game) emotional pallete.

Now, off to look at more synths…