Along with the last few posts, this post continues the exploration of music videos from the point of view of the design of the places that are seen in them. In this particular post, I will discuss music videos whose design approaches take their inspiration from video games. Over the past decades, video games have developed a particular visual language and set of standards that indeed work well within their own context. Yet the use of such visual standards in a different medium or for a different purpose – such as in music videos – provides another perspective on both mediums and as well leads to interesting results in themselves.
The first example is of a music video whose visual theme is indeed centered on video games, as it lightheartedly explores the evolution of their visual language. The Lost Levels’ music video of their song The Early Sheets follows the adventures of a video game character in three parts, each representing a different graphical level of video game creation in recent decades: pixel graphics, vector graphics, and photorealism. It features architectural elements as game props (especially in the first part) and enhances its sense of space by using 3-dimensional camera angles and movements throughout the video (even when the visual contents are only 2-dimensional):
The second example uses the visual language of video games as a means of expressing places and situations from the physical world in a free form. The music video of the Red Hot Chili Pepper’s song Californication presents various geographical areas in California as if they were video game levels that need to be completed, and each of the four band members is presented as a character that one can choose to play the game with. The goal of the game is to lead each character through his separate adventure towards the meeting point of all four of them on the final level. The music video then alternately follows each of these game sequences as the band members find their separate ways to the end goal of the game:
In contrast to the above example, the music video of Superpowerless’s song Wasted My Time presents an opposite kind of relationship between video games and the physical world. Instead of showing a video game that is modeled on a physical place, it rather makes a regular physical place look and function as if it were a series of video games. It presents a simple contemporary environment using the visual language of video games, thus also emphasizing their absurdity and limited relevance to actual life in the physical world:
Finally, the music video of Röyksopp’s song Happy Up Here brings out video game elements into an otherwise unaltered common physical environment. Opening with fragmented views of a city at night with its light-bulb signs, it proceeds to suggest (starting at 0:50) that the signs turn into spaceships that seem to be taken straight out of the video arcade game ‘Space Invaders’. In this case, the photorealistic visual language is the same as that of a documentation of events in an urban environment, yet in its own playful way it somehow suggests that the city also includes objects that clearly do not belong to it, but rather to the world of video games:
The above examples show music videos that are influenced by video games in various ways, yet they all also demonstrate an interesting approach to designing places for pictorial mediums in general. Different mediums often end up each developing their own unique elements, style, and visual language that tend to become typical of them. Sometimes, however, such established standards are borrowed from one pictorial medium and applied to another – or in this case, from video games to music videos. When successful, this can be a refreshing creative approach as regards both the resulting work and the virtual place that is presented through it.
