To play or not to play…music, that is.  Over the years, I’ve tried to incorporate music into the gaming experience.  For me, it started with having a bit of mood music on in the background while playing — appropriately bombastic classical for fantasy campaigns, James Bond themes for espionage or action games.  The ambient soundtrack could create a certain mood, but more often than not it didn’t really effect play.

With the airing of Miami Vice in the 1980s, I was influenced by the use of key musical numbers to enhance moments on the screen, and I attempted to emulate that with the use of “game soundtracks” — bringing in music for key scenes.  It kind of worked; it kind of didn’t.  One:  the use of music was a tip off to players that something was coming up — an emotionally important scene, a car chase, a shootout.  It lessened surprise.  Partly, I think it didn’t work well because of the nature of the delivery at the time:  cassettes.  They were slow to activate, with clunky devices to produce the soundtrack.  It also was just one more thing to tote around with you.

Eventually, I went back to the ambient mood music for a while, and while it didn’t necessarily distract (but could), it didn’t really add anything.  DVDs didn’t solve the problem of queuing up the soundtrack elements, but once I started to run games off of a laptop, the opportunity to use .mp3 files queued properly to create music for key moments was possible and much easier.

The problem remains that you have to stop what you’re doing — however briefly — to set up the appropriate clip, stop it when done.  And you still tip off the players that something is about to happen.  Now, I usually use a music clip as a “title sequence” — something to get people’s attention and let them know we’re starting play.

While I’m not against use of music to create a soundtrack for a game session, I’ve just never found it that effective.