On Games, Music, and Meaning  I'm usually OK with soundtracks as
long as they don't actively annoy me; of course, it's nice when
they do something more than just provide not-too-irritating
background noise I may or may not turn off. Douglas Wilson looks
at the relationship between gameplay, music, and meaning (and
what makes for a 'musical' game) over at GameSetWatch, picking a
perhaps unlikely example to illustrate the relationship he's
talking about: Civilization IV. After explaining precisely what
he's getting at, Wilson opines:  Even though the music of a more
“traditional” game may not affect the gameplay on the level of
the code, it can certainly affect the way we experience the game
mechanics, just as the game mechanics can alter our
understanding of the music. Indeed, since experience is
ultimately what matters, I would argue that any deeply
synergistic soundtrack-gameplay relationship that acts on an
emotional or cultural level can be just as "musical" as the
formal mechanisms of rhythm games – physi