Integrated Serialism & Systemic Games: Rulesets, Chance, and the Audience

Today I realized that Integrated Serialism is just like systemic video games. Both use systems and procedural generation as part of creating the experience, both can harness chance and indeterminacy in different amounts and for different reasons, and both ask questions about the importance of you, specifically, as the audience.

So what is integrated serialism?

Well first, it sounds like this:

If you’re like me and many others, this is challenging music. It’s not very easy to enjoy. Honestly, that’s part of why I find it so fascinating. A lot of composers in the 20th century were making music like this. Why? What did they see in it?

Before we talk about why, let’s talk a bit about how. Serialist music often uses tone rows, which is a technique where you have a predetermined order where all 12 pitches are used and then repeated. This tends to undermine any sense of pitch hierarchy - one result of the tone row is that all twelve pitches are used (approx.) equally. It also often undermines familiar Western harmonic tension and release. This lack of the familiar is part of why serialism can still be so challenging to modern audiences, many years later.

Integrated serialism takes that idea and expands it to more than just pitch. Now there are cycles determining pitch, but also how long a note is, the style of the note, or its volume level. There are complex systems and cycles playing out when you listen to integrated serialism. But those systems often feel unpredictable. (Even trained musicians can’t really “hear the rows” in a serialist work.)

Unpredictable systems also feels a fitting description of systemic games.

Systemic games are games about, or that prominently feature, the unscripted ways in which systems can interact. The weather in a game, for example, might interact with other objects in the game world, with unexpected results that were never directly authored by the developers. For me, serialism and systemic games both use complicated sets of systems and rules to create something that feels… well… organic. It’s unpredictable. You don’t know exactly what will happen next. And it will happen because of forces that exist independently of you. That feels like nature. That feels organic. And for me, that feels like Boulez, and also Minecraft.

This sense of unpredictability, ironically, can be achieved through very different means. Take the music of Pierre Boulez. The musical details can be meticulously predetermined through cycles and rows. But the sound of it is sometimes basically indistinguishable from to the works of John Cage, which relied on outright chance and indeterminacy. The unexpected interaction between different rules and systems can feel indistinguishable from something truly random. The specific outcome of combining complex rules can feel as organic and unpredictable as RNG.

What fascinates me most is that integrated serialism and systemic games both ask questions about the centricity of the audience. One of the big draws about systemic games is that it feels alive - it feels like it exists without the player. I’ve always found the world of Minecraft to be deeply immersive because of this. The world goes on forever, and there is much more than I could ever explore. It feels like the game world just exists, and I am just a visitor there, exploring.

Sometimes that feeling can be unsettling. Like in the walking sim “The Beginner’s Guide”, where the game’s stories and themes seem to say, this game wasn’t meant for you. Maybe you weren’t made to understand it. “That’s not your role as a player. And if your role is not to understand, than… what is it?” Honestly, not understanding the world around us or our role in it is a very relatable experience. And that brings us back to that question: why serialism?

Karl Schorske describes Schoenberg’s music as “[confronting] his listener with an art whose surface was broken, charged with the full life of feeling of man adrift and vulnerable in the ungovernable universe.” The feeing of being adrift and vulnerable in the ungovernable universe. As a 20-something grappling with how to survive within the unpredictable systems acting on my own life, that’s… a relatable feeling.

And to me, that’s what I end up getting out of serialism. It’s about exploring a world that you aren’t meant to understand. A sound world where I’m not the player character.

Joseph Cieslak