thinking of that part in deadly premonition where the cast listen to "miss stiletto heels" in a bar after yet another serial murder.
and that's a game with its own weird sense of time, both infinitely expansive and squeezed tight - everyone else has a schedule to keep and so do you, but you can blow it off if you like and pick things up the next day with minimal consequence. the game doesn't really care how many days worth of murder investigation you instead spend pushing boxes around to earn trading cards. the store of accumulated days is left to sit uneasily in your memory, going nowhere and not really signifying anything but there, building up, piling higher.
the scene i'm talking about, in the bar, is a story sequence - it happens about halfway through the game, no matter how quickly or how loosely you've been following up the story missions. at a point where whatever approach you've been taking it can't help but feel like it's solidified into a ritual, in addition to the game's own ritual structure of investigation sequences followed by awful combat missions. you've gotten used to the strange nature of videogame time, where a few fixed story events can be surrounded by an endless ocean of directionless game-time experienced less as linear sequences than as random jumblings of a permutation space: moving your guy here and the camera there, and vice versa. the in-game clock goes through a compressed, abstracted version of the day as you move around a compressed, abstracted version of a place.
a song, music with vocals, represents a different and much more granular form of time - based on the rhythms of heartbeat and breath, felt intensely in seconds, where the tiniest pause or moment of inflection can feel like an era. in the context of videogames the intrusion of this alternate form of time can be strange. sometimes that strangeness is downplayed - games like grand theft auto use a sped up clock where every second represents a minute of in-game time. so a three-minute pop song takes three in-game hours, but this is an abstraction, we're not meant to assume the characters are listening to insanely chopped n screwed slowed down drone versions of the tracks (to my knowledge??)
but when a game stops, puts the song first and foremost, the juxtaposition is stronger - it can be shocking to suddenly go from videogame-time to song-time, to suddenly recognise the weight of seconds in a format defined by endlessly reproducible operations, to come face to face with linear time once more. when the cast of deadly premonition sit in silence at the bar, after failing to prevent yet another killing, after however many days of doing the same thing, and listen to the song it feels like we've hit the edge of something, like we've glimpsed the limit this world can't move beyond and is defined, doomed, by that inability to reach.
at some point after this the game itself wraps up - it goes through the rituals we use to put closure around a span of threateningly undifferentiated videogame time, both the corny ones (final boss!) and the weirdly moving (one last aimless tour around to say goodbye). and that's all fine and good. but it's an ending that doesn't negate, and barely knows how to recognize, a different kind of closure that happened much earlier - when the game itself seemed to catch a strange glimpse of itself in a song, and froze, and is still watching in the bar, is still listening to it.
