Reflections on the first six Star Wars movies

Written prior to seeing Episode VII.

I think the only way you can make sense of the whole saga and all the flaws of the prequels is if you conclude Yoda and Obi-Wan underwent a major change in philosophy as a result of the events of the prequels. In the prequels the Jedi are basically super soldiers fighting wars where both sides of the conflict are in service of evil, and Yoda fights multiple Sith pitting strength against strength, employing forces that will ultimately destroy them all. In the original trilogy, Yoda says wars don't make one great, a Jedi should never use the force to attack, and that the evil you encounter is only what you take with you. The Yoda in the prequels is a warrior who fights evil directly and uses clone armies to destroy his enemies. The Yoda in the original trilogy is a sadder wiser creature who learned that pitting violence against violence is not the answer, and chooses to live in isolation rather than fight.

Luke defeats the Emperor by throwing away his weapon, preferring to die and leave himself defenseless rather than give in to hate. He doesn't save his father by becoming more powerful, his supreme act of defiance is rejecting the cycle of violence in pursuit of power. He mirrors Obi-Wan's final moments: in an act of love, he refuses to harm the man he should have every reason to hate. Vader isn't saved by a stronger power, but by mercy. The scenes in Return of the Jedi are so compelling because it's not a battle for who's stronger, but a battle for the souls of Luke and Anakin. Luke wins because he's able to love the monster the Emperor built for him to hate.

The prequels are a loud bombastic mess where the Jedi and Sith are two sides of the same coin, employing similar powers and tactics, a Sith is just a Jedi who favors a different leader. The original trilogy shows the Jedi as rejecting the tactics and worldview of the Sith. And saving someone from the evil within their heart is far more compelling of a resolution than fighting to kill them.

May the force be with us all.

The Pros and Cons of Kindle Reading

My girlfriend got me a kindle for Christmas, and having had the chance to read a few books on it so far, I feel it's time to weigh in on what I think of the delightful little gizmo.

The pros:

• It's the one thing you need to bring with you when you want something to read. It's lightweight, gives you your whole (digital) library, and lets you pick up where you left off in any book you want to come back to
• Pro: It absolutely minimizes physical effort and distraction in the reading process, you don't have to turn pages, or go from one side of a bound book to another, you literally hold the book in one place and hit a button to change pages. It's faster and more convenient than traditional reading.
• Pro: I'm starting to think it's the easiest way to read pure text, scrolling on a web browser is awkward for keeping your place and has uncomfortable margins, and it's easier to pick up and set down than a normal book and start reading just at a push of a button.
• Pro: This is more of a lack of a problem, but the battery life is well-nigh infinite if you're not downloading books, and can be pretty much forgotten about 99% of the time.
• Pro: Having spent so much time reading and watching backlit screens, the digital ink of the kindle is much more comfortable for reading, it feels like reading a normal book. It not being backlit means you need a light source like any other book, but I'm convinced it's the most comfortable way to read, it's essentially a book with one page that keeps changing.
• Pro: In theory, you can search for specific text or phrases and annotate, although those seem to be more experimental and less-refined. Skipping to individual chapters from the table of contents is much simpler

Now for the cons:

• A number of books have had spotty support for kindle features, pull quotes which are images have ended up in the wrong place depending upon your text size, there are minor transcription errors or incorrectly placed text, and viewing footnotes isn't always as easy as it's supposed to be. Not every book seems to be set up with the same level of quality
• Con: Not every book is available in kindle format, it's great for picking up new books or best-sellers, but it's a way to get books on a going-forward basis, while most popular titles I looked for were there, not all were
• Con: Amazon is currently fighting over the future of e-books thanks to the iPad promising 15 bucks for an ebook, and publishers not wanting to sell their content cheaply. Amazon tries to push a 10 dollar price point with possible discounts, I think trying to sell a digital book for more than a standard paperback is really unfair to the consumer who doesn't necessarily know how long he can count on a particular format sticking around.
• Con: While the size of the device is ideal for what it is, a portable reading device, you are sometimes made aware of the limitations of the smaller screen size and the correspondingly smaller amount of text it can fit before you hit the next page button, I've chosen to go to comparatively smaller text sizes to bite off larger chunks at a time
• Con: Picking up where you left off is very easy, but I'm not completely sold on the merits of searching by text or location, paging through a book is still faster than hitting next page even if hitting "next page" is faster than turning a normal page. In one book in particular, the index at the back of the book was useless, non-hyperlinked and the page numbers offered no correspondence to how "locations" were laid out in the book, you had to rely on a text search or guessing by section
• Con: You can't lend out a book as easily that I'm aware of, and at the moment trying to show someone something in a book quickly turns into a kindle tech demo as the device overshadows all
• Con: It's unsuitable for certain types of information: magazines, strategy guides, comic books, graphic novels, and newspaper articles you might want to tear out or pass on to another person.

Essentially, the kindle is optimized for a very specific process: reading a book, leafing through it one page at a time, and periodically setting it down to pick it up later. It helps accomplish that process better than any invention since Gutenberg. It is significantly less optimized towards the other ways in which people use books: leaving margin notes (although annotations are possible they aren't as intuitive as in a book), skimming through a book and trying to take in large sections at once, or representing other types of content rather than just pure text. (images are possible, but limited)

That said, going off of purely empirical data, the kindle has been an incredible success for me. It's successfully subsumed my normal book reading (excluding graphic novels, and online stuff like the wall street journal), and I'd say it's even increased the rate at which I read books because of its incredible convenience for normal reading, and the ease of just picking up a book where you left off and diving in. Reading books on the kindle is addicting, it gets information to you incredibly fast and you're less intimidated by the size of the tome in question, your progress is tracked at the bottom with a bar but you only ever have a well-measured chunk to deal with.

So while I may not have had the courage to attempt this experiment on my own, I'm sold on the kindle for basic reading, and I'll continue trying to find ways to make it better at the things I want it to do like searching and scanning, and hope it continues to grow in support among publishers. I'm undertaking a certain risk in committing part of my future library to this format, but hopefully it'll prove more resilient than the cheap paperbacks it's effectively replacing.

Topics from Comic-Con: the Philosophy of Adaptations, the Future of Strategy Guides, and the state of nerd culture

My first article with a round-up of the interesting events/etc from Comic-Con is up, you can read it here. I got to talk to Zach Snyder of Watchmen and 300 about his philosophy of adaptations, the creator of CSI and lonelygirl15 about their new project, and present an overview of all Comic-Con has to offer. For anyone interested btw, four-day passes to the 2010 convention have already sold out, single-day passes go on sale in one week.

An update on Farmville musings

I've updated my thoughts on Farmville and summarized them in half the space on Gamasutra.

The Strategy and Ethos of Optimized Farmville

Introducing Farmville

My girlfriend recently became obsessed with a Facebook game called Farmville, which has become the most popular game Facebook has over the last five months, and by way of strengthening our relationship and indulging her casual nerdiness as she does for my more intense variety, I decided to check it out. As a gamer I tend to engage primarily with engrossing long-form gaming experiences. I think of a long form gaming experience as something where you progress through increasing levels of difficulty tied together by a narrative, and in which very often your character or state in the game develops according to choices you make. And I think of an engrossing game as one that demands your full attention, you play the game when you're ready to sit down at home, turn off the lights, unplug your phone, de-wire your doorbell, load up on food for the weekend and hunker down to just play, rather than something you idly mess around with when you're bored.

Exceptions to long form games would include puzzle games or games played competitively, and exceptions to "engrossing" games would include RPGs in some cases(FFXII is the worst offender that I'm aware of, although I certainly play RPGs) as well as a new brand of game exemplified by Facebook's Farmville. Farmville works on a different timetable than most games, it's real-time, but not in the sense of a game like Zelda where an hour takes a minute to pass, it runs on real-world time. You plant crops that you can only come back and harvest after a day, multiple days, or hours. It's not a game designed to be played full-time, it's a game designed to draw you back in spurts all throughout the day.

Farmville and Other Farming Games

Oddly enough, I am no stranger to the world of simulated farming games, I've played games in the Harvest Moon series for a while, which are designed to be played in a sort of "game real time" with no downtime between accomplishing things. You have many of the same features as Farmville, you plow fields, raise animals, make investments in seeds, harvest crops, and then re-buy more seeds to increase your capital, while sometimes investing in larger projects like houses. Farmville takes the farming theme a step further in letting you interact with nearby farms and show off your farms to your friends, while it also leaves out some features in terms of having a secondary system in the game for making friends with people while putting your crops and goods to a secondary purpose as gifts. Unlike the Harvest Moon games the social aspects of Farmville are largely independent of the core economy of the game. There's not a significant world to interact with outside your farm, and it also lacks the mechanics used by the Rune Factory spinoffs which introduce crafting and combat to the world to provide a further purpose for all the money raised and goods produced.

A few parallel elements are handled differently: Harvest Moon makes a big deal out of clearing your field so that you can reclaim all the space to plant crops, Farmville has all the space initially available, the way you increase your usable farmland is to buy more. In Harvest Moon (and a limited-round board game that involves farming called Agricola), a plowed field is plowed forever, you can keep re-using it to plant more crops of different types, while Farmville increases your clicking requirements by making you re-plow a field in between each crop you plant. In Harvest Moon, animals are a useful source of fixed income year-round since you have to deal with seasons when you can't grow certain crops, in Farmville animals seem like almost an afterthought since they provide nothing close to the money gained by crops, which require far more time and maintenance, which is what the game is built to reward. Quite a few features of Farmville simply end up as decorative, sometimes because they are intended as such, and sometimes because they're completely outpaced by other factors of the game in making money.

Farmville and Optimization

My girlfriend and I noticed that people used a wide variety of strategies in playing Farmville, some filling up their field with a single crop, raising a lot of animals or simply none, and their farms ended up looking very different for non-aesthetic reasons. So we decided to run the numbers Harvest Moon style and figure out what crops gave you the best return. There are two main resources you get in Farmville, coins which you use for your investments, and XP, which lets you level up and gain access to more crops and goods. Crops have turn-around times ranging from 2 hours to 4 days, offering larger or smaller returns. So the two things we wanted to calculate were the profit per hour for each crop, the XP per hour, and in some cases the XP per hour per coin, if your goal was to level up as quickly as possible where coins were your limiting factor.

A spreadsheet quickly (relative to the amount of time spent playing Farmville) showed that the lone 2 hour crop had the best profitability simply because of how often you could flip it and re-plant it, although later on in the game the margins of longer-running crops catch up, which also means that the game after a certain point no longer takes regular two hour obsessive re-checking to maximize profitability, you can be on an 8 or 10 hour schedule. We also noticed that some of the worst crops in the game were being heavily used by several players, and that in some cases the next 10 crops you could look forward to unlocking offered no improvements in profitability over the previous ones. Figuring out what crops to plant optimally is a calculation of the most profitable crop you have access to over the time interval at which you next expect to check the game.

While most of the fixed income assets of the game are amazingly inferior in profitability compared to the benefits of planting crops, there is an expensive building that offers more profitability than using the same stretch of land for crops, which raised the question of when it's appropriate to make that investment. We eventually realized that while on a per-square basis, the building beat the benefits of growing crops, it was a worse utilization of capital than using your money to fill your field with crops and harvest them continually. If you were in a situation where squares were a limiting factor and you had enough capital to grow crops on the rest of your field, you should buy the expensive building, but if you were in a situation where capital is the limiting factor and you could either buy the building or fill your field with crops, you should fill your field with crops.

The single most profitable long-term investment is expanding the size of your field to give you more squares to farm, since after a certain point your total assets are too high to be used on your entire field, although obviously buying a larger field is only worth it if you can still fill your field with your leftover capital, or else you're cutting your income for no reason. The only other trade-off worth considering is increasing your XP as quickly as possible to get access to better crops and assets compared to increasing your coins as quickly as possible to gain existing resources. However, those goals overlap closely enough when you use fast growing crops to not represent much of a dilemma. From the track my girlfriend seems to be on, if she keeps re-investing her capital in the most profitable crops and increasing the size of her field, she'll hit the maximal levels of prosperity the game is capable of representing, and at that point have little to do but decorate.

Pursuing the goals of ruthless optimization revealed a few things: the optimal strategy is fairly easy to discover when you run the numbers, and disappointingly predictable: you fill your field with the best crop available to you, which is what we noticed most of the top players doing. A lot of players preferred to keep an area of their farm "just for fun" and fill it with the gameplay features that were decorative by design or hopelessly inefficient, while using the bulk of their field for wealth maximization. There are ribbons and achievements that seem intended to give players incentives to diversify and try out strategies other than the obviously optimal, but because of the way the curve of the game is set up, you're locked out of most of its content until you grind your way to the top, so even if you simply want to make a beautiful farm with the minimal amount of effort, minimizing the time spent grinding via optimal farm-building seems to be the only way to go.

Farmville, Addiction and Money

While Farmville is open to being played intermittently rather than in more focused sessions, playing the game still takes a good chunk of time since it is set up to reward you for coming back regularly to get your small chunk of gameplay in. Its main advantage over the Harvest Moon games for me is its social aspect in showing off your farms and interacting with your friends by giving them help on their farms or gifts, and it benefits from its accessibility to anyone with Facebook and a web browser at all hours of the day.

The points I'd make against it are that I think it's a less deep system than the Harvest Moon games offer in terms of optimizing the use of your time and resources, and the end result of the game in achieving decorations and badges of achievement seems less satisfying than channeling the results of your income into the secondary gameplay systems offered by Harvest Moon. You're able to show off your success, but there isn't anything meaningful to do with it. And while being rewarded for coming back every few hours to play the game and punished when you don't is probably an optimal formula for addiction by creating a regular habit, I prefer my gaming in controlled well-scheduled bursts that don't represent a constant invasion upon my schedule. Farmville is an itch that keeps building and rewards you for scratching it in predictable intervals, I prefer a gaming experience that puts itself entirely at your mercy to control when you reap its rewards rather than demanding real-time effort to keep up.

The last comparison I'd make to Farmville is to massively multiplayer games like World of Warcraft or Second Life. World of Warcraft tries to maintain itself as a meritocracy--buying your way into the upper echelons of the game is a violation of the community ethic, and will get you banned from the game if you're caught selling resources acquired in the game to another player. Second Life makes real world money transactions an essential part of the game, to accomplish anything significant in the game's world you need in-game currency, which can only be obtained by exchanging real dollars. Farmville does a little of both: it has definite meritocracy elements since it's possible to work your way to the top of the heap, but they are perfectly happy to sell in-game perks to players who are willing to throw real money at them. Since the game's entire means of funding itself is getting players to spend money to get ahead, it's arguable that the whole purpose of the grind is to be painful enough to make players consider spending cold hard cash instead of time to unlock the game's content.

Farmville and Casual Gaming

I think of a good game as something you go out of your way to spend some time on, Farmville is the kind of game you stumble your way into getting an addiction for, and use it to fill up internet-enabled downtime. I'm more comfortable with the incentives inherent to a game you pay for in advance in comparison with a game that's "free, unless you want to buy your way to the top", and I prefer attention-focusing experiences in general to attention-splitting ones. I'm very guilty of multi-tasking my day, but I recognize that focusing all your attention on a book, movie, or game will get you a lot more out of it than juggling it with a number of other activities.

Now granted, every game is ultimately a waste of time, the only real metrics of comparison are how enjoyably it wastes that time and how meaningful the challenges are. 64 million people are playing Farmville, which eclipses the entire sales of the Harvest Moon series and its spinoffs by more than a factor of 10. I think the perfect Facebook farming game would have a meaningful interactive economy where users could exchange and directly deal in the game's goods themselves, a better defined end-game with a purpose for all the wealth gained, include more meaningful incentives for specialization vs diversification, and allow for more complex strategy than the game currently affords. However, that may not be compatible with the financial incentives of the developer: allowing players to have an economy between them directly could allow players to "buy into" the system from each other rather than the developer, Farmville is already wildly popular with mechanics that involve a fairly simple grind, and the ultimate purpose of the game is to make spending money on it seem like a better deal than spending time.

Casual gaming has opened up the world of simulated entertainment to people who don't normally consider themselves gamers, and have never honed the reflexes, the three dimensional spatial awareness, or the drive for eternally optimizing strategies that the hardcore gamers possess. Ultimately I hope it ends up filling a niche as a gateway for people to dip their toes into what games are capable of, rather than eclipsing and replacing the existing world of games catered to dedicated obsessives. But until that day comes when I have to rally the troops, my girl and I will keep farming away.

Update: Two other things I've noticed about farmville's addictive potential: investing your entire field in crops can be a risky move if your internet goes down or if you lose access, which has caused some people to recruit Farmville babysitters to harvest their crops so they don't rot. And Farmville is very clever about getting you to market it to your friends and draw you back in: occasionally a black sheep will show up and Farmville will beg you to ask your friends to "adopt" it and start a game, and if you go idle for a long time you'll receive notifications about all the people who are helping out on your deserted farm. But with all that said, I think Farmville is more of a triumph of social psychology and addiction than gaming quality.

Storytelling in Games, and a comment on notability

I just got another article published on strange horizons discussing storytelling in games, which brings my body of work on game theory topics to five major pieces so far, as seen in the sidebar. I've written about four areas which share little overlap, the uses of story, music, and puzzles that are unique to games, and issues related to the perceived fairness or balance of multiplayer games. 

I've fleshed out adventure games and abstract puzzles the most, writing two articles talking about the use of interfaces in that genre and the different forms that puzzles take. When writing I spend a lot of time defining what I see as the essential concepts then building from there, which is why writing two article in a specific area such as puzzles has reaped greater rewards than just laying out the groundwork.

Some of my inspiration for writing in this area has been reading some of what's been written about games already in the books First Person, Second Person, Third Person by the MIT Press. First Person was primarily academic criticism and commentary on games, Second Person had a lot more input from game designers on how they made their games and some interesting projects, and Third Person is about the potential and techniques used for long-running stories.

And on a side note, there are roughly 6,706,993,152 living human beings on the planet, 369,285 of whom have passed Wikipedia's standards for notability and earned their own article, which means that roughly one in every eighteen thousand people are "notable", the top .006% of humanity. Assuming you could resist the urge to hover over the stream of facts and misinformation flowing about you, it would be nice to make it in that number.

Modes and Video Games Music

There's a very useful classification of music which helps explain why pieces sound dramatically more happy or sad: the major and minor scales. The major scale is the staging ground for most of the peaceful or upbeat music you'll hear, whereas the minor is a little darker and used for more music with some conflict or sorrow inherent to it. Darth Vader's theme from Star Wars and Captain Jack Sparrow's theme from Pirates of the Caribbean are both written in a minor key, and the major key dominates the lullaby scene and most tension free music.

The reason music sounds so different depending on which scale it's written in has to do with the different notes that make up the scales, the minor scale has a few lowered notes which give it a less pleasant sound. The root chord, which is what a piece has to end on in order to sound resolved, has a darker sound in the minor scale, and the two different scales work out to different chords and progressions appearing in the music, such as the major scale's classic "A-men" IV-I progression, which appears in a lot of hymns.

The vast majority of music falls into one of those two categories, and our system of musical notation is designed around the properties of those two types of scales. However, those two types of scales are just two examples of a general type of scale called a mode, and including those two, there are seven types of modes that have been historically utilized in music, as far back as the Greek Era.

The Greek philosophers Plato and Aristotle, in pontificating about the way people ought to live took the trouble to recommend certain modes over others, believing some to have properties best suited to laziness or drinking songs, and others more fit for inspiring music in times of warfare. While scholars are not entirely convinced of how their seven modes relate to our modern ones, Greek philosophy being easier to come by than Greek music, popular interpretation suggests that our modern major mode was of a type Aristotle specifically condemned as making people stupid, and both philosophers favored only using the Dorian and Phrygian, two modes which are largely extinct in popular music, for worship and times of war respectively.

A few technical points, three modes have a major root chord: the Ionian(or major), the Lydian, and Mixolydian, and those last two differ from the major only by a single note(all three characterized by Plato as too light, incidentally). Three modes have a minor root chord: the Aeolian(or minor), Dorian, and Phrygian, and those last two differ from the minor by a single note as well. The seventh mode is the Locrian, it differs from the minor by two notes, has a diminished root chord, and is largely theoretical simply because it's so uncomfortable to work with.

Some styles of jazz make use of the atypical modes, and artists like the Beatles have been known to explore the different scales, but for this entry I'd like to give examples of the different modal possibilities from a different branch of popular music, video game music. Well-known for songs that have to stand up to inordinate amounts of repetition and being forced to rely on synthesizers in the days before hardware and budgets allowed for orchestral renditions or licensing out pop artists, video game music happens to be something I'm quite familiar with, am in an easy position to analyze, and possesses a surprising amount of variety.

It has some similarity to TV and movie soundtracks, with pieces being written for specific settings and scenes, and frequently uses leitmotifs as a recurring cue to mark the presence of a character, a device dating back to opera. But while video-games can focus on story and character like other mediums, video-game music is unique in that it is written to accompany an activity rather than a fixed story, and it often times has to be dynamic, randomly choosing which section to play next, or changing in instrumentation/speed/tone depending upon feedback from the player. The following seven pieces represent music designed for six consoles and six series's, and aside from the absence of a good heroic theme, I think it serves as a good representation of some of the medium's musical styles.

i. Ionian(or major) (C D E F G A B C) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y6ljFaKRTrI Still Alive- Portal(PC). This is the game industry equivalent of a credits song, and the only one of this set that doesn't accompany actual gameplay. It's played upon the successful conclusion to the game, although the melody itself is foreshadowed in the game. It is sung by a major character in the game to represent their last bit of character development, which in context may remind the well-informed of a scene from Kubrick's 2001 A Space Oddysey. It's written in two major keys, and the lyrics provide an interesting contrast to the otherwise happy/peaceful melody.

ii. Dorian (D E F G A B C D) http://youtube.com/watch?v=nRPOX0iO_Zg Temple of Time - Zelda: Ocarina of Time(Nintendo 64). This one is a chantish/worshipful sounding piece. One feature of this particular game which influenced its music: a few songs, including this one, had to be performed by the player on a virtual instrument tuned to the key of C, making relying on alternate modes a natural way to vary the styles of the music.

iii. Phrygian (E F G A B C D E) http://youtube.com/watch?v=yhnBUd6R31k Magus's Theme - Chrono Trigger(Super Nintendo). The major scale has a half step from its seventh note to its root, which makes hearing the seventh note slightly tense because you're expecting it to resolve into the root since it's so close. This mode, with a lowered second, has a similar effect in reverse, with a half step leading down into the root. This piece is an intense/dark theme serving as the motif for a sinister yet not entirely evil character.

iv. Lydian (F G A B C D E F) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hHLw8G190a0 Space Junk Galaxy - Super Mario Galaxy(Wii). Back into major-related territory, this is a mellow piece which, like a lot of these songs, uses an atypical mode to create an ethereal or exotic sound. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lydian_mode Wikipedia is of the opinion that the Lydian mode is most often used for dreamlike music in soundtracks and video games, and while the game above uses it a few times, I haven't noticed that many other instances.

v. Mixolydian (G A B C D E F G) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f5EF5bI-blA Home Termina - Chrono Cross(Playstation). This piece serves as the background music for a city in its game, and is meant for a different style of explorative gameplay than most of the others in this set. I tend to associate the Mixolydian mode with this style of folk music, which has a certain dance-like quality to it. Lowering just one note on the major scale allows a number of interesting chord progressions to appear that you don't otherwise get.

vi. Aeolian(or minor) (A B C D E F G A) The classic minor key. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B_MW65XxS7s One Winged Angel - Final Fantasy VII(An orchestrated version of a Playstation piece). While this one is a bit more chromatic than your typical minor piece, the main themes are clearly identifiable as minor. It also happens to be one of the more popular modern video game pieces, apparently serving as the encore for at least two video-game themed concerts. With a few lyrics "borrowed" from the Carmina Burana, this is the theme for the villain of the game.

vii. Locrian (B C D E F G A B) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r08jlBT4ZVU YYZ - Rush - Guitar Hero 2(Playstation 2). The bane of music students everywhere, the Locrian mode is largely considered theoretical just because everything naturally sounds dissonant, and the closest example I could find from the video game world is a rock piece, used in the guitar hero soundtrack, which has a locrian synthesizer part. If you know of any better examples, or feel like writing one, feel free to let me know!

And finally, in researching these examples, I came across a couple video game pieces that don't belong to any of the seven classic/medieval modes:

Phrygish(aka Phrygian Dominant or Spanish Gypsy Scale)(E F G# A B C D E): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=322V5rD6ko4 Forest Temple - Zelda:Ocarina of Time (Nintendo 64) This mode differs from all the modes above in that it has three half-steps between its second and third notes, which is a longer interval than is allowed for in any of the classical modes. It bears some similarities to the Phrygian, from which it gets its name, it's essentially a Phrygian mode with a raised third, which puts it in a major root chord again. The lowered second and the long interval give it an unusual sound, and it's apparently used in some Middle-Eastern music, particularly Hungarian music and the works of Franz List.

Mixolydian Flat Sixth (G A B C D Eb F G): http://www.geocities.com/TimesSquare/Chamber/8189/ff3daryl.mid Daryll's Theme -Final Fantasy VI (Super Nintendo)

and http://www.geocities.com/TimesSquare/Chamber/8189/ff3setzer.mid Setzer's Theme - Final Fantasy VI (Super Nintendo)

This mode could be characterized in a few ways, it resembles a major with a lowered sixth and seventh, or a minor a with raised third which would essentially put it in the major, or even a mixolydian with a flat sixth, as the "official" name would suggest. Regardless, its root chord is major, but the sixth and seventh notes which typically distinguish the major from the minor, match the minor key. The first is a bit of a bittersweet melody, and the second is a somewhat triumphant variation which still has a bit of tension, it's an interesting mix.

This article led me to a number of other thoughts about music/modes, and the number of modes that are even possible, but since it gets extremely technical, I chose to place it on my main webpage instead for those interested: http://newheiser.googlepages.com/musicandmodes