"The smog was heavy, my eyes were weeping from it, the sun was hot, the air stank, a regular hell is L.A."

- Jack Kerouac

At the turn of the 20th century, a Jewish immigrant penned a stage play after having had the chance to absorb the fusion of American life with other emigrating cultures. It was entitled 'The Melting Pot' and although its story has long been forgotten, its title has become one of the most common descriptions of the city of Los Angeles. Today, it is used to describe a city that has no fixed identity, is recognised as one of the most culturally diverse places in the world and whose very existence is obscured under an orange haze of heat, smog and dust.

The city's chaotic and contradictory nature is entrenched in virtually every aspect of the its environment; As the heart of American popular culture, the world recognised Hollywood sign stands tall as a symbol of the American dream. Yet it is a symbol juxtaposed with what the LAPD once referred to as "the gang capital of the nation" among the poverty stricken suburbs resting below the Hollywood Hills. It is a city with a long history of illegal immigration problems illustrated by a number that has now reached 2.6 million according to the University of Southern California. But it is also a problem that has been one of the contributing factors to the city's multicultural identity - an identity that is now so entrenched that many inner-city schools are attended solely by minorities legal or otherwise.

Like the city itself, depictions of Los Angeles in popular culture are endlessly diverse with each rendition attempting to tackle a different issue. Changeling (2008) commented on corruption within the LAPD of the 1930s whereas Gangster Squad (2013) chose to focus on the city's history in dealing with organised crime. Michael Mann's Collateral (2004) took a more aesthetic approach using digital photography to depict the chaotic nightlife in a blur of neon signs and car headlights while coyotes aimlessly wander across highways. But for all these titles' intellectualism, arguably the most successful analyses of life in contemporary Los Angeles was Falling Down (1993). Rather than dealing with wider political or cultural subjects, the film depicted one ordinary man pushed too far by the smog filled, gang polluted city and whose 'mission' to return home was continuously hampered by arrogant yuppies, neo Nazis and retired billionaires. It succeeded in highlighted both the suffocating heat of an overcrowded metropolis and the difficulties in navigating a space that seems torn between countless different cultures.

Now blessed with the ability to create large scale depictions of real life cities, the freedom offered by video games to explore and soak up environments at the player's desired pace has enabled Rockstar Games to effectively meld all of the above examples into one package resulting in a genuine fusion of colour, culture and crime - the likes of which are rendered impossible by film's reliance on fixed story structures which usually prevent the focus on multiple ideas.

Represented in Grand Theft Auto V by the city of Los Santos, its real life counterpart's multicultural identity is one of the first subjects confronted with the presence of multiple protagonists, all of whom are of different backgrounds and race. First, Michael is depicted as the organised crime element of the city. He is often seen wearing mafia-style suits, speaks with a slightly gruff Godfather-likeaccent, is an expert at planning heists and is under a witness protection program that recalls the later life of bona fide gangster Henry Hill. Franklin, reminiscent of Carl Johnson, fills a 'Boyz N the Hood' role as an African American low income criminal living in a broken down neighbourhood. Making heavy use of cultural and racial slang that has now become synonymous with the gang occupied residential districts of Los Angeles, Franklin is the only native among the three and is presumably intended to represent the city's diverse racial population. Finally, Trevor is a Canadian who is routinely chastised by people he meets for being north of the border. This includes his encounters with the Civil Border Patrol, a fascist right wing duo who pursue and arrest immigrants regardless of their legal status.

Over the course of the game's first act, the three slowly end up mixing with each other as they are drawn into mutual criminal arrangements that involve protecting one another's business operations, performing heists and rescuing each other from their rivals. Illustrating the fusion of different cultural backgrounds, missions that see the three working together provide them with unique roles integral to overall success; Franklin, who begins the story as a car thief is usually the driver of a getaway vehicle while Trevor's history as an air force pilot sees him given airborne assignments which include spotting targets for Franklin or Michael using infared cameras. Together, they occupy a character wheel on the bottom right of the player's HUD as if providing a menu of different races and cultures that can be selected at will specifically for their special and unique abilities they bring to the whole. This focus on multicultural cooperation is only reinforced by the absence of character exclusive missions within the core story. The concept of multiple protagonists of varying race may have even contributed to the idea of setting the game in a city modeled after Los Angeles. Particularly considering that no other American city has had such long standing problems with both immigration and crime that have been argued countless times by individuals such as Manhattan Institute scholar Heather MacDonald to be far from mutually exclusive. According to her studies, 95 percent of homicide warrants were at one point solely targeted at illegal immigrants.

So what of the Los Santos itself? The Grand Theft Auto series has been long focused on creating believable cities for the player to occupy. But with the series now in its fifth generation, what separates each representation of a metropolis other than simply providing a different layout to explore? Over the course of playing GTAV, I found the best way of answering that was by comparing it to the depiction of New York in Grand Theft Auto IV (2008) which is vastly different both in aesthetics and personality. GTAIV is often remembered for its ultra-serious approach to representing New York by removing many of the more bizarre features that had emerged in Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas (2004). This included the ability to gain and lose weight, add and remove tattoos, hijack trains and jets and mow pedestrians down with a combine harvester. In their place was a far more depressing and moody game world with an almost completely grey colour palette while the story dealt with no-nonsense gangsters and deep-rooted psychological issues inherent to Nikko Bellic's past. This approach, while a departure from traditional Grand Theft Auto games, may have worked for a setting reminiscent of New York but Los Angeles requires a far different outlook that virtually demands a return to the more outlandish features of past titles in order to properly convey a more confused space.

To reflect the confused nature inherent to L.A., Los Santos is far more open and colourful than Liberty City. Night time reveals a neon drenched downtown, filled with nightclubs, bars and heavy use of building and streetlights that almost resembles the use of colour seen in Ridley Scott's Blade Runner (1982), a futuristic interpretation of a decaying Los Angeles. The streets are far wider with a greater amount of vegetation comprised of palm trees and forest surrounding the Vinewood Hills. This is not merely a stylistic choice based on the setting. This hypnotic blurring of colour serves as a reflection of the often nonsensical space the player occupies throughout the course of the story. Due to having multiple protagonists, the story continuously lurches from one scenario to the other as both environment and character change in the blink of an eye. At no point is this more obvious than the transition from Michael and Franklin sitting in the former's spacious, Italian Renaissance themed mansion watching a widescreen television to Trevor's messy trailer situated in the middle of the desert. Things only become more muddled as each character finds himself moving into spaces that do not reflect their backgrounds or personalities. Franklin suddenly finds himself in possession of a mansion in an area of the city usually reserved for celebrities while also being 'employed' by paparazzos and super rich car dealers. Likewise, Trevor becomes embroiled in real estate and mixes with the rich and famous when he is asked by a celebrity obsessed couple to steal possessions from film and music stars.

All of this gives the impression of a damaging shift between zones of cultural influence which is even depicted as having a dehumanising effect in Michael's case. The promise of the American dream that is so invitingly advertised by the Hollywood (or Vinewood) sign has become something of a nightmare. His transition from snowy North Yankton to Los Santos sees him landed with all manner of psychological issues that appear serious enough to warrant therapy sessions. Once Trevor tracks him down he routinely mocks his changed pursuit of a blissful family life commenting that the city itself has turned him 'soft'. Trevor himself appears to be the only character who is fully aware of the city's suffocating power as he airs his resentment for journeying to Los Santos while overlooking the night time lights with Wade.

From a gameplay perspective, the freedom offered to the player in this franchise is defined by excess - both literally and figuratively. But with this installment using a city like Los Angeles as it's template, there results a new kind of decadent chaos that has been absent in past titles. The absurdity of being able to fire rockets into oncoming traffic is nothing new in the Grand Theft Auto series except it now takes on a somewhat different meaning when dealing with a space so culturally murky. Michael is representative of a life of excess that is indicative of countless Hollywood celebrities that occupy Tinseltown. His broken marriage and two spoiled kids is a story that will have been heard many times by anyone remotely concerned with celebrity culture. He is shown to have a heavy drinking problem indicated by his penchant for expensive alcohol and is revealed by his (hypocritical) wife to be a cheat, apparently having had multiple affairs with off-screen prostitutes. While his behaviour is not unheard of, it is juxtaposed with the sheer lunacy of characters such as Poppy Mitchell - an actress who films a sex tape of herself purely for the sake of creating publicity. When she is discovered by the Franklin, she descends into a psychotic rage and is later involved in a high speed chase which leads to her arrest. This depiction of Hollywood's underbelly is made difficult to process by it being precisely the kind of meltdown that has become part of the fabric of being a real life celebrity. While Rockstar and the GTA series has long been known for creating exaggerated representations of everyday idiocy, this is a rare case of them getting it more or less exactly right. When seen up close in a work of fiction, the realisation of the reality the player is faced with in a game whose very reputation was once defined by unrealistic excess becomes rather disturbing.

It is for these reasons that the ability to go off mission and create havoc by staging showdowns with the cops now suddenly seems far more conventional than simply occupying this severely twisted city space. However it does serve as an example of the nonsensical nature of Los Angeles itself that the player is able to embark upon a drug fuelled rampage only to immediately follow it with a visit to the screening of a French art film.

When researching this essay, I asked for people's opinion of what life was like for the average resident of Los Angeles. The most persistent response I received was that the city looks after only those rich enough to afford a home above the traffic, noise and smog. Everyone below it is subjected to what Jack Kerouac described as a literal hell. But for all its negative aspects, it is a space that has created value for its inability to appear as something coherent. Its diversity and cultural richness has led to it being the unofficial hub from which virtually all other modes of expression originate in the United States. With countless explorations of the Hollywood system and the commentaries on race, immigration and crime that give birth to works such as Grand Theft Auto V, perhaps the identity of Los Angeles ultimately rests with what observers have to say about it.

“On the fifth day, which was a Sunday, it rained very hard. I like it when it rains hard. It sounds like white noise everywhere, which is like silence but not empty."

- Mark Haddon, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time

London’s Random International Art Gallery is home to quite a unique exhibition. In October 2012, they unveiled the ‘Rain Room’ where visitors can surround themselves with falling water while sensors in the room detect where the person is standing, keeping them dry. Described by the Daily Mail as encouraging the visitor to “put their trust in the work”, it provides a reminder of the way rain if so often perceived.

There are few things that have such an immediate effect on emotion and behaviour. For most, rain represents negative emotions such as depression, misery and stagnation. It becomes an element that hinders the progress of those who work outdoors or would simply prefer to traverse sidewalks without being drenched by passing cars. But as the Rain Room illustrates, rain itself is nothing to fear and can have far reaching and beautifully poetic attributes. For example, the opportunity to be surrounded by it can in itself have an enveloping sense of comfort on a person. Rain provides relief from drought and has a cleansing effect on the environment, nourishing it and encouraging growth.

It is for these more weighty symbolic interpretations that rain has long been at the forefront of an artist’s palette when staging visions that require a particular sense of immersion. For moving images, it began with film as a device to raise tension, set the tone of a story or create emotion for a pivotal scene. This is likely why so many of cinema’s most famous moments from Gene Kelly’s rendition of Singin’ in the Rain (1952) to Jurassic Park (1993) and its T-Rex attack were drenched to the gills.

For the modern computer age, water in general has been cited as one of the most difficult challenges for software to handle due to its unpredictable nature. Even so, long before films like The Abyss (1989) and The Day After Tomorrow (2004) made what are now considered breakthroughs in realistically rendered O2, game developers were dealing with it on an almost regular basis.

Japanese developer Taito’s racing game Continental Circus saw its original release to arcades in 1987 being later ported to the Atari ST and Commodore 64 in 1989. While certainly not the first title to showcase weather, it remains one of the earliest known examples where rain had a realistic and dynamic effect on the player’s experience. As a Formula 1 game, the player must traverse outdoor tracks that are susceptible to dynamically changing weather conditions. Similar to 1983’s Enduro and it’s day/night cycles, weather in Continental Circus shifts depending on the distance travelled by the player. From time to time, a thunderstorm will occur, prompting a ‘CHANGE TIRES’ alert to be displayed. Unless immediately entering the pits, the car’s traction will be nullified by the rain represented by a pixelated zebra-like pattern literally flooding the screen. Rainfall also leaves lasting effects on the condition of the track in the form of puddles of water after the storm has ended.

The game as viewed today also remains interesting as being a precursor to what would ultimately become the 3D representation of rainfall and its accumulating effect on the player’s experience within a virtual environment. Fast forward 26 years to Grand Theft Auto V (2013) and its use of rain can be identified as having its origins in its 1980s forbearers. Despite utilising radically more sophisticated technology, the end result is more or less unchanged. Rainfall occurs at random intervals, effects the handling of vehicles and leaves behind puddles of water on the streets of Los Santos. The only identifiable shift between the eras as far as weather is concerned is in the behaviour of the world itself. Technology now allows the reaction of non-player characters to changing weather conditions as pedestrians cover their heads and quickly dash towards nearby shelter. The allowance of subtle details like these allow the more realistic depiction of what is intended to be a living city due to the demand presented by the advent of complex technology. Nevertheless, Continental Circus and Grand Theft Auto V have more in common from a gameplay standpoint then one would initially believe.

Perhaps then, as the rain room again illustrated, the true power of rainfall in artistic works is through its use as a narrative and aesthetic tool. If rain as a gameplay element fundamentally ends at realistic depictions such as in Grand Theft Auto V, the potential for its ability to evoke mood, story and character would seem far more open ended.

Beginning in 2001, Max Payne is a franchise that relies more heavily on atmosphere than most other AAA brands – to the point where weather tells more of the story than Max himself. He begins his story in the original game having lost his wife and daughter in a tragic prologue level. As such, the world Max inhabits has been designed to reflect his grieving and negative outlook on life as he hunts for those responsible. Set in New York which itself is referred to as ‘Noir York’ via an in-game television show, the city is in the grip of the worst blizzard in decades. As the cold, bitter tone of the setting serves to reflect Max’s state of mind, snow becomes part of the narrative as the storm gets progressively worse approaching the finale. “A hint of desperation had crept into the snowstorm, as if it was trying to get it all out before the end” narrates Max while ascending Aesir Corporation’s headquarters.

The use of snow rather than rain for atmospheric effect in the first Max Payne was a necessary choice both as a psychological plot point and also as a metaphor for the mounting trauma he endures over the course of the story. As Max sinks down into his own personal hell, the snow too becomes deeper and less manageable representing the continuously mounting odds. Max Payne 2: The Fall of Max Payne (2003) evolves the concept of weather as metaphor by replacing snow with rain to illustrate the wasteful aftermath of the original game’s ending as what remains of Max’s life is quite literally washed away.

Returning in Max Payne 2 was one of the most memorable characteristics of the original - its use of a graphical novel rather than cut scenes to convey a moving story. Comparisons are often made to Frank Miller’s Sin City publication in both its dark colour pallet and its use of rain as a persistent presence. Due to Miller’s heavy use of contrast, characters and rainfall are most often coloured white against a black background giving an almost melting quality to each frame, as if the page itself is torn or decaying. Max Payne 2 borrows the same tactic – placing characters within a frame and superimposing layers of rain that obscures any recognisable aspect beyond the characters themselves. Like many of Miller’s characters the point rammed home is that Max does not embody the role of idealistic hero, existing purely for his own needs rather than those of the world around him. By being blurred out of the frame and leaving behind only the basic act of murder as his defining characteristic, rainfall becoming a barrier to any sense of normality. The commonalities between the original game’s plot involving a wider political conspiracy and the manufacturing of narcotics cease to exist.

Accentuating Max’s deteriorating mental state within the game engine is rain’s effect on the setting itself, now far more decrepit and nihilistic than before. Remaining mired in slum neighbourhoods, abandoned warehouses and Max’s own dingy apartment building for the duration of the story, the constant rainfall becomes more penetrative as the story goes on. Beginning with an expert use of sound, rain can be heard falling onto the roofs of darkened hospitals and disused restaurants containing skylights where the beating effect on the glass is imbued with an uncanny sense of desperation. Once the environments progress to the slums, water actively penetrates the environment through cracks in the ceiling, broken windows and fire damaged roofs as if nature seeks to reclaim a world and individuals no longer fit to exist. It is also for this reason that Max Payne 2 is arguably the best example of a game making artistic use of rain’s cleansing and purifying qualities – quite a feat for a game with such a murky sense of atmosphere.

While all of these examples have made heavy use of rainfall as an active characteristic in an environment or story, SCE Japan’s aptly named Rain (2013) released on the PlayStation Network is among the first to take a meteorological phenomena and give it a personality of its own. Taking the role of a nameless boy, the player must guide him through a rain drenched neighbourhood to investigate after spotting the silhouette of a young girl. While not promoting rain as something empowering or welcoming as the Rain Room had done, the game instead expertly taps into the common perceptions of fear in relation to weather and weaves them into the fabric of the gameplay. After discovering the girl is able to turn invisible, the boy finds that the rain exposes him to threats from the various creatures that stalk him unless he takes shelter, rending him detectable only by his watery footprints. Where rain becomes a character is in its manifestation of the enemies the boy must avoid. Instead of appearing as something with a solid mass, creatures seem to be composed of the rain itself possessing an ethereal and almost ghostly appearance.

The implication is that rain is a living presence rather than simply an event with no coherent order. By being given a watery quality, enemies offer the impression of being born out of a sentient form of life actively seeking harm against the player’s character. The need to hide under shelter represents the natural instinct to seek safety as dry areas are represented as sanctuaries where rain cannot reach. Nevertheless, there remains the need to reach the next stage of the game which means braving a dash between shelters, while quietly hoping for a quick resolve. The interruption to the fluidity of movement and purpose among various forms of life when rain begins to fall is poetically invoked in a threatening but deceptively attractive game world.

If there is any truth to the commentary provided by the Rain Room, the real power of an element traditionally held as something to be avoided is only paid tribute when applied to various works of art. This should be taken as yet another testament to the ability offered by video games as a developing art form to give life to something otherwise ignored as a routine or expected aspect of daily life. Of course, not all titles recognise this. When writing his review for Rain, Tom Mc Shea summed up the importance of the game’s reliance on its titular effect with the words; “Without the rain, you're nothing.” Although describing gameplay mechanics, this statement conjures up those that sometimes fail to properly respect the ability of immersion on offer. One particular example that persists is World of Warcraft (2004)’s addition of weather during its vanilla era where rain and other weather effects are only barely noticeable, having no effect on the player, or the world around them – a jarring oversight in a game with an otherwise outstanding sense of atmosphere.

Regardless, such examples are few and far between. With storytelling and technology both constantly evolving, there can be no doubt that rain and the elements in general will become a presence impossible to ignore as simple ambience when creating interactive entertainment.

When I was a child, my interest in popular music was next to zero. I was not in touch with popular musical trends or what was in the charts. There were bands and songs that would be sung by my classmates that I had never heard of. But I didn't mind because while music was popular with my friends, my interests lay squarely within the realm of games. Rather than spending time in my bedroom socialising with generic background R&B music playing, as they would often do, I would be killing aliens and blowing up spaceships on Cannon Fodder and Raptor: Call of the Shadows. I thought anyone who preferred talking to other human beings was bonkers. It's ironic then that games were my first exposure to the power of music.

For me a massive part of music is it's association with imagery. Cannon Fodder came to my attention first with the opening title song 'War Has Never Been So Much Fun' juxtaposed with cartoonish images of stubby, fat soldiers yelling at each other while also splicing them into real black and white backgrounds of battlefields during the introductory cinemtatic. The game's attitude to war took a satirical approach that reduced soldiers to caricatures and war to a sport where the menu screen even had a score board with each side's death count labeled as 'home' and 'away'. But the tone quickly becomes more serious as the main menu consists of a green hill with grave stones representing each soldier you had lost on various levels. Accompanying this was a sad, melancholic instrumental theme. This ingenious use of music and image created the intentional contradiction between the blasé attitude to death so often seen in various forms of entertainment - illustrated by the opening sequence next to the seriousness of the sheer numbers now seen buried on the hillside. Interpreted today, this was a game highlighting the gung-ho attitude of soldiers in John Wayne war films, which often featured absurdly patriotic musical themes and then replacing that with the kind of brutal honesty they so often avoid.

The images of your dead and their sad musical theme sap the pleasure from the disproportionate score board.

Raptor: Call of the Shadows didn't have the satirical message of Cannon Fodder but had a soundtrack designed specifically to create adrenaline for the game's fast paced and hectic aerial combat. The soundtrack expertly weaved between a bombastic military theme that wouldn't be out of place in a Michael Bay movie to more suspenseful build ups consisting of a slowly rising beat as the jet approaches the final boss of each sector. The speed and tone of the music generated nothing short of panic during the more intense moments when waves upon waves of enemy fighters are attacking the player's lone jet and they try to resist dropping their last megabomb that they were saving for the boss. This is still a prime example of music creating emotion appropriate to gameplay rather than story instead of the reverse readily favoured by modern fantasy games for ambient effect.

Fights often become a ballet of gunfire and explosions.

As much as I enjoyed the music in both of these titles, I was not exposed to a soundtrack containing actual lyric driven songs for a game until 1999's Sonic Adventure for the Dreamcast. This was also one of the first 3D adventure game I had ever played. The soundtrack consisted of the screaming guitars and lightening fast drum solos of Crush 40 to accentuate the speed of Sonic's levels. As he would charge down a ramp suspended in mid-air on the Windy Valley stage you would be treated to a searing combination of guitars and vocals that created not only adrenaline but a sense of the power of speed rather than simply speed itself - that by going fast enough your could run up vertical walls and jump hundreds of feet into the air. The game's snowboarding sequence featured a punk rock theme you would associate with snowboarding culture that would rise and fall each time Sonic performed a spectacular stunt on his board while plummeting down the mountain's cliff faces and landing without a scratch. The game's music revealed itself as having the ability to represent heroes able to do truly extraordinary things and it was the music that gave their actions weight, not the fact that Sonic was just incredibly fast or that you were playing a game that was far removed from reality. The final boss fight between Super Sonic and Perfect Chaos is nothing short of a titanic clash between two god-like beings whose power to inspire owes a great debt to the song 'Open Your Heart' that plays during the fight. The song begins with two powerful strikes of guitar strings that serve as the bell ring to start the fight while also illustrating the finality of the struggle between these two immensely powerful characters - Super Sonic, when traveling fast enough, is able to run on water while Chaos had destroyed an entire city moments before. The song then allows riffs and drums to take over.

It's a wonderful combination of music and action that create a power even the best action movies seldom achieve. Once I had beaten Chaos I felt like I had just run a marathon - that I had achieved something truly epic. And ultimately that's the games magic. It's expert use of music allows the player to truly take on the role of a hero rather than merely controlling a hero. I wanted to do all the things that Sonic was doing in the game. I wanted to be able to perform impossible jumps and run up walls to the sound of guitars more than anything else in the world just to show what the power of the game's music had built up inside me - an urging to do something spectacular. This was the experience that inspired me to get into heavy metal music as I began looking for new and different ways to replicate it. I loved the promotion of heroic ideals and the message of triumph over adversity and so it wasn't long before I was listening to power metal bands like Helloween and Dragonforce.

Inspired by a heavy metal song, Super Sonic (and the player) charge at Perfect Chaos who dwarfs the heroic hedgehog.

I wouldn't say that modern use of music in games is any better or worse today but it is very different. With so many games relying on atmosphere these days, It's difficult to find a game that actively makes use of a strong soundtrack. Games like World of Warcraft and F.E.A.R. feature outstanding musical scores but only for the purposes of creating a world that is vibrant and absorbing rather than attempting to illicit strong emotions from the gamer inherent to the perils and trials of what your character faces. After all, we do put computer game characters through some very tough times, it's only fair that they should have some encouragement with their own fist pumping theme song. One of the few recent example I can name is Alan Wake. The soundtrack to the game is a corker featuring the likes of David Bowie and Poets of the Fall who also wrote songs for Remedy's Max Payne 2. The character of Alan Wake is a man constantly pushed to the edge of his sanity by the surreal situations he faces on each level and the songs were specifically chosen for their equally surrealistic content. As Wake grows increasingly detached from reality, it's no wonder that the game ends with the lyrics 'ground control to major Tom'...

As games become more and more like movies in their cinematic content and developers continue hiring professional film composers more often, what I'd ultimately like to see is developers willing to approach their scores with an eye for creating positive and negative emotion rather than simply integrating them into the atmosphere of the level and songs are a great way of doing so. Otherwise, music becomes exactly what my friends listened to in their bedrooms - background music.