It’s funny how an obsession gets started. Decades ago, when our hair was long, I remember looking through the record collection of Henry Cow’s guitarist, Fred Frith. The record which tilted my world axis was Toru Takemitsu’s November Steps, which was included on the fourth side of a double LP of Messiaen’s Turangalila Symphony. Flute playing would never be the same after getting sandblasted by Katsuya Yokoyama’s shakuhachi. But there was more: Fred also played me Japanese chamber music for koto and shakuhachi. A strangely chilly music, formal, full of space – it made no sense at all, but I was drawn like a moth. I still fail to understand why a 17th century piece like “Rokudan” spoke so clearly to me. But in autumn 2020, after viewing Christopher Nolan’s movie Tenet, I can hazard a guess that it was a message direct from my future self – the self that, this week, has been recording music for The Sims computer game.

The Sims is the same age as the millennium, its first incarnation appearing in 2000. As a game, it invites you to play God while showing off your taste in architecture. You create a bunch of characters, dress them, design where they live and turn them loose to pursue hobbies, find partners, or, even more realistically, screw everything up. The story goes that game designer Will Wright lost his California home and everything in it during the 1991 Oakland firestorm, barely escaping with his life as the fire raged towards the house. As Wright examined his feelings about replacing his home, he considered offering the same experience to gamers in a witty, somewhat satirical form. Consumer culture is presented as a feather-light gag; it’s an endless catalogue, dreamt up by someone who was surprised how little he missed all his past possessions.

And like all computer games, there’s music everywhere. This autumn I’ve been surprised to find myself playing shakuhachi on the soundtrack for a yet-to-be released Sims expansion pack set in Japan. Forgive me for going hazy over the detail, but as a humble session muso I’m at the bottom of the pyramid and I don’t get told very much – hopefully I’m not breaching confidentiality rules when I say there’s going to be a Japanese ski resort, and a teahouse. The music is written by British composer Ilan Eshkeri, whose movie credits include Alan Partridge: Alpha Papa and Keanu Reeves’s 47 Ronin – could there be a better CV for the job?

On a more serious note, Eshkeri has been fantastic to work with. There are multiple problems writing for traditional instruments, problems of minimal interest to anyone apart from the poor musician struggling to jam a simple length of bamboo into the mighty orchestral tradition of Richard Strauss and John Williams. My shakuhachi for example – though much of this also applies to koto, shamisen, or, for all I know, the kora or Paraguayan harp – is designed to create special timbres within a single note, or move around inside a mode. The Western flute’s nimble acrobatics, trampolining in any key you like, are from another world entirely. And yet composers are asked to render their music ‘authentic’, so somehow the shakuhachi must join the orchestras and choirs partying on the soundtrack. “They want it authentic like Benihana,” ran our in-house joke, referencing the shouty, knife-flashing chain of Japanese steak restaurants. Eshkeri did his best to understand our instruments and adapt his music to be playable by them, and for this I was grateful.

In 2019 I worked with Eshkeri on another game, Ghost Of Tsushima for the PlayStation 4. This is a vast, open-world blockbuster set in medieval Japan. As the player, you’re a lone samurai battling the invading Mongol hordes. Every move you make, every menacing forest you explore, there’s music. Eshkeri produced reams of it: titles like “Combat System 5 Endings” or “Kill Ryuzo” tumbled from my printer. This is not like a film score, as every choice you make can trigger different music. As you run through a forest, the sound design swirls around you, and that’s not just any old wind you hear in the trees. The game designers boasted of having visited Kyushu in west Japan to record the wind, the insects, the sea. I began to get an idea of the oceanic budget when I offered to contact several taiko drummers based in the UK, the same drummers that played on Wes Anderson’s Isle Of Dogs. “That’s OK,” came the reply, “We’re recording our drummers in Tokyo next week.”

One summer session, I found myself in the RAK studio in St Johns Wood in London, established by Mickie Most. I was super excited, as Mickie (born Michael Hayes) was a founding father of British pop. He produced The Moody Blues’ “Go Now” and The Nashville Teens’ “Tobacco Road”, long before he was 30. Alone in the live room, I basked in the historic vibe, while attempting to play “Confronting Ryuzo 5” in tune. It was here that I met several of the Ghost Of Tsushima designers, eager young men from a company called Sucker Punch. I asked when the game might appear, and they laughed bitterly. Little did I know that thousands of gamers were slavering online over this very question. Eventually Ghost Of Tsushima sold 2.4 million copies in its July 2020 opening weekend, and everyone was pleased (apart from parents of 12 year olds, who are not supposed to play an 18-rated game).

The Sims is another game with multiple millions of players, figures only swollen by lockdown, and stats suggest that over half are female. The general feel of the game is bright and chirpy, but there can be a weird side. I watch a video by a woman in Australia called Deli: she sets up a big suburban house full of characters, and leaves it running for 24 hours – that’s a year in Sims time – while she does something else. When she checks back in, food and electricity have long since run out, and green puddles of rotting matter are visible in every room. Most characters have died, many in accidents involving folding beds. Deli’s breezy conclusion is that those beds needed fixing. A couple of videos later she’s recommending Sims expansion packs called Pets and Parenthood: they make cool gifts, says Deli with no discernible irony.

The music for our Japanese Sims adventure comes in three types: pop songs, teahouse tunes and stings. Each piece may be delivered in four different intensities, ranging from an orchestral rampage to a flute solo; however, that’s organised in ‘post’ (post-production) by the mixing engineer, so not my problem. Eshkeri bases his pop songs on fragments of Japanese folk tunes, to ensure they’re readily playable. The stings are tiny, two second pieces that highlight a significant event. So I duly play “Wildlife Encounters Centipede Attack”, also “Death Vending Machine Crushed”, and my favourite, “Denkimushi [electric insect] Attack.” I’ve been forewarned that when two Sims go to bed together, it’s a big deal, and therefore marked with a special “Woohoo” sting. And here indeed, at the end of six pages of stings, is “Woohoo Rough” - a rather beautiful tune, in fact.

The teahouse music is more of a poser, needing to be dignified and a tad classical (none of us musicians have seen any visuals at all). In discussion with Eshkeri and Melissa Holding (our koto player) we agree they should be based on Japanese chamber pieces, eg “Rokudan”. We send off a couple of tentative demos, and word comes back from Sims HQ that sparse is good, and “plodding tempo” is bad. Hmmm, OK. So we semi-improvise, using material from our favourite classical tunes. Suddenly I flash back to Fred Frith’s vinyl-strewn living room: I’m now deep inside that same 17th century music, trying to deconstruct and reassemble it for a function – cartoon people at a tea ceremony? – that I can only guess at. Not for the first time I feel I have very little idea what I’m doing, but I hope that if I play with conviction the music will sound natural and appropriate.

Another level of complication is introduced by the fact that, thanks to the pandemic, we can’t go into a recording studio. “Can you record yourself at home?” I am asked. “Or if necessary we can take control of your laptop and engineer the session remotely.” Ha, I snort, do you take me for a wimp, sir? Of course I can engineer myself. I was wrong about that. I’ve now learned an important lesson, that recording studios are fine places not only because they have sofas, coffee, a cat and a supply of banter. When you’re attempting to improvise a three minute piece with a koto player 50 miles away, and she keeps stopping and starting (aka sparse, see above), we badly need to be in the same room, with eye contact, and my attention needs to be entirely on the performance and not the recording levels, or worrying about did I unmute that other thing? I have learned that when recording at home, everything takes roughly three times as long. Next time: please, take control of my laptop.

Some musicians play recording sessions all the time, and start to get twitchy if they’re not checking into Abbey Road or AIR Lyndhurst (the late George Martin’s Hampstead place) several days a week. For me, these trips are a rare treat. The novelty has never worn off, and I remain fascinated by the process, the engineering, and how the composer, under huge pressure to deliver at speed, relates to everyone else. Being a tiny cog in a mega-project like Ghost Of Tsushima is just weirdly satisfying. And it’s not only that I can impress game-obsessed adolescents with my résumé – within the world of the game itself, playing the shakuhachi is featured as an activity (this, actually, is true to Japanese history: samurai often played shakuhachi to pass the time, or cultivate a Zen spirit). All you do is (it says here) swipe left on the DualShock 4’s touchpad, and your Ghost protagonist takes a break from slaughtering his enemies, hunkers down and blows. But why? It doesn’t add to your powers, distract enemies or even wound anyone, so bewildered gamers have asked, “Does playing the shakuhachi do anything?” I was so delighted to see an online article under this headline. It holds up a large part of my professional career for existential debate, and the answer, I felt, might be lengthy and subtle. Wrong again. The answer is a simple one: no.