Hi there! I’m Cherie, a writer who focuses on the intersection of music and technology. On a higher level, I’m interested in how technology and tech companies impact the way artists make a living, build their brands and reach fans. Games have served as an indispensable player in this equation over the past few decades, providing both an immersive creative playground for artists and a lucrative business model for music companies and rights holders. In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic in particular, games and game worlds have emerged as potential digital alternatives to in-person concert venues, and as outlets for entirely new paradigms of interactive, at-home entertainment for music lovers. In this column, I’ll explore the theoretical concepts and real-world case studies that are shaping how these hybrid music-game experiences are coming to life today, with the hopes of opening up your mind to what’s possible within this fast-growing, fast-changing ecosystem.
In-game concerts, such as Travis Scott’s shows in Fortnite and Open Pit’s festivals in Minecraft, have become the pinnacle of a new generation of immersive musical entertainment amidst the COVID-19 pandemic. Key benefits of this paradigm include the ability to design fantastical, larger- than-life, immersive environments without the physical constraints of the real world, as well as more interactive, self-directed experiences that are central to the player experience in any game.
But there’s a whole, separate layer of spectatorship that has been largely untapped to date. Namely, logging into the game directly isn’t the only way to watch an in-game concert. Fans can also experience the show one level removed, by watching other players stream the concert in real time on a live-streaming platform like Twitch, YouTube or Facebook. This creates a situation where players, not just artists, can also be performers; putting their own interactions with and perspectives on the concert on display for others to consume.
The notion of a game player as a performer has roots both in academic game research and in real- world case studies. In her 2009 paper Play’s The Thing, researcher Clara Fernández-Vara explains that the way a player actively interacts with a given game environment, trying to figure out and enact the game’s mechanics in real time, inherently makes them a performer, like an actor manifesting the directions of a written screenplay onstage. In turn, “video games can have a spectatorship,” says Fernández-Vara. “The player performs as she plays, so other people can watch that performance too.”
This concept is already normalised in the world of esports. Prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, championship tournaments for games like Overwatch and League Of Legends regularly sold out stadiums and arenas around the world with a five-figure capacity in days or even seconds — an achievement any modern music celebrity dreams of.
