Genre in Genre: The Role of Music in Music Games

The first academic researchers of music and dance games focused their primary attentions on ethnographic observations of game play, how the shift from arcade to console play affects game play strategies, defining embodied aesthetics, and analyzing the rise of a competitive play circuit in Dance Dance Revolution fan culture [Chan; Demers, 2006; Smith, 2004; Behrenshausen, 2007]. The Dance Dance Revolution franchise has attracted the attention of both academic researchers and members of the education and medical establishments, who wish to harness the power of exergaming in physical education classes to combat rising levels of childhood obesity. Less attention has been by academic researchers to the economics of the production of these games or the ways that the management of track lists, genres, and artists in music games affects gamers’ opinions of these titles and their evaluation of the relationship between a game’s core mechanics and in-game outcomes. This paper analyzes the ways that game publishers and developers create and license the music for games such as Flow: Urban Dance Uprising, Band Mashups, the Guitar Hero, Rock Band and Dance Dance Revolution franchises, and the forthcoming titles Scratch and DJ Hero. Critics’ and gamers’ complaints about the use of “soundalikes” to replace the master recordings by original artists along with recent attempts from Warner Music to push for increased licensing fees point to ongoing controversies over in-game music and the industrial relationships between the gaming industry, the recording industry, and performance rights organizations such as ASCAP, BMI, and SESAC. This paper also examines how particular genres of music create difficulties for game design, constructing the relationship between on-screen content, the player, and game peripherals, and for players working to make sense of the relationship between their musical and gaming tastes. Examples I discuss include blog reactions to the introduction of country music as downloadable content in Rock Band, the lukewarm reception given THQ’s Band Mashups, fan and critical ruminations over the potential success or failure of the turntable peripheral in Scratch and DJ Hero, and the difficulties of mapping hip hop into the dance game in Flow! Urban Dance Uprising. Reactions to the introduction of country music in Rock Band ran the gamut, with many bloggers and online fans expressing frustration that the visual culture of the game and its embrace of rock culture militated against the inclusion of country music. Likewise, many gamers and critics were bewildered by Band Mashups, a game that simulated a battle of the bands and a battle of musical genres. Even the deceptively simple Dance Dance Revolution franchise illustrates the difficulty of managing the track list for each title. The need for genre diversity and for a range of songs with varying numbers of beats per minute to satisfy inexperienced, intermediate, and advanced players illustrates the need for designers to have at least an elementary knowledge of musicology and/or musical form. Perhaps the most interesting example of a music game’s failure is Flow! Urban Dance Uprising. This game, developed by Artificial Mind and Movement and published by Ubisoft, illustrates the difficulty of mapping hip hop onto a DDR style game. The biggest problem with Flow wasn’t the paucity of A-list artists and a track list that privileged lesser known songs that were hard to groove to, but the ways that game designers made few significant modifications to the core mechanic of the dancing game. In Flow, it is a stretch to think that the diegetic operator acts of the player bear any “realistic” relationship to the “machinic embodiments” of the onscreen avatar’s breakdancing moves [Galloway, 2006]. Players seem willing to suspend disbelief that the scrolling arrows in DDR match up exactly to the movements of the player on the pad and the movements of the onscreen avatar, but the complicated breakdancing moves performed by the avatar in Flow substantively challenge the relationship of action and outcome that Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman [2004] posit as critical to designing meaningful play. Author