background music reactive games
In this paper, we discuss the concept of games that react to their background music. Instead of limiting the player to a fixed set of songs, the background music can be any song chosen from the player's own music collection. Due to the relative simplicity of such existing game titles, we wanted to explore the potential of the concept more broadly in both digital audio and MIDI domains. Mappings between several musical and game parameters were studied by modifying two open-source games to react to their background music. The feedback collected with the game prototypes suggests that players appreciate the concept and find it entertaining. Based on the feedback and our experiments with different mappings, we present a set of design considerations for background music reactive games. The concept can be used to bring new life to existing games, and even a trivial game can be made interesting if the player can affect the game by changing the background music to his or her favorite song.
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