Fun Inc. by Tom Chatfield

Author:Tom Chatfield
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Pegasus Books
Published: 2011-12-13T13:32:00.367000+00:00

CHAPTER 8

Second lives

In September 2009, the first-ever licensed use of the music of the Beatles outside of their own albums and compilations arrived in the form of – what else? – a video game. The Beatles: Rock Band was released to what can only be described as hysterical approval and represents the peak, so far, of one of the youngest and most astonishingly successful trends in gaming – its encroachment not only into the music industry, but into the whole notion of lifestyle and media consumption, in a manner far broader and more powerful than anything ever considered the terrain of a ‘game’.

The Rock Band games, of which there are now five (plus six expansion ‘track packs’) are essentially an extremely sophisticated offshoot of multimedia karaoke. Players accompany hit songs on vocals, guitars and drums, and are awarded points and feedback for the quality of their performance. It sounds standard enough. Yet, in these games, popular music is being made available for consumption in a form that has never existed before: an interactive form, broken down by instruments and vocals, and complete with a sophisticated interface that will train listeners to play along with every note, record and grade their every effort, and allow them and their friends to get about as close as is humanly possible to the experience of being, for the length of one track, a member of the Beatles.

Rock Band makes an MP3 recording seem about as limiting and primitive as a wax disk. Along with other similar titles like the Guitar Hero and SingStar series, it has already revolutionised the music market, having achieved over a billion dollars of sales, 50 million song downloads and 10 million copies sold. And that’s just the Rock Band games – and it’s also just the beginning. For the experience these products can offer in comparison to traditional media is simply unrivalled. In an age where the cost of non-interactive media is rapidly tending towards zero, it suggests that such innovations should be pretty much irresistible to any company wanting to offer their consumers a service they can actually charge for. Think of what a customer now expects from even an up-to-date television service. Simply being able to flick between a hundred, or even a thousand, channels is no longer enough. Users expect programmes on-demand; an up-to-date programme schedule and information service; the option of recording and rewinding multiple programmes, of organising their recordings, and setting them days or weeks in advance; they expect to be able to manage their account options, hardware configuration, software set-up and preferences. None of this is a game in any strict sense, yet this is a distinction which is becoming more blurred by the day; for, in every aspect of interaction, it’s video games above all that are both defining expectations and setting the standard for new technology.

Games, moreover, are becoming a seriously revolutionary force for many more fields than music. Take the 2009 game Ghostbusters, a product whose relationship with the two

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