Blog - DJ games
Tuesday, January 19, 2010I just got DJ Hero this weekend, and feel like I can finally write all the stuff I've wanted to write about it since the moment I first heard it was going to exist... behold as I begin the week of DJ-game related writings!
Fun fact: I used to be a DJ professionally. Not long-- just as a brief stint over a summer or two back when I was in high school.
However, I got really into it. And given as I'm also very much into games (also professionally) seems like these DJ games like DJ Hero and Scratch: The Ultimate DJ would be a winning combination, right?
Well, no. Frankly, I'm a little disappointed. Don't get me wrong-- they sounded decently fun, and I had to buy DJ Hero. But I'm be slightly disappointed all the same:
First of all, I've been burned by DJ games before.
Some of them are just electronic or hip-hop music themed rhythm action games simply claiming the player is a DJ to try to provide some kind of motivation or backstory, despite the fact that the mechanics have almost nothing to do with anything resembling DJing.
A few flash "DJ games" I found just now as I started to write this... weren't "games" at all-- just simulations of DJ equipment: Mixers, turntables etc.
No goal or challenge- just toys to play with. Okay, fine.
Add actual gameplay to that and you have a small but varied collection of games based around scratching and mixing -- of which the two titles above are no doubt the most ambitious works of this style to date.
Here's the thing:
Almost all the DJing games I know of involve record scratching.
I guess that's the image people have in their head of DJs. I don't blame them-- scratching is freakin' cool, when done well.
Games are often about selling a fantasy to the player, and this DJ fantasy seems to be common. I totally hear all of you that it sounds like it'd be really fun to have a turntable controller and just go nuts with the "wikiwikiwiki" kinda scratching fun in a video game.
Hell, through my electronic hobby experimentation fun, I turned an old Sony Discman I bought for $2 at a Goodwill into a sort of scratchable CD player-- I'll be the first to admit that my main inspiration for doing so was that scratching a CD like a vinyl record sounded like a ton of fun. I also play with virtual turntables in my music making, occasionally even linking them via MIDI to the pitch-wheel of my keytar so I can 'scratch' while playing live.
The problem is that scratching is turntablism, not DJing.
Many DJs engage in turntablism, sure. But in the sense that in games we should be concerned with the verbs --what the player DOES in the game--
I find it interesting that many people mentally equate the verb of turntablism with DJing -- a verb in it's own right.
Which brings me to another fun fact: I was a professional DJ and I've never even USED turntables for either mixing or scratching.
All the magic happened for me with two CD players and a mixer.
There are many DJs out there who do not use turntables.
Then there's the phenomenon of remixing to cause further confusion.
Not to mention star DJ/musicians too -- you may have never been personally there for, say, a night Fatboy Slim DJed a set-- but you no doubt have heard some of his music in movies and television commercials and many other places.
Sure, a lot of DJs will create remixes, mashups, or entirely new electronic music compositions, and/or anything in between. And since remixes and mashups, (or hell, even just creating grooves through backbeat techniques) can all be created on he fly by a very skilled DJ-- the lines can get a little blurry...
But, er, if you want to argue semantics-- none of those are at all required in DJing either. They're related fields, or tools in a handbag of DJ tricks, rather than the actual verb of DJing itself (which is, extremely simply put, just playing a set of pre-recorded music for a crowd.)
So okay, cool: scratching != DJing and ReMixing != DJing.
Who cares?
Didn't I already say scratching was fun? And ReMixing could be (and in some cases already has been) made into a pretty cool game too.
Frequency, for example, includes both-- and it's one of my favorite games!
So why do I care?
My beef is that I think nobody realizes what they're missing out on by ignoring the most fundamental level of what a DJ does.
Sure, scratching and remixing are the flashiest, edgiest parts of the whole DJ culture. But that's just the surface-level gloss-- which admittedly video games as a medium tend to get obsessed with in general (graphics race, anyone?)
I was just a DJ at the most basic level, without any of that. In fact, when I tell people I used to DJ, I usually add to it by saying I was "the lame kind" of DJ-- the type that does wedding receptions, birthday parties, etc.
In that role all I did was entertain a crowd, often through (but not completely limited to!) playing popular music.
Again-- no turntables, so I couldn't do anything fancy like scratch or back-beat.
And that kind of crowd isn't the type for mashups or remixes-- Hell, I mostly played oldies!
But I loved it. It was incredibly fun.
See-- the reason I'm sad that all DJ games turn into the more obvious points of scratching or remixing... is because I've seen how much of a game DJing in its purest form actually is.
Being a DJ is playing a fantastic strategy game--
First, you can observe the game system (people at a dance club).
You have a really unique form of input: a case of records, and a couple turntables/CD players to play them on. (Music selection as a form of UI!)
If the old chestnut about a game being a series of interesting decisions needs to be brought up... well, you've got a whole case of records to choose from. How will you decide what to play?
Contrary to what you may believe-- if a DJ is worth anything, he's not just throwing on records willy-nilly, or playing what he wants to hear at the time.
There's a reason he's getting paid for what he does: he's in a friggin' chess game, observing every pawn on the dance floor, noting their every move, and his mind is racing, already several moves (read: songs) ahead. Keep in mind a professional DJ has a goal-- to entertain people through dancing. To aid in this quest, he has a visible score: the number of people on the dance floor. So, essentially a DJ's goal becomes a quest to lure everyone onto the dance floor. But how to reach this fabled high score?
How to DJ Right was my strategy guide, and I regularly poured over its suggested tactics:
-Get the women dancing first, as men largely dance only to try to pick up women. Focus early energies on attracting women to the floor.
-The importance of proper pacing -- warm up slowly (when people first arrive at a club they usually want a few drinks before they'll dance-- the floor needs to build up slow, over time) and building up to feverish climaxes.
-Knowing when and how to boot people off the floor rather than gain them-- again, using only music.
-Etc.
And before you think this game is too stuffy and intellectual of a game (I did compare it to chess just then...), then let me assure you it also involves skill and even brief moments of twitch play-- sure, there are stretches of time where only your mind is racing, trying to strategize what songs to play next-- but when it comes to actually finally mixing the tracks together, that takes some definite player skill.
Beat-matching is notoriously difficult to learn... and you'd be surprised at how much the timing of your crossover into the next song impacts what the crowd does.
It can be the difference between night and day.
Fun classic DJ trick, just to show you there's a lot more going on in a DJs head than you perhaps realized:
People often think to themselves "Oh I'll leave after this song." either because they're tired or they just happen to like that song, or what have you.
This is the reason DJs have a ton of tricks up their sleeves to blend between songs and blur the lines-- if you can't tell when exactly a song ended, you have already missed your window and started dancing in another song-- maybe you'll say to yourself "well, after THIS onen, then..." ...crossfading, beatmatching, even skillfully done mashup DJing can be used to take control of the system without the dancers even knowing they're being manipulated. All thanks to a honed sense of timing and a masterful control of he DJ's hardware (the cross-fader, the play and pause buttons, etc.)
I've always wanted to design a game that represents DJing in this light.
One of my designer friends suggested that feedback wouldn't be immediate enough to work as a video game.
Oh, really? You'd be surprised.
Perfectly time the mix in to just the right song, and the crowd goes nuts. And that's an understatement-- the best way I can describe it is "It's like you just gave everyone in the room a simultaneous orgasm".
Seriously. I've never experienced anything else like it-- I've been a comedian/actor and made an audience explode into laughter and applause... the few times I've nailed the right track as a DJ beat those experiences, hands down.
But play the wrong song and you can have your floor clear out nearly instantly, with a lot of grumbling, maybe some booing.
So sure, you can have your turntablist scratching play with your turntable controller peripherals-- but I just feel disappointed because it's like my old friend is being neglected or sold out. There's so much more depth to DJing-- and a depth that is very similar already to a game system, no less!-- that DJ games all seem to be missing out on.
That's why I'm disappointed all the more that DJ Hero is starting to be seen as a flop. Now that I've played it, I'll admit that on top of my initial hesitations indicated by the whole rest of this entry-- the game has some real design issues. But I WANT it to succeed-- because I want to see my dream of a DJ game come true someday, and one major flop could be the nail in the coffin for the genre before it even gets a chance to ever really exist in the first place.
Labels: DJ games
posted by Brian Shurtleff @ 8:41 PM
0 Comments: