Blog - The Similarities Between a DJ and a Game Designer
Wednesday, January 20, 2010After making my weekly design challenge game Warm-Up DJ a year ago, I had thought it would be fitting to discuss some of the interesting crossovers between the art of DJing and the art of game design.
This essay got a bit lost in the mix though and so I'm only wrapping it up just now.
Thought it was a fitting addition for my DJs and Games theme week...
So here you are -- How DJs are like Game Designers (and vice versa):
In both disciplines, one creates an experience, largely a "fun" one, for the participants. Specific decisions are made which are used to try and establish the right mood and pacing.
In both cases, the goal is immersion. A game designer keeps players immersed in a game and a DJ keeps players immersed in dancing.
If people don't get immersed in a game, they won't tell their friends about it, and the game won't get played.
For a DJ, immersion is just as critical. Some rare exceptions aside, people just won't dance unless there's already people dancing. Dancing by yourself is strange and embarrassing, but if everyone is doing it and you can hide inside the crowd, and have fun.
So, just like how a game needs a good hook, a DJ needs to find the hooks that get his audience to join the dance floor. In this case, it's finding just the right song to get that first group excited to dance. Here, however, is one of the differences: they say a game should be fun within the first 5 minutes, but when it comes to dancing, people don't want to dance within the first 5 minutes of arriving at the club. The DJ must wait for her moment to strike, but when that time comes, she needs a hook just the same.
Just as there are forces that break immersion in a game, giving players excuses to break away from the game at times the designer may not desire, there are similar forces at play for a DJ to overcome. For example, people will often decide to stop dancing "as soon as this song is over."
The good DJ has then in his toolbox various techniques for manipulating the dancer to continue beyond this point. Artful mixing can blur the lines between songs to the point where the transition may go unnoticed, and if someone didn't realize the song changed, then they missed their excuse to leave.
Similarly, immersion can be built with other techniques relevant to the game designer.
Consider player goals, or, in this case, dancer goals. Are they just there to have fun? There's many layers to the fun-factor of dancing, and one of those layers is in dancing's sex appeal. Many of the people who enter a club are only there because they're looking for a mate. In such cases, emotional immersion matters, and just as a game designer can build tension, one form that a DJ can craft is sexual tension. It's no accident a lot of dance music have suggestive if not blatantly sexual lyrics.
On the most basic level, a classic DJ technique is to attract women to the dance floor first, because men generally only dance to find women. Once the gender mix has been established, it's easy to stir into a hormonal froth with some well selected music.
This leads to player-created stories...
A big source of fun in games as well as dance.
After a night of dancing, you generally have a story or two to tell your friends, or share if you were with them at the club. Just like how you can tell people of your zanier exploits in GTA4, flipping cars and what have you, you can tell people of the fun you had at the club last night, and that hottie you danced with, etc.
Finally, just as the game designer can use the tools of game design to create game experiences that are not the typical game fare of "fun" (for example, in many art games or serious games, which attempt to use mechanics to communicate or persuade beyond merely entertaining) --the DJ can and often does select music to make people stop dancing, and even stop having fun. Sometimes it is for pacing -- to get people off the dance floor temporarily to give them a rest before you hook them back in later as opposed to dancing them until they're so exhausted they're done for the night. It is especially true when the club needs to close and you have to get people out of there -- nothing works better than playing some truly irritating music. Or, for the more subtle, simply winding slowly back down in mood and tempo of the songs you select can signal people to wrap it up and head home.
As a DJ I have done both of these many times. You can be as blatant as you want with the the most truly awful samplings of your collection, or go for a gradually, subtly increasing threshold of irritation so that your crowd doesn't even consciously realize why they want to leave -- they just do. A combination of the the above methods works especially well.
Alternatively, you could eschew that whole technique entirely, and end with a bang so climactic people know their night is over, and leave with a rush of feeling.
Further, if game design is a process of iteration, DJing could also be seen as an iterative process: you play a song, see the results on the 'players', try a different song, observe the reaction to this new song, etc.
Now, some have said designing games is like a game in it's own right. Well, consider this entry all the more support for my entry yesterday, then. If DJing is like game design which is like a game -- DJing is like a game.
It should be a game.
...But DJ Hero, sadly, is not that game.
Labels: DJ games
posted by Brian Shurtleff @ 8:30 PM
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