Blog - Reflections on DJ Hero -- Music Games aren't Dying, They Just Forgot Who They Are

Friday, January 22, 2010

I have read about how sales are down on the music-game-with-plastic-instruments game genre as a whole. That they haven't been meeting sales expectations. I've heard cries that the genre is waning. Dying out. DJ Hero is one of those titles that just wasn't meeting sales expectations (despite Activision now boasting that it's generated more sales than any other new IP this year, ironically... although it seems that was in terms of revenue, not copies sold.)

Playing DJ Hero, though, I get the feeling that the problem isn't that the genre isn't dying-- the genre has just forgotten who it is. Or, more accurately, it forgot what made it hot in the first place.

I've mentioned many times here before that I'm a huge fan of Harmonix's first game, Frequency which is also a DJ game in a sense but in far more abstract terms. But Frequency and it's sequel were never the successes that their later game Guitar Hero was... Guitar Hero was the game that REALLY kick started the recent craze in music games, despite the fact that they've been around for quite a while now. And comparing the two games, it's not hard to see why. I think people at Harmonix would be the first to admit all the things that Frequency does that make it no where near the commercial and popular success that their later games have been. And I say this saying that I actually like Frequency BETTER than I like Guitar Hero -- that doesn't stop me from viewing it's flaws critically and admitting that it's not nearly as accessible of a game.

Playing DJ Hero, and the few times I've been able to play Activision's contributions to the Guitar Hero franchise as well, makes me wonder if the developers of the game really took the time to look back into the past and see the paradigm shifts that happened at Harmonix to take them from Frequency to their smash hit Guitar Hero (and it's continued legacy in Rock Band).

I say this because playing DJ Hero gives me the feeling that it's falling into all the same traps as Frequency. And as the Guitar Hero series progressed post-Harmonix, they just got harder and harder... and I stopped finding them less fun as a result.

Two things really made the initial Guitar Hero blast off in a rocket of success:

First, it was super-accessible. The music itself was, for one thing -- rock music is more generally popular and accessible than the stuff in Frequency, and they had enough flavors of it to more or less satisfy everyone. But also there's the interface -- the interface of Frequency/Amplitude is a big scary octagon of doom which intimidates the hell out of people who have never experienced the game before. A friend of mine watched me play Frequency for 20 minutes straight and said "I still have NO idea what's going on." But Guitar Hero? Pretty straightforward.

Second, it made you feel like a rock star. You could pick up the controller and after you get the hang of it after a couple songs, you're really rocking out. It's easy to get all stupid getting into character with friends and trying to look your most badass while shredding...
Frequency, although it got you into a real groove sometimes... and sometimes you'd pull off something impossibly hard in the game and feel a bit like a legend... was in the end too abstract to really make you feel like a rock star in any capacity.

So-- DJ Hero. When I played it, I initially jumped into playing it on medium. I guess I knew that it was going to be a different experience and would probably be lost jumping straight into expert mode... but cocky enough about my skills at other rhythm games to swallow my pride and try easy mode.

So, starting on medium difficulty-- I was immediately overwhelmed. On MEDIUM.
Oh sure, I got the hang of it eventually, and beat the whole game on medium... but initially it left me very flustered. I've now gotten used to where the controls on the mixer are located, but first starting, I'd be watching the screen and groping-- nay, flailing, trying to find them while keeping my focus on the screen.

Feel like a rock star DJ I certainly did NOT.

Even now, having beaten all of the hardest songs in the game on medium... I still don't think there's too many songs easy enough that I could properly show-boat and act like a cocky pro DJ if friends were over to play it as a party game. ...on medium.

I eventually decided though that it was unfair that I was judging the game in this way by medium difficulty mode, and went back to try the others. I take some of it back now. For example, beginner mode can't help but be too easy for anyone but the person who has never played a single rhythm game in their life before, and are hopelessly uncoordinated. So, accessibility as far as difficulty goes? I'll give it to them after all.

And having played through some songs on all difficulty levels now I'll admit that there actually is a really decent curve of difficulty between all the different difficulty modes. I can't think of a better way than they did it. But... it still doesn't feel quite right to me. But as I can't admittedly think of a way it could be better -- sure, you win this round, DJ Hero.

I've since, btw, jumped into playing Expert mode now, and at first I thought it was actually pretty cool -- terrifyingly difficult, but it's interesting that it's far more accurate to real turntablism than the rest of the game, and the challenge of actually having to scratch in the right directions is kind of fun.
(...But those damn peak spikes! WTF ARE THOSE?! They are just annoying as hell, impossible to juggle on top of everything else and are entirely unlike anything a DJ does ever!! Again, W-T-F?! ...there, got it out of my system... sorry)

However, all that said, there's still a problem -- the interface. At first it seems simple -- 3 note track. Not bad! But as the game goes on, it adds more and more things that happen to that track-- the crossfader that splits the track, the different kinds of scratch portions, the sample-playing sections, the dial-tuning bits and the peaks...

If you hadn't played or seen the tutorials, you'd have NO IDEA what's going on!
Guitar Hero you could easily play without a tutorial, but I can't imagine anyone playing most of the songs in DJ Hero without having seen the tutorials, especially the higher the difficulty modes. Really hurts the game as far as being pick-up-and-play at a party -- which is what made Guitar Hero explode in popularity.

And, furthermore, the problem with all those things that clutter up the track is that all that all of those things are entirely different actions you have to perform!

Here, let's go back and look at something...

Frequency had quite a few actions possible:
-hit beats
-switch tracks
-deploy powerups
-scratch/play samples (when available)
-play with the axe (when available)

Guitar Hero?
-hit notes, sometimes chords
-strum (basically always done at the same time as the hitting of notes, so it's almost only really one action, and not two)
-deploy star power.

5 vs 3.
And... which one of those two was the more accessible, hugely selling game again?

DJ Hero's list...
-hit beats, sometimes 'chords' of them at the same time
-crossfading to the left or the right with the crossfader
-scratching, sometimes freestyle, sometimes in more specific discrete directions
-tuning the audio with the effects dial knob
-deploying 'euphoria' (read: star power) with a button on the mixer for that
-spinning back the platter to rewind the track (when available)
-hitting peak spikes with the crossfader

7. Woah.
(Isn't the limit to how many things a person can even juggle in their head... 7 things? HMM...)

Note also that the game often has you doing some completely ridiculous juggling of things that are on completely different controls!
Sometimes I swear it seems like there's more things available for you to do at a time than is physically possible with only two hands.

Again, feeling like a rock star, I did not. I just felt incompetent.

Admittedly, the difficulty level you're on does determine how many of those features you'll see or have to use (thank god). So, put Grandma on beginner mode and all she'll have to do is hit one button and freestyle scratch -- not bad. Easy mode, best as I could tell (didn't play too many songs on it) adds all three buttons. So in some ways it still does beat Frequency's list, if you're playing on a low enough difficulty mode.

But I can't see myself ever 5-starring more than the first 4 tracks on expert mode. Thanks for making me feel like a loser, game.

And since even on medium, I find most songs too difficult to show-boat so I can feel like a rock star... the game just doesn't make as good of a party game as even Guitar Hero, let alone the new "band" games out these days...

At least DJ Hero provides a 2 player mode -- a nice attempt. But I don't think it's enough to make it work as a party game, and so it'll never be the success that Guitar Hero was.


But after all that criticism of DJ Hero -- the game certainly isn't awful. If I had worked on it, I'd be pretty damn proud. The game design may not be as polished as it should be -- but the game as a whole certainly is! Some of the mashups are really awesome, and there's not too many song/levels I straight up dislike -- the overall quality of the tunes available are pretty good. I totally love the spinback-rewind powerup -- time rewinding in a Guitar Hero style game is really interesting and actually leads to at least some strategy (something the rhythm game genre generally sorely lacks). The game has certainly kept me playing it, and nothing BUT it (due to the fact I AM in crunch right now so not really much free time for gaming...) for a week now. So kudos, Activision.

But yes-- that said, I can't lie to you either-- the game's got some real issues too.
But hey, nobody's perfect. I can tell you a million things wrong with my games...

Labels: , , , ,

posted by Brian Shurtleff @ 10:30 PM  0 Comments Links to this post



Blog - The Similarities Between a DJ and a Game Designer

Wednesday, January 20, 2010

After 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:

posted by Brian Shurtleff @ 8:30 PM  0 Comments Links to this post



Blog - DJ Games part 2 (Bonus Content!)

Tuesday, January 19, 2010

Since that previous entry was already getting too lengthy, I decided to add this little addition in a new post instead. I feel it is necessary, because it's amusing and geeky:

While trying to formulate the thoughts that went into writing that prior entry, I explained it to one of my game developer friends using the pirates vs. ninjas debate that forever rages on the internet.

Turntablism is the pirate, and DJing (as I define it) is the ninja.

Turntablism, much like a pirate, is flashy, cool, and cocky-- Pirates were the rock stars of their day, and true turntablists are simply stunning.
So, it's easy to see why DJ Hero and your average person are drawn in to the allure of turntablism...

...but true DJing is like a ninja -- you don't even notice it's there until it's already done it's terrible work on you. It is clever and subtle and cunning in the way the pirate/turntablism could never be...


And that's the problem. People vote for the pirate, because they can see the pirate.
But DJing is so good that people don't even know it's there...

It's like good game design in that way -- you notice bad game design like you notice a hangnail... but if a game designer has done her job right-- you're too immersed to even know just what she's done. But I have a lot more to say on that later... ;)

Labels:

posted by Brian Shurtleff @ 8:46 PM  0 Comments Links to this post



Blog - DJ games


I 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:

posted by Brian Shurtleff @ 8:41 PM  0 Comments Links to this post