Curating game music is the missing magic.
Curation = Culture = Community
I’m so busy with work and non-work at the moment that I’m losing patience with my own thoughts, so you’re getting a fairly raw 10x re-written conglomeration of my frustrations potentially littered with spelling errors. Substack, why do you not have a native spellcheck?
For this Substack, I’ve seen a couple of announcements come from partnerships between the music and gaming industries that I want to compare my notes and observations to, and what better way to formulate my understanding than to write one of these bad-boys. I think there is one big thing that we are forgetting.
Reactional AI partners with Ninja Tune
FC 25 partners with Spotify
Where’s the magic?!?!?!
1. Reactional AI partners with Ninja Tune
"Musical innovation is full of danger to the State, for when modes of music change, the fundamental laws of the State always change with them." (Plato, 428 - 348 BC)
Recently, Ninja Tune (Very cool record label with artists such as Thundercat, Bicep and many more) partnered with Reactional Music - a company designing a framework for personalising music in interactive digital environments, such as video games. You give them music, they will customise it for the required scene. Here’s an example of how this looks:
Some of this I can’t quite tell if the music was mapped to the characters movement manually as the timing lands on the beat, as if it has been decided ahead of time - and perhaps that’s a part of the technology where it identifies whats upcoming with pre-rendering and adjusts tempo ahead of time. Either way its application has done its job!
This is not the same as the ‘Generative AI’, which creates ‘new’ recordings by listening to a bunch of other stuff, pinching elements of the recordings (& songs), and making songs. These Generative AI’s use a Large Language Model (LLM) which is a collection of things that already exist that the AI will look at for references. They cannot make something new, instead it recycles all the recordings it can listen to and make something that sounds new. So if you knew your own song had become part of this impacted cellular mass of sound, contorted beyond consent, and then thumbed into YouTube for someone elses monetisation, you wouldn’t be happy.
So the fact that Reactional AI are using a collection of already existing music to adapt, rather than create, makes sense. Removing admin is a better use of AI. Working with a label partner in this way, or using a closed approved source of data for the Large Language Model (LLM) makes for a more ethical and legitimate usage of AI (which basically isn’t stealing - standards are pretty low aren’t they?)
To summarise: Great to use AI to implement, rather than create. However…where’s the curation? How can you create unifying moments if everything is different for everyone? I will come back to this.
2. FC 25 Partner with Spotify
"The poet’s function is to describe, not the thing that has happened, but the kind of thing that might happen... according to the law of probability or necessity." (Aristotle, 384–322 BC)
Another announcement is that FC 25 has now integrated with Spotify for Australia and Saudi Arabia territories. So at any point across the menus, you can bring up the native Spotify player and play from a huge selection of tracks on Spotify, including podcasts.
I’m trying to put myself into the shoes of the team here to understand more about what this direction could mean. Giving players more access to wider range of tunes and bridging accessability across applications for a more fluid interactive experience? Okay, sounds nice.
But…what about the famous FC 25 tracklistings that were specifically curated for these games? And lest we begin chapter 3 of this substack…
3. WHERE’S THE MAGIC?!?!?!
“The poet who pleases everyone is the one who blends the useful with the sweet, delighting the reader while instructing him.” (Horace, 65-8 BC)
As someone who spent a decade watching decisions pass the music industry in this area, I think we need to keep our eyes on the prize. The magic is curation.
There was a LinkedIn post about a guy saying the music industry is starved of innovation (which I cannot find anywhere!), and that their focus is to find new ways for people to engage with music. The biggest opportunity appears to be curation (well, to me anyway), where the ‘infinity’ of music in streaming services causes choice paralysis, and that standing out amongst infinity is tough without it.
With this in mind, how do you stand out here? Are we thinking technology is going to beat curation?
—Thoughts on FC 25 x Spotify
A game can decide its creative musical direction - and therefore curate its music along with the story. If a game’s music selection is via Spotify, then Spotify are doing the curating for you. They take the basic or historical input from the user and dish something back to you, and Spotify love to give you the same thing.
Functionally, I’d be interested to see how they ensure they don’t just turn this into a playlist. I’d be more interested to see if they’ve both decided to consider played music in FC as ‘streams’ rather than a ‘syncs’.
Back to the creative - Let’s not forget how monumental those FC & older FIFA playlists were. I wrote about this before - these curated playlists were the culture vessels for those players who came across bands like Kasabian and may artists through another means than traditional music marketing. That’s so important, because gamers can be part of the FC universe beyond playing the game by listening to the playlist, rather than listening to everything.
If players can listen to anything, then how do people have a unified shared experience through music? Because I always got the impression that songs selected for this playlist was the cultural language shared amongst players. It was the nod given to you after you put it on the aux. Without it, will it have as much of a cultural impact?
Brandon Polite’s 2019 study (read here) argues that musical experiences can be genuinely shared, showing that joint listening enhances both personal enjoyment and social connection, challenging the idea that music appreciation is purely private.
I feel that the biggest aspect of community is the joint experience of a moment. Look at the cultural impact that Tony Hawks had, or how we felt watching ‘Mad World’ in Gears 3, or even listening to ‘Dearly Beloved’ from Kingdom Hearts. Purposeful selection made Quentin Tarantino’s films excellent. It made Hideo Kojima’s games iconic. Look at my Substack catalogue for 1.5 years worth of examples. If you can’t share these moments…what happens to the long term impact of that community, and therefore that game?
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— Thoughts on Reactional AI & Ninja Tune
To start, if you are an artist on Ninja Tune, then you’re currently not competing with infinity through the medium of any of these Reactional AI inclusions. Great! However, if Reactional AI keep acquiring labels to work with then their next problem will be ensuring they can guarantee that your music will be listened to amongst the many other options they have.
Also, I need to figure out how music is ‘selected’ per scene within the Reactional AI system. As much as the engine concept is impressive, I’m interested to see how this is implemented per game, and will it cannibalise curation opportunities by being a ‘full-game solution’ rather than a contextual one?
—Solutions
For Reactional AI x Ninja Tune, I’d suggest they use these catalogue uses aesthetically for the ‘between’ aspects of the gameplay, but to ensure music is carefully selected for big storyline moments, cut scenes, or even in-game scenes that are memorable. Using this to ‘enhance gameplay’ with between-scenes is fine, but defo not for the big moments.
For FC 25 x Spotify, having the option to listening to anything through the same TV you’re playing the game through is fine, but ensuring that the curated FC 25 playlist is front and center is very important. Without that, FC lose their culture outside of the game itself. If they were to just host this integration for future games as an option rather than a requirement then that’s a good way for console players to listen to music without having to mute their TV and play it through another device (and justify FC’s streaming impact for this exact use case) - but I’d say it should stay there.
TLDR:
Reactional AI’s machine is impressive, and so is digitally-ergonomic integrations of Spotify - but it risks removing the unifying aspect that music-in-gaming’s real selling point is - curation. Providing games protect important curated musical elements within gaming experiences, then moderating this tech by keeping it optional and helpful is the best combo.
Live, Laugh, Curate.
