[ISEA2015] Artist Statement: Alexander Thumm — Pallas of Vines: Branched and Nested Relationships in Video Game Performance and Play

Artist Statement

Keywords: video games, performance, OSC, MIDI, improvisation, electronic music

Pallas of Vines is a performance-based video game about the collaborative creation of music and its relation to a dynamically changing game-environment. Players have a high degree of freedom to co-create and re-define musical and visual aspects of the game. It is built on my own game performance framework that was conceived in response to issues of the lack of original creativity in both music games specifically (which tend to focus on variations of emulating other people’s music), and in the video game industry more broadly and its long history of achievement and addiction based game design practices.
Its core functionality is based on a system of branched (divergent) and nested (convergent) game-object linking – for example linking a sound source to a DSP effect, and a DSP parameter to an LFO, all during play. Players improvise in the game world, navigating both audio and visual aspects, and as they do so they affect changes in the game world, where parts of the environment will alter, reveal, be created or destroyed, or be connected in various ways. By navigating and controlling aspects of this changing environment players can create and alter music and visuals within the game. The game itself is the instrument and the source of the audio-visual performance. The game supports MIDI note and CC controls which can be mapped to audio and visual parameters of game-objects during play. Thus it is also open to the diverse forms of hardware control available via MIDI. Similar OSC implementations are also in progress, and a complementary piece of smartphone software has been created that currently provides some simple avatar control via accelerometer. The game is performance based in the sense that players can create solo or collaborative performances either purely for play, or for a live audience.

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