Emergence and kingpins

Popmatters' games and multimedia blog Moving Pixels has a great piece on emergent music games -- as opposed to linear games, like GH and Audiosurf -- in which players generate music through their actions on-screen. A familiar example is Rez, which I downloaded from Xbox Live a few weeks ago in a rare instance of retro-gaming, and Auditorium (see a few posts below). Others in the emergent category that I have yet to try out include Everyday Shooter and Electroplankton. The upshot is that emergent music games are relatively rare, but they offer a glimpse of a new form of narrative that is only beginning to be explored. The Clash picture is from this piece.

Speaking of Popmatters, its music blog Crazed By The Music has a series of articles about "The New Music Kingpins of the Post-Napster World", in which it names Guitar Hero as one of those kingpins. There are a couple of factual inaccuracies in the piece, but the overall tone is basically positive.