Research Questions
- How will audience members with authority affect a performance and its crowd?
Game Overview
Two performers on stage ask the audience for a suggestion to start a scene. After receiving a suggestion from the chat, they start the scene. Meanwhile, audience members sign up to be a DJ. The DJ is randomly selected from the pool of willing participants. They pick a generic genre from a list of three available choices (picked randomly from a group of 20 genres). This process is repeated twice more until they have a “playlist” of three songs. They’re encouraged to poll the audience to see what genres the audience wants.
During the scene performed on stage, the host changes the music according to the DJ’s playlist. The performers change the mood and tone of the scene to match the new music. Once all three music choices are finished, the improvisers wrap up the scene. New performers take the stage to start the next scene and a new DJ is selected.
Interface
Viewers were presented with a button that allows them to join the queue to be selected as a DJ. The DJ was selected at random from viewers in the queue.
If viewers were in the queue, they were notified as such.
When viewers were chosen to be the DJ, they were given three randomly-chosen music options from our bank of genres. They could pick an option at any point of time during the performance. They were allowed to do this three times.
Hosts would see the current DJ’s Twitch handle, as well as the songs they selected as they picked them.
Technical Implementation
Unlike the queue system in Discourt, the order in which the viewer joined to queue to be a DJ did not factor into DJ selection, i.e. DJs were always randomly selected. A Unity application that we developed was responsible for playing music and fading each track out.
Lessons Learned
This game is surprisingly difficult for performers. Having to react to songs while maintaining a scene is challenging.
Audience members want more power and control over the performance. They want to manipulate things like when songs change or submit their own songs to play.