5.2 Electronic Instrument Games

Computer games that generate music and put the game principle outside the realm of awarding points and clear winner or loser conditions, can be regarded as electronic instrument games. On the one hand, the computer-supported creation of music has gained enormous success since the first experiments by electronic pioneers in the 1950s and 1960s, and contemporary pop music can no longer be imagined without it. On the other, multimedia artists such as Toshio Iwai have started exploring and further developing complex interactive simulations for generating sound. Also, analog video/audio synthesizers can be regarded as predecessors of electronic instrument games.

Many of these games, such as Sim Tunes (Maxis 1996) and Electroplankton (Nintendo 2005), can be understood less as rule-bound, goal-oriented games in the classical sense, but more as pointing in the direction of toys and new types of musical instruments in the broadest sense. Unlike popular software for sound production, these games often use metaphors at the visual level, which are taken from dynamic systems. In Electroplankton, for instance, a biological system, specifically the movement of micro-particles in different simulated environments that players interact with, becomes the starting point for sound production.