Guitar Heroes in Music Education? Music-based video-games and their potential for musical and performative creativity

This network aims to investigate the potential of music-based video-games, such as Guitar Hero, Wii Music, RockSmith, Dance Central or Child of Eden to foster a creative engagement in its players. By connecting academics from a wide range of relevant disciplines (such as music eduation, music psychology, game and gaming theory, theatre studies) with both game designers and artists and musicians, who have embraced the soft- and hardwares of gaming for creating new ways of composing and performing, we seek to discuss this topic from the best possible variety of angles. We also seek to facilitate discussions and suggestions towards impact by interrogating how our renewed shared understanding about the creative potential of these games will influence future game design. We further ask how existing and future games could be implemented in music education, be it in the classroom or the conservatoire.
The network brings together an international group of academics, game designer and developers and composers/musicians, who will meet twice in the UK. The first 2-day meeting will focus on taking stock, exchanging the different perspectives and interest of the participants and the different notions of "creativity", "play", "music-making" and 'education' that each bring to the phenomenon of music-based gaming. We will also seek to differentiate the wide range of available games and platforms and the different kinds of experiences and opportunities for self-expression and learning these afford. We need to distinguish, for example, games such as Guitar Hero or Rock Band, where the focus lies on creating the narrative of a career in the music industry as a performer by emulating great performances by existing artists to games such as Child of Eden or Wave Trip, which are essentially Shooter or Jump and Run games, but where the gameplay's main attraction is that the activity creates also the music.
The second 2-day meeting will focus on looking forward: what are the opportunities for game design and the implementation of music-based games in educational settings with an aim to foster music-performative understanding and creativity? Based on some existing pilot studies (e.g. Dr Gianna Cassidy's EPSRC funded project: "Music-Games: Supporting New Opportunities for Music Education", Glasgow, UK) and the collective expertise of the network, we will be able make a range of suggestions and propose a number of findings, which we hope - on dissemination to different groups of beneficiaries - will foster new developments both in game development and music education. To that end, we will present our findings both at the Game Developers Conference, a key event in the Gaming Industry, and write an article for an interdisciplinary music education journal (e.g. Research Studies in Music Education). We will also provide open access opportunities to follow our network through a Blog, which will include excerpts of our discussions, presentations and findings.
The network also aims to explore opportunities for future projects, e.g. a funded pilot study of embedding different music-based games in different educational settings (classroom, conservatoire etc.).

There are four core pathways to impact beyond academic communities and beneficiaries that we aim for with this network:

1. We hope to engage the stakeholders of the gaming community and the game design and development industry in the discussion and evaluation of music-based games by directly involving key representatives of these industries as participants of the network and by addressing its community at one of the main conferences in this field, the Game Developers Conference (Europe) in Cologne.

2. By also involving creative artists - composer and musicians - in the network, who use video games and/or consoles for creating and performing music, we hope to facilitate synergies between their work and the work of the game designers. New ideas and developments in the field of cutting edge composition and multimedia musical performance are expected to stem from the network meetings and online exchanges.

3. The third pathway to impact is the deliberate inclusion of music education into the range of topics and considerations. By specifically asking the network as an interdisciplinary group of people to exchange ideas about the nature of musical and performative creativity that music-based games afford and how current and future games might contribute to music education and the fostering of musical creativity in children and young adults, we are paving the way for future projects and field studies, in which to develop and test these ideas with and for young people.

4. The fourth pathway targets the general public: music-based gaming is a wide-spread phenomenon across ages, genders, classes etc. so there is a broad public interest in this activity. By writing a blog and by holding a public event at the end of the second network meeting, we hope to attract non-academic, non-specialist audiences to engage with the questions we ask and to stimulate discussion about the nature and the potential of music-based games.
The blog will contain a forum function, which allows for questions, comments and suggestions by the general public, which will add to its impact.
We will make sure to advertise and provide links the blog and the forum on relevant websites to maximise circulation.