While reading the Rickert and Salvo piece, and thinking on this concept of the contribution of the prosumer, I kept thinking: what a perfect thing to read when also focused on games, but especially for me, since I’ve been thinking a lot about what players bring to the table and add and how they create within worlds. But in particular, this piece made me think of the zombie game Left 4 Dead’s AI director: the system observes player interaction with the world and alters the world to create the experience, changing enemy spawns, item locations, and even closing/changing pathways in the sequel. But there’s a second director that isn’t spoken of as much, that only controls music. The regular AI director can insert cues of nuance, tone, and tension – sound effects and such – as well as music, and a second director controls music on a player scale (personal events, etc.). It’s a very complex system, and within that, there are the jukeboxes.

The jukeboxes scattered throughout the game in Left 4 Dead 2 can be trigged by players and will play different songs, and those songs may create events of their own. For instance, the chorus of a particular song triggers a horde event, in which the undead come pouring en masse onto the screen (though most of them just play, and may trigger hordes with nothing but the sound). You don’t have to trigger the jukeboxes, and you can’t predict what song will play when you do, but it’s interesting to think about alongside this article, because the game controls the songs, but the player controls the play, and the game then responds based on player interaction – it’s all feedback and distortion and incorporation, all the time. That’s what creates the experience.