There are celebrities today tweeting about Call of Duty and Twitch streaming, something you may have once thought of as a more niche hobby reserved for the most hardcore gamers. But on the industry is booming. HBO’s biggest TV show debut in ten years is for a zombie game. While Merchants of the Silk Road thousands of years ago had their methods of global and cultural dissemination, we have the internet to promote the corners of our culture. So, yes, your favorite musician is live, playing Dead space or Breath of the wild.
They interact with their chat room, jumping into Discord the way any other streamer would. And musicians on Twitch, especially those who grew up with the games or who are in their 20s and watched (not without sadness) video games overtake movie theaters and music make an informal exchange when they stream, placing gaming closer to the traditional arts – music, painting, theater and writing – than ever before.
22-year-old Maya does delicate pop songs such as mxmtoon (and provides Alex’s singing voice in a narrative adventure game Life is Strange: True Colors). She started it chatty Twitch channel in 2018. For her, her art is inseparable from games.
“People often forget how music and gaming are connected,” she tells me via email. “My understanding of music has always been very much rooted in visual imagery, and this is largely due to my love of the playing space. With music, you benefit greatly from having a clear understanding of the ‘world’ you’re building for an album or song, and I’m grateful that the list of games I’ve played so far in my life has developed my sense of artistic direction.”
Maya has been gaming since childhood, when gaming was still largely considered a ‘boy’ thing, and she remembers being ‘the only girl in [her] a whole class playing video games.
Keeping games so close throughout her life, Maya says they’ve “always been a central part of how I find community or connect with friends, and I think my history with them in that sense actually helped me as I got into even more so in music.”
“My thinking and approach to both has become more similar over the past few years,” she says.
It seems only natural that Maya would feel the impact of the games so fully when she has spent so much time with them. But even newer gamers like synth-pop duo Magdalena Bay, made up of 27-year-olds Micah Tenenbaum and Matthew Lewin, are feeling the influence of games on their art as they get to know them and their communities.
Both started playing games just a year before they started their Twitch channel in 2020 when covid-19 has locked down most of the world. And even though they’re relatively new to gaming, they can already remember the pleasant black hole of obsessing over a…The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess it now “holds a special place in our hearts, forever,” Tenenbaum tells me over email—and he gets inspired.
“I think we love the world-building that a game can provide, whether it’s characters, plot, or just mood,” Lewin said. “We definitely strive to do that kind of thing in our music.”
Video games offer musicians fantasies, sounds, colors, and stories to energize like the glittering crystal in a geode, but Twitch appeals in more specific ways. Rapper T-Pain, for example, who popularized auto-tune in modern pop soundtracks the club scene of 2000and get dressed my very favorite NPR Tiny Desk gig, was moved by its social aspect. He was first inspired to stream a decade ago by a PlayStation event he was a part of, and eventually started his own Twitch channel in 2016. The first time he streamed, at that PlayStation event in 2013, he recalls, he “felt like I wasn’t alone.”
“I wasn’t alone, I was just playing games like I usually am in my room without being able to talk to anyone,” he says on Zoom. “I’m an artist, so most of the time I’m just in a hotel room, on a plane and on stage. Hotel room, stage, plane. I really can’t relate to people like that. Having [streaming] in my life added a new feeling to being on the road and I wasn’t alone anymore.” T-Pain is currently the CEO of Nappy Boy Gamingstreaming team and an outpost of his record label Nappy Boy Entertainmentfirst established in 2006.
Streamer and vocals by Kero Kero Bonito (the band that performs the bubble gum Bugsnax main tune of a movie) Sarah Midori Perry recently created Discord server for her Twitch subscribers. She also believes that the streaming platform is a unique way to connect with games and people.
“I really don’t think I’ve ever had a bad streaming experience,” she says. “It made my game more interesting and more social than playing it alone and not talking to anyone.”
Sometimes, especially with younger artists, there’s an overlap between a musician’s established fanbase and their Twitch subscribers — “I guess the type of people in our streams is generally similar to our listener base in general,” Lewin suggests. “I think everyone who watches our streams is originally there because they know our music, so there’s definitely a huge overlap.”
But T-Pain notices a huge difference in who watches his streams and who watches his music, which he says comes from the generation gap.
“My generation was told that playing games will ruin your brain,” he says. “You’re going to be a loser when you grow up if you keep playing these video games.” But this new generation, [virtual entertainment] is all they know. They have seen that people are making money from it.
Still, he would hesitate to call the games “massive.”
“If I asked my mom, ‘What are the new games that will be fake in 2023?’ she wouldn’t know a damn thing,” he tells me. “Will there ever be games mainstream mainstream to the point where you get drake doing game soundtracks like Travel? I think we are very far from that. But it is mainstream in our hearts. Games are a big part of our lives.”
Fresh video game players like Magdalena Bay are also hesitant to call themselves outright “gamers.” Even Midori Perry who appreciated the game Tomb Raider as a kid so much so that he still considers it one of his all-time favorite games, hesitates before truly declaring himself a “gamer.”
Although clearly an expanding term, “gamer” is historically rooted in strangely cruel demands since its existence mostly associated with menespecially those who like shooting rifles. Maya says it’s still “difficult as a woman in gaming spaces, especially when you’re a person of color and queer.”
“We’ve come a long way,” she admits, “but I still find myself in the gaming lobby where I get nervous to use my microphone for fear that someone will threaten me. I’ve found my closest friends in the gaming community, but I’ve also been told some of the most violent things.”
As more people feel encouraged to play games, perhaps inspired by Twitch like these musicians, this hostile history may slowly release its octopus grip on the term “gamer.”
“People used to have this idea that playing games was just for kids,” says Midori Perry. “Twitch has a huge influence on that, but I think it is [currently] more acceptable for adults to play games. I feel like there’s this change that gaming can be for everyone.”
Likewise, art is for everyone. When I asked the musicians in this article whether or not they consider video games to be art, every single one of them gave a definite, or at least reasoned, yes.
I go online and my world softens and stretches into a video game. Fashion ads suggest I wear non-functional corsets like I’m in Bioshockand I do a double take when I realize that 31-year-old Chinese artist Gao Hang is blurred Sims– looking portraits are created from acrylic paint, not a sleepy game engine.
By design, our physical and simulated worlds have overlapped since the 1991 NES platformer Barbie I tried to find girls to go to the virtual malland hip-hop group Bone Thugs-n-Harmony borrowed a brooding chiptune from the Sega fighting game The eternal champions of their 1995 song Eternal— but our modern lives in front of screens blur the distinction between real and virtual, culture and counterculture, to the point where it almost doesn’t exist.
During our conversation, Midori Perry says that she loves Breath of the wildpartly because it has “amazing nature”.
“It’s gotten to the point where in real life I’ll be in a nice place in nature and I’ll be like, ‘Wow, this is like Breath of the wild!’,” she says.
Likewise, most of the time when I’m riding a crowded subway with my boyfriend, he turns to me with twinkling eyes and says “Wow, it’s just like Persona.” I’ve noticed that people slap statements like this with catchy, catchy terms for spending too much time staring at a screen, like “chronically online” or, more dangerously, “definitely online.”
But even these people have probably felt dreamy at some point, looking out their car windows while it’s raining, for example were in a movie. People tend to treat games with more suspicion than movies because they’re younger, but as we and our games get older and more prominent, it makes sense that they become more connected to our existing art canon. Non-gamers see this too.
“When we think of video games as art, the first thing that comes to mind is the indie games we love Undertale and Tux and Fanny,” says Tenenbaum. “These games are so unique in their creative visions, from the visual design to the music. Are all video games art? That’s an interesting question, it’s easier to say yes when you’re thinking about art-driven concept games than when you’re thinking about a big sports game. But there’s definitely artistry in all games, if not ‘Art’ with a capital A.”
This reasonable position may be enough to please film critic Roger Ebert, who famously and controversially told an Internet commentator in 2005 that “no one in the field or out of it has ever been able to cite a play worthy of comparison with the great dramatists, poets, directors, novelists, and composers.”
In order not to analyze a dead man’s Internet comments, I will note that Ebert made a small addition to his statement in 2010. saying this “I had to be willing to accept that gamers can have an experience that to them is art… I don’t know what they can learn about another human being that way, no matter how much they learn about human nature. I don’t know if they can be inspired to surpass themselves. Maybe they can. How can I say?’
There is no one to define what is and is not art for someone else, even now, 13 years later, with all our technology. But we can look at proof that video games are important to artists, this Kero Kero Bonito used super mario 64 to write a song and that Magdalena Bay made a game to complement their music. When musicians stream on Twitch, they show audiences that gaming and art are connected. The audience can see that gaming is not a selective hobby; anyone can and does. The internet continues to influence art, which influences people, and we all continue to move around.