It's storytelling through music: on video game concerts and the promise of an immersive and collaborative experience

Video game music concerts are a growing phenomenon since the 90s, expanding its global radius of performances, resources, fans and popularity. From the Distant Worlds concerts tour of Final Fantasy to Video Games Live, more orchestras, venues and productions are betting and specializing in video game music. Using large screens with gameplay excerpts of the video games which soundtrack is being performed, a carefully designed lighting accompaniment and the participation of known figures in this industry – from composers to producers and youtubers – many of these concerts are characterized as an “immersive experience”, promoting “interactive segments” and appealing to all fans of video games but also including non-gamers.
Besides the performances of previously composed orchestral soundtracks, this model of concerts is also based on the symphonic transformation of video game soundtracks that weren’t written with orchestral resources, being associated with the idea of “nostalgia” and promoting an “arcade” segment of the event. This paper examines specific cases of video game music concerts and how its models of construction and presentation shapes its performances according to the idea of collaborative immersion and experience, moving the musical component to another degree of meaning due to its presence in another environment – removed from the video game and its narrative –, being a vehicle of a live and interactive storytelling experience.