I love this little platform game, Get Home, that accompany the song “Weathervanes and Chemicals” by Norwegian band Team Me. Cunningly enough, you have to make it through before the song is over to win, which means that you (or at least I) end up listening to the song many, many times trying to jump higher and run faster. After nearly an hour I admitted to myself that I’m really not a very dexterous gamer and watched someone else play it on YouTube – and oh, how sweetly the game mechanics and narrative speak to the message of the song.

I’ve not really been following the video game accompanying new music trend. Local game company Mwahaha made a simple platform game for Eye Emma Jedi’s Lights, which is fun. As far as I was able to play it it doesn’t add a lot to the song as Get Home does, but it does have an ornamental sort of function – or maybe it should be understood more along the lines of dancing, or choreographing the audience? I have to admit, my terrible skills at platform games might mean I missed something really interesting going on on the upper levels of the game because I never reached them. Please leave me a comment if that’s the case! The creators of the Lights game also wrote a nice little post mortem about the development of the game.

A couple of years ago Arcade Fire’s The Wilderness Downtown was a great example of a personalised, engaging web experience programmed to go perfectly with a song. It was created by Chris Milk, who has a few other “experimental” projects listed on his portfolio.

Do you know of any interesting games or “online experimentations” to music that I should check out?


Discover more from Jill Walker Rettberg

Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.

1 Comment

  1. Walter Iriarte

    There is an older Red Hot Chilli Peppers song titled, “Californication”. It is music video that imitates a video game. However, it is not interactive.

Leave A Comment

Recommended Posts

screenshot of blogpost from sept 11, 2001, about blogger.com showing blog posts about the attacks
Networked Politics social media

25 years since September 11

I’ve been reading through my blog posts on September 11, 2001 and the days that followed. The things that stand out to me – in addition to the horror of the attack itself – are how massively we (or at least I) used the web to understand what was happening, […]

AI STORIES

AI-generated stories have longer endings than human stories

My colleague Jessica Witte has just shared a preprint where she compared the emotional arcs of the stories we generated using gpt-4o-mini to those of human-authored (pre-2022) stories from the subreddit r/WritingPrompts, conveniently gathered in this dataset. She found a distinct difference in the endings of the LLM-generated stories: both […]

How to peer review a paper in 2026

Dorothy Bishop, a psychologist, wrote a useful list of what reviewers need to look out now that so many papers are bad science that looks good thanks to LLMs. Read her whole blog post, she explains it well, but here’s a brief version because I’m pretty sure we’ll be needing […]

“So what if it was ChatGPT? It *could* have been true!”

I recently read a good article on the different kinds of truth a language model operates with by Luke Mann, Liam Magee and Vanicka Arora, Truth Machines: Synthesizing Veracity in AI Language Models, but despite its lovely typology of truths (consensus, correspondence, coherence and pragmatic) it doesn’t help me with […]

AI STORIES

AI shimmer and sparkle

I have this hunch that sparkles and glow and shimmer are somehow a point in the latent spaces of LLMs that have more connections than you would expect. Perhaps their connotation to magic and to the unknown matches some of the mystique of genAI? Or perhaps these words are used […]