Last week I decided to spend an evening participating in a fascinating interactive experience, a digital metal concert. This particular event caught my attention for several reasons, but primarily it was due to the band involved being one that only exists in a video game that I’ve been playing for over 7 years.
First, some background: League of Legends, developed by Riot Games, is one of the biggest e-sports in the world. The 5 vs 5 multiplayer online battle arena (MOBA) game has been continuing development for over a decade since it’s conception as an original IP based on the Warcraft mod, Defense of the Ancients. The game thrives through constant content updates including new playable characters, cosmetics and events. The cosmetics in particular are a major part of the game where players buy “skins” for the characters they enjoy playing that offer new thematic versions of those characters. For example, an ice witch character has a skin that turns her into a Tron-esque living program throwing shards of code instead of ice. These skins are often given to many champs to tie them all into one theme called a “skinline”.
One popular skinline from League of Legends is called Pentakill. Named after the act of a player wiping out the entire enemy team (getting 5 kills in a row, thus penta-kill), the skinline imagines several characters as a metal band, giving them each a role in the band and changing their weapons to match those instruments. The gravedigger Yorick replaces his shovel with a bass, the lich Karthus swaps his staff for a mic stand, the viking Olaf uses his hand-axes as drumsticks, etc. This skinline actually began 10 years ago, first releasing in August 2011. Even back then Riot chose to advertise this digital band through an actual musical release, coming out with 3 albums since their conception. Each album released with new additions to the band’s backstory and mythology alongside new skins to commemorate the events.
The latest album, Pentakill III: Lost Chapter, released with a major event that took place completely separate from the game League of Legends. Riot partnered with a website called “Wave XR” (wavexr.com) to host an interactive concert for the band. An animated spectacle reminiscent of the 1981 film Heavy Metal, with a storyline involving Pentakill saving their world of metal from an antagonistic force called the “dissonance”.
I had never heard of Wave XR, but from what I’ve gathered they have been making a business creating interactive digital events for performers on their unique streaming platform. Using a team of digital artists, they create unique visual environments and animations that wouldn’t be possible in a live concert. These experiences range from more story driven concepts like Pentakill’s to more abstract visualizer type demonstrations. In both regards, the big draw and meaning to it being XR lies in the interactive elements the audience can participate in.
When I first entered the stream when it aired on September 8th, I was presented with a message saying I was a devout of “The Immortal One”, one of three gods established in the Pentakill mythos. Every viewer was assigned one of these gods (The Deep One, The Mad One & The Immortal One) as a sort of team they’d be cheering on during the concert. While the gods themselves don’t play an important role in the event, various points of the concert filled musical riffs with moments pitting the teams against each other in order to “give favor to their gods”. For example, the first portion of this competition came when the dissonance was raining lightning on the Pentakill performance. A faceless audience member walked up to a large catapult and a prompt appeared saying to offer oneself to the fight. While the stand-in for the audience cheered people on, a button prompt appeared on the screen for viewers to repeatedly press and cheer on their side of the competition. Despite the simplicity of the action, I can’t deny I was wrapped up in trying to raise the bar of The Immortal One, curious as to what would happen. Unfortunately, it seemed The Mad One’s team had some more avid clickers as they won the trail (and actually most after). After the victor was decided, the previously nameless audience stand-in now gained a name above him in the purple color of The Mad One. Not just any name though, it was a viewer’s name. It seems a random person from the winning team was picked from the stream and got to have their name projected onto this figure as it fired itself from the catapult and into the lightning, exploding in a fiery purple blaze. The point of the competitions were actually about slightly changing the visuals of the event. Nothing that would affect the story as a whole, but enough for those of the team to take pride in their colors being put up.
These button mashing sections weren’t the only interactive aspects either. While the team dynamics created a sense of competition, the concert also integrated audience content directly at times. Text taken from the stream chat (likely curated and specifically picked) popped up in segments with the names attached. Some viewers went even farther, joining a special Zoom based room where they shared video of themselves watching the stream. These videos were also integrated to parts of the concert, floating in segments behind or around the performers, creating a live audience to this digital band. All of these aspects show a fascinating part of this experience: it truly is somewhat “live” despite being a digital event. I don’t know for sure, but my guess is that rather than a video, the event takes place in an interactive live rendering of the concert with sections set up for the showrunners to dynamically include outside inputs. They can gather inputs from the audience as the scripted portions of the performance goes on, then when it reaches the more interactive segments they display the gathered input for the audience to enjoy in a non-scripted fashion.
This became most clear in some major fanservice moments of the concert. Between the songs, some story events would take place to lay the groundwork for the next song. During some of these moments, a segment was set aside for a live motion-captured act. Known Riot developers donned mocap suits (shown as small picture in picture moments) and controlled the villain of the story directly for a bit to call out to popular League of Legends streamers that were watching at the moment. The reactions of these streamers having their names directly called out by the characters in the concert were very neat moments for the tens of thousands of fans of those streamers, spreading the hype of the concert even further.
With all these different interactive segments combined, the great visuals and the base established fanbase, this digital concert wound up being a ton of fun. Both for myself, and for others as I’ve looked into the reactions on various social media platforms. Overall, the Wave XR concert appears to be a huge success. I’m very glad I participated directly on their platform and got to see it all go down live. The various methods they used to drive up audience engagement got me thinking of how digital events in the future will progress. In particular, some aspects of the concert got me wondering how it’d be in a VR setting. VR concerts have occured before, but not with this kind of audience integration and concepting. On Wave XR’s page for the concert, they even included a portion of their FAQ to make it clear that this event was NOT a VR event, which implies they are aware how people are interested in the concept. Even outside of a VR space, just imagining the ways this kind of unique live digital experience could work in other forms of media is fascinating to consider. I may have been drawn to this experience due to my history with the game it was based on, but I left it hopeful as a developer of interactive experiences as to what future experiences could pull off.
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