it – Max Schramp among them – was also
responsible for last year’s Coalchella festival.
Fire included British producers Hudson
Mohawke (who scored the game Watch Dogs
2 ) and A.G. Cook. As Schramp explains, the
idea of a virtual music venue ‘started last May,
when I decided to have my 21st birthday party
in Minecraft’. As Schramp and his friends
partied in a custom-built mansion, other
events took place that demonstrated the
game’s potential for gatherings. ‘People had
run off into the desert during the party, built
an underground club and started their own
show,’ he recalls. At Fire, rather than having
the public shape the world, a 20-strong team
of builders was given carte blanche to experi-
ment on the environment, along with artists
appearing at the festival. Performers built
their own houses in a postmodern landscape
full of references to pop culture and corporate
branding. For Schramp, the hyperreal environ-
ment reflected the festival’s collaborative
ethos, which he describes as a ‘huge collage’
composed of ‘visual artists, people who play
Minecraft and musicians’. As with most video-
game spaces, Fire used peaks and dips in
intensity to keep visitors engaged during two
seven-hour-long days of music.
Interestingly, although virtual worlds
can incorporate many experiential layers
into a performance, Schramp argues that thestage retains an important role. Because ‘this
crazy world doesn’t have gravity’, he says, it’s
helpful to have ‘one real anchor point that
you actually see to help with the immersion’.
Of course, there are over two millennia of
embedded cultural history in theatres and
stages, and for the Fire team they still play an
important role in creating the sense of being
at a festival and distinguishing the performer
from the blocky crowds dancing below –
even if the stage is on a floating volcano,
suspended over a mile-wide pool of lava.
Perhaps what most surprised
Schramp and his team was that although
Minecraft is the ‘platform we know best’
for realizing such ambitious events, the
audience consisted of more than ‘just gam-
ers’. Players were more likely to be ‘fans ofelectronic music and of music in general.
That’s something we didn’t really expect.’
One reason for the broad span of players
lies in Minecraft’s extreme accessibility.
Likewise, Fortnite is a free-to-play show-
case for Epic’s Unreal game engine soft-
ware, which along with that of rival Unity
is being increasingly adopted by architects
and designers who employ VR. The result
is a near convergence of game design and
architecture. The architectural potential of
these worlds is far the richer, involving as
it does the full audiovisual and interactive
spectrum. If Schramp and Epic have their
way, the future of music performance will
be embedded in worlds where buildings
dance, weather responds to musical pitch
and time is remixed. ●Fortnite is tied to music
culture through in-game
dances that encourage
players to ‘emote’ to others
Coalchella – a 2018 music festival held
within Minecraft – proved so successful
that the game’s servers initially struggled
to keep up with visitor numbers.Br
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