OBJETIVOS DEL CURSO El curso tendrá como objetivos:

" “You are a star, so act like one!” That was the motto of the original SingStar (2004), a karaoke-like party game for the Playstation 2 (PS2). Unfortunately, judging from many of the players that I heard during the last few years, most may act like a star but they cer-tainly do not sound like one.

" This PS2 game includes two microphones and allow players to sing along to popular pop songs. The lyrics are displayed as text on the screen as they need to be sang. The game also provides visual feedback on the accuracy of the singing, so it is easy to see if the player is singing off key.

" New games do not grow in a cocoon and this is also true both for SingStar and kar-aoke in general. When Sony launched SingStar Legends, it created a promotional video that paid homage to the long tradition of singing and role-playing. The video shows differ-ent scenes in the life of a girl, from her early years to her late teens. In each scene, she is shown singing along to a song. At first, she does it without using any props but later she creates make-believe microphones by first singing into a spray can and then into a shower nozzle. The video ends with the girl now as a young woman who is playing SingStar while holding a real microphone (the one provided with the game). It concludes with the SingStar Legends logo followed by the message: “We know that youʼve been practicing”. The

mar-keting tradition in the videogame industry has always been to frame products around their novelty and high technology. It is particularly interesting that instead of than going this way, SingStar designers decided to situate the game within the larger context of musical role-playing. Thus, SingStar becomes just another way of doing what you have been doing all your life: singing along while mimicking real pop stars. As the gameʼs motto suggests, if you want to pretend that you are a star, you should behave like one. It would be too short-sighted to argue that SingStar is just a singing game. Based on its own advertising, it is clear that it is marketed also as a game for role-playing, even though not a classic RPG.

" The rhetoric of make-believe is particularly exceptional. Traditionally, when a speaker attempts to persuade her audience, she tries to convince them, to change their views or positions on a certain subject or even act in a way that they originally did not intend to. The situation with role-playing games is different because the “audience” does indeed want to play along: they actually want to be persuaded. It would be particularly hard for the game designer to force the player into believing or doing something that she does not want to.

What the game designer can do is shape the experience and discourage or facilitate cer-tain actions and performances. Within that range of options, the player will play along.

" Both karaoke and SingStar encourage a very specific kind of singing, which is solo and duo singing with an audience. Of course, both games can be played in solitary but it is clear that they are marketed as social, party games. These games offer an excuse to sing and goof around with friends, regardless if players are good or bad singers. Naturally, competition is also possible but, even in that context, these games can serve as an ice breaker to encourage singing and dancing among people who would normally not do it in public. The main rhetorical message of SingStar is: you can perform like a rock star in front of your friends. The game does not guarantee that the singer will not be embarrassed but the fact that everybody is taking their turn can help making the experience less threatening

for shy and/or poor singers. The game provides players not only with an excuse for singing but also with all the required elements: the music, the lyrics, the video clips, microphones and a little help from the game rules. The latter is what differentiates SingStar from tradi-tional karaoke. Karaoke machines simply allow players to sign along by displaying the songʼs lyrics on the screen. That text is synchronized to the music, which generally is a voiceless song track (in Japanese, karaoke literally means “empty orchestra”). SingStar also follows these mechanics but introduces a couple of minor but essential changes. The videogame measures the tone of the playerʼs singing and tells her when he is singing too high, too low or getting the right tone. According to this, the player performance is meas-ured into a final score. Traditional karaoke is different because it is not judged by a com-puter but by the audience. Since the audience is not a machine that can objectively meas-ure sound frequencies, they many not simply judge the singerʼs pitch, but also other di-mensions of the performance, such as originality, body movement, style, dancing, attitude, etc. Outside competitive and professional karaoke environments, the judgement is gener-ally informal and may include congratulation, mockery or indifference towards the singer.

However, since SingStar introduces a discrete form of measuring singing abilities, it offers a way to objectively measure competition between players through a grade rule. In other words, it turns the karaoke play experience into a game. Certainly, karaoke can be a com-petitive game but SingStar is different because it offers this possibility out of the box. So, SingStar is competitive by default, while karaoke is not. Does this mean that SingStar is more competitive than karaoke? Probably, but that does not necessarily mean that Sing-Star players do not engage into other non-quantified performances such as dancing and mimicking rock stars. Arguably, the mimicking of pop stars can also be a powerful source of joy for players that can complement and even become more important than the actual singing competition. Technically, the rules of SingStar state that players must sing in the right key in order to win. However, it would be hard to infer from these simple rules the role

that body performance can play in this game.

" Traditional games allow players to empathize with characters through avatars.

In Halo: Combat Evolved (2001), you are a space marine because you control the ac-tions of Master Chief. However, SingStar does not use empathy to make players feel like a pop star. Instead, they allow them to make the connection solely through body performance. Arguably, singing Like a Virgin in SingStar may get a player closer to feel-ing like Madonna than any photorealistic

depiction of the diva controlled by a joystick. An image may be worth a thousand words but, sometimes, playformance can be worth a thousand images.