Players as Rock Stars

Abstract

Music-based social interaction games are a recent, specific niche of analog games that are made possible through the advent of music streaming and widespread availability of music playback. This article investigates the card game Song Saga (2020) as an explorative case study for such social interaction games, and explores the possibilities in the application of quantitative and qualitative text corpus analysis for such games and musicology/game studies in general. Analyzing both the paratexts and the text of Song Saga, the article explains how Song Saga invites its players to view themselves and their biographies through the lens of rock stardom. In this sense, the design of the game ultimately conceptualizes music as a universal biographic asset and replaces the music’s creator as the music’s protagonist with the recipient.