cI love radio. In spite of repetitive station playlists and constant advertisements, radio is a big part of my music-listening experience both in the car and while I’m at home. I like to get in touch with a town’s local character through its radio stations, and I’ve discovered many of my favorite songs through listening to various college and classic rock radio stations. While my friends like to switch on their iPods or Spotify, I like the old-fashioned sense of place that comes with a good radio stations.
My obsession with quality radio spills over into videogames. One of my favorite experiences in SSX 3, which is to say one of my favorite experiences is gaming, is cruising around and listening to EA Radio Big, the in-game radio station complete with disc jockey, DJ Atomika. I’ve just finished up playing the demo for Forza Horizons, and I’m thrilled at its three radio stations, complete with different formats and sweepers between songs. If radio is one of my pet pleasures in the meat space, it’s nothing compared to how much I drool over a well-done in-game radio station.
“Well-done” being the operative term. In-game radio is rarely done, and rarely sounds anything like an actual radio station. More than just a collection of songs, proper videogame radio needs to focus on what radio accomplishes apart from playing music and selling ads.
Why even implement a radio station into your game? For my money, in-game radio brings about a feeling of immersion. Radio stations help sell the idea that the game’s environment expands beyond the scope of what the player experiences, and go a long way towards grounding the game’s world as a “real” location. Radio stations can especially be a boon to open-world games, offering a slice of what the average citizens who live in the game’s location listens to.
I have an over-active imagination when it comes to this sort of stuff. Wreck-It Ralph will certainly not help me here.
Where video game radio stations go awry, however, is when songs end and the actual “radio station” part takes over. Games with regular in-game soundtracks never have to worry about this; they usually just go to the next song. Games with radio stations often try to emphasize “comedy” in between songs, either through wa-acky DJs or humorous advertisements, and neither with compelling results.
In-game radio often fails, too, when they fail to jive with a game’s mechanics or the rest of its world. Take Burnout 3: Takedown, for instance. Burnout 3 has an in-game radio station in the form of Crash FM, cranking out pop-punk tunes and helmed by DJ Styker. The urban setting for Burnout 3’s races make Crash FM a plausible, even welcome addition, but Stryker undermines Burnout’s reality by continually referencing the violence in its motorways, joking about how the best way to mod a car is by piling it into another one and other one-liners advocating vehicular homicide. I can buy instantly reviving after my car collides head-on with a bus, but hearing a radio DJ cheerfully acknowledge it to whatever virtual five o’clock commuters are listening makes me question the reality of Burnout’s setting. Radio stations tend to ground game worlds in the realm of believability, but they need to emphasize the right elements of gameplay in order to keep them grounded.
On the subject of small continuity violations are on-air swearing during certain radio shows or commercials. For real-world radio stations, the FCC has guidelines on what DJs can and can’t say on the air, guidelines that even Howard Stern has to follow, or at least had to prior to his exclusive contract for Sirius. This creates a disconnect for me when I listen to “funny” ads in games like Grand Theft Auto or Saints Row. Yeah, it’s funny to hear two characters swearing at each other in order sell a fire arm, if in a Blink 182-esque sophomoric way, but it reminds me that I’m only playing a game, and that the station I’m listening to is only a parody of actual radio. Funny, that in a game where I can swipe a car, run over seven pedestrians, and continue my next mission like nothing happened, I’m crying “unrealistic” because a radio commercial used the word “shit.”
What pushes an in-game radio station over the top and out of the Uncanny Valley is neither DJs nor advertisements. It’s the station’s sweepers, short pre-recorded segments dropped in between songs to plug the radio station. “You’re tuned in to 96.7 The Sky, your home for today’s hottest music!” That sort of thing. From the smallest country station in Montana to KROQ Los Angeles, every radio station uses bumpers to transition from one track to the next, and their addition helps give in-game radio stations extra foundation to plant themselves.
Losing myself in a believable open world is one of gaming’s greatest pleasures, and a quality in-game radio station adds to the goodness. Forza: Horizon has one of the best I’ve heard in years, and now I’m all sorts of excited for Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit and whether or not I can expect any extra radio goodness.
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