Concept, implementation and evaluation of an improvisation based music video game

Popular music video games are mostly examples of the rhythm game genre. They rarely respect the creative component of actually playing music. In this publication, a novel improvisation game-play element is introduced to account for the creativity. An evaluation is conducted to assess, whether improvising music as a game-play element in music games can increase the entertainment factor. Therefore, prototypes of two improvisation-based music games are implemented and compared to a simple rhythm game with regard to the entertainment factor. The evaluation shows that the entertainment factor can be significantly increased by an additional improvisation part in rhythm games. A purely improvisational game instead does not significantly improve the entertainment factor compared to a purely rhythm-based video game.