Music + Gaming Creates Joy and Discovery

In the video game Starfield, the player character joins a group of space explorers who travel across space to acquire mysterious artifacts. The music is technical, complex and difficult to play, and it is challenging to get the stars to align in a performance.

“Something here is magical,” Emmy award-winning composer Inon Zur told the Wake Forest Symphony Orchestra after they performed music from “Starfield” and “Fallout” – just two of the more than 40 video games featuring Zur’s musical scores. “You really get the music, and I love the energy.”

The magic was, in part, the result of “intentional purpose, hard work and passion for the program,” said violinist and first-year student William Merritt, a biochemistry and molecular biology major who is also minoring in music. “Gaming music is some of the most challenging music for symphonies to play.”

Percussionists had worked to find the right mallets, sticks, bows and mutes to impact the timbre and volume of sounds required for the music, said junior Haozhen Xu, an avid gamer majoring in both politics and international affairs, and music. “Video game music combines classical elements with the excitement, energy and immersive atmosphere that can only be found in new platforms of art today,” he said.

We play together

The symphonic performance, with more than 500 attending, was just one facet of the “We Play Together: Music & Gaming” event hosted April 17-19. The three-day program offered a diverse range of activities including a pop-up concert on the University’s Manchester Plaza, a video game music class, a gaming music composition masterclass, a forum on the intersection of music, gaming and business, a targeted career conversation for physics, math and engineering students and an Esports LAN event, where people gathered to game together in the same space, organized and hosted by the WFU Esports Association.

Pete Hines, former senior vice president of Bethesda Softworks, whose company developed the Fallout and Starfield games, and engineer and retired NASA astronaut Dan Tani, joined Zur as special guests during the event.

During Tani’s 16-year career at NASA, he flew on two space missions for an accumulated 132 days in space, featuring six spacewalks, including the 100th spacewalk on the International Space Station. At the station, he repaired and replaced power and other system components on the shuttle.

“I used to consider myself a citizen of the United States, but since my time in space, I am proud to be a citizen of the planet Earth,” said Tani. “It’s incredibly beautiful to see our planet from 250 miles away.”

Tani shared details of his preparation for space travel and working together with a team of people with different backgrounds and strengths.

“A video game launch is much like preparing for a rocket launch,” said Hines. “We need people from across academic disciplines to create, build and support the gaming industry.”

Video gaming and its music, like space travel, offer “the pleasures of joy, wonder and discovery,” said event organizer, music professor, researcher and director of the University’s symphony orchestra Aaron Hardwick. “These are also fundamental themes for our Wake Forest orchestra.”

Careers in music and gaming

Gaming continues to grow among people of all ages and backgrounds and represents (as of 2022) a $85 billion industry in the U.S. alone. It is projected to reach a worldwide revenue of $533 billion by 2027.

In addition to engineers, computer scientists, mathematicians and physics experts, the industry hires graphic artists, musicians, writers, language translators, psychologists, sociologists, and business, marketing and legal experts among other disciplines. “If you want a career in interactive entertainment, it’s there,” Hines said.

“We Play Together was more than just a collaboration of disciplines—it was a celebration of creativity, community, and the powerful intersection of sound and play,” said Hardwick. “What we created together has already begun to spark conversations and inspire new ways of thinking about the relationship between music and games. I’m so proud of what we accomplished.”