Applied Playlists: Online Gaming
Listening to Spotify’s “Top Gaming Tracks” playlist while I write this post feels wrong and that’s the point; this playlist was made for a specific purpose and blogging isn’t it.
Historically, a variety of services (most of which are no defunct) leveraged networks to distribute the blueprint for playlists, but didn’t actually let you listen to them in full; the experience was fundamentally flawed because you still had to find a way to listen to the music in the playlist.
One of the fascinating things about Spotify playlists is how easy it is to both publish them and enable listening in a single act: the “add”. With essentially a single click (and a little bit of typing), you combine the creative act of content curation with publishing to a network of up to 100 million people.
When it’s this easy to assemble content and put your assembly into the world, it’s no wonder that a music fan would feel enabled to make a playlist for any situation, whether it be knitting, sex, or a mysterious celebration of frog, kangaroos, and other assorted animals. This is not to say all of these playlists are good (or even necessary), but the possibility is there.
Returning to “Top Gaming Tracks”, which I’m listening to presently, I feel like my hands should be on a controller instead of a keyboard, that I should be slaying Rakanoth, Lord of Despair or sending Zenyatta to cripple an enemy. This playlist is designed to supplement continuous adrenaline infusion, to reduce thinking and amplify instinct. And in terms of purist mixtape construction, it makes absolutely no sense.
Just take a look at the music:
You have 195 minutes of music; you have “Smells Like Teen Spirit” followed by Avicii followed by “Feel Good Inc”; you have four tracks by Enimem, four by Skrillex (not to be confused with Skillet, who has two tracks on the playlist), and three by Imagine Dragons. It jumps from hip hop to EDM to punk to metal at a whim. But in an essential way, “Top Gaming Tracks” works: it serves the function of making gaming sessions feel intense, even if you wouldn’t typically select any of this music to listen to on your own.
Looking under the hood, Chartmetric shows that the average “Energy” score for these tracks is 85/100, with 18 out of 50 tracks yielding an energy score on 90 or higher (one of those Skrillex tracks hits 98!). It’s hard to imagine a “tasteful” playlist curator assembling this collection of tracks with some kind of grand vision or narrative; beyond the consistent dosage of octane, these tracks don’t obviously belong together.
There is, of course, a reason for “Top Gaming Tracks” existing as it does: it wasn’t created by a single human intelligence so much as by the aggregate of human activity. Spotify claims that the organizing principle of the playlist is not handpicked curation, but rather “all of the most-added tracks in gaming playlists.” Since Spotify controls access to who can create playlists under the “Gaming” genre, predominantly PlayStation, EA, and Spotify itself, “Top Gaming Tracks” is not entirely democratic (ie, Spotify users can’t control what content goes into these playlists), but it is the product of an algorithmic (some might say “data-driven”) approach: when a user “adds” a track from a gaming playlist, it increases the likelihood that that track will end up in “Top Gaming Tracks”.
This playlist is a simple example of how Spotify leverages its user behavior data to curate an experience that no single individual would have arrived at on their own. This method allows Spotify to introduce playlists that can evolve over time to suit the reality of listener tastes.
Ultimately, for a playlist that needs to accompany hours of online competitive gameplay, “Top Gaming Tracks” reflects the mindset of its listeners: frenetic, surprising, and ready for battle.
