Fan Creativity, Collaboration, and Resignification in Sonic Participatory Cultures Within, Through, and Around Genshin Impact (HoYoverse, 2020) Available to Purchase

After reaching their apex in the early 2000s, music games have experienced a decline in popularity that lasts to this day. Their legacy, however, can be traced across the video game industry, with many games having inherited and further developed the music-based ludic mechanics originally conceived by these systems. Seizing the opportunities afforded by our present-day technology, these games have fostered new forms of musical play, giving way to sonic participatory cultures that hold the potential to transcend a game’s original aims, influence, and lifespan. This is the case of Genshin Impact (HoYoverse, 2020), an open-world A-RPG that periodically presents its players with opportunities for collaborative musicking supported by different interactive virtual instruments. These instruments’ playing interfaces have sprouted nascent paraludic creative communities that thrive within online spaces, where players can build collaborative relationships based on a shared media literacy. Drawing from digital ethnography and media culture studies, this article delves into sonic participatory cultures surged within, through, and around Genshin Impact. The aim is to illustrate how, by providing new channels for meaningfully interacting with music, musical instruments featured in video games contribute to the actualization of new forms of technologically augmented musical participation, in doing so holding the potential to redefine instrumentality in the Post-Digital Era.