FETE ACCOMPLIE – Serious Game – How to Manage a Music Festival?

FETE ACCOMPLIE
A serious game on music festival organisation

SUMMARY: You are a festival director in charge of a music festival. You must make decisions and adapt quickly as various unforeseen incidents occur. Your aim is to make this the most successful festival ever!

DEVELOPED BY  Masters students from the Centre for Digital Media (Vancouver, BC, Canada)

An original idea from the cultural team of Embassy of France in Canada.

RELEASE DATE:  April 15, 2021

TAGS: Serious game; 3D isometric, Simulation, Music Festival, coaching

This game is licensed under a Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0)

The cultural sector is a complex ecosystem, and the cultural and creative industries are a priority of the cooperation between France and Canada.
In 2021, in the midst of a health crisis, the teams of the French Embassy wanted to use one of the major vectors of creative and economic development – the video game – as an information and training tool on the environment of a music festival.

Objectives

• To create a Serious game, a simulation game, linked to the development of the cultural sector and the music industry,
• To build a simulation game as a training – coaching tool – in order to understand the environment and organizational challenges when creating a music festival.
• To raise awareness of the challenges of a professional festival, around 5 main axes:
  • The programming and artistic discovery ;
  • The economic model ;
  • promotion / communication;
  • Team management;
  • Event organization.

Each area offers several choices/levels of achievement, that will determine the options you will have to make in other areas, in an interdependent mode.
FETE ACCOMPLIE can thus be a professional tool of sensitization and mediation for the actors in the music field, in direction of a new public.

Development
It is important to see this project as a first step, a resource.
A second step of development could be to add new features (missions, music, etc.) or/and explore a global cultural ecosystem: next to a festival event, how within the performing arts, to produce artists, to manage a rehearsal-creation-diffusion space, a recording studio, an art school, but also to work on public policies, to deal with international partners, etc.?
The model bellow, synthesized in French by La Scène (the current festival referring to the blue rectangle of Diffusion):

The vector of the serious game would make it possible to connect in a pedagogical way the music and the live performance in general to the other disciplines which are visual arts, book, audiovisual and “new media”, architecture, heritage…?
FETE ACCOMPLIE is the first brick of this reflection-simulation on the cultural field. Registered in Creative Commons, it leaves freedom to organizations, institutions and operators, both French and Canadian, who wish to exploit the content and infrastructure of the game, to compose other facets in the service of an increase in competence – playful – of new entrants, as well as of professionals neophytes in a field related to their main activity.

See at the end of the article to access the open source project files and the design document.

FETE ACCOMPLIE is a third-person isometric 3D PC game that helps coach players on decision making when holding a music festival. Throughout the gameplay, players follow the music festival preparation workflow and internalise the music festival operation experience. Gameplay begins with the preparation stage, where players will make mandatory choices such as artists list, stage, promotions, etc. and can choose to prepare some optional contingency plans.

The Festival stage involves controlling a manager character and moving around the environment, tackling various scenarios. Scenarios are timed events based on real-world festival case studies. Players will have to make quick decisions to resolve these scenarios that will heavily affect the final result and public opinion of this music festival. While making these choices, players will learn how to manage audience satisfaction and the budget. These are critical elements for a festival’s success; the final result will display these metrics and give players a chance to reflect on their choices.

To better understand the vocabulary and expressions of the show, a glossary in French is available on Jerrock.com

This project was developed by Masters students from the Centre for Digital Media (Vancouver, BC, Canada), based on an original idea from the Embassy of France in Canada.

Centre for Digital Media Development Team:

• Project Manager – Neel Nair
• Programming Lead – Matthew Belford
• Lead Designer – Lan Wang
• UI/2D/Concept Artist- Ada Tam

Cultural Services of Embassy of France in Canada: Alexandre Col, Nicolas Piccatto, Anthony Lahaye

Alliance Française of Vancouver: Fanny Surzur, Damien Hubert

Price : $0 – Free to play

Platforms: Web/Online; PC; MAC

Design Document: download here

Project Files : Free upon request

Contact: Culture[at]consulfrance-vancouver.org