This chapter seeks to understand how media and digital technologies influence art demand and supply. Particularly, we shed light on the impact of the mass media on cultural consumption and live attendance. We describe the emergence of virtual museums and, more broadly, digital cultural heritage. We also evaluate whether video games may influence art consumption and discuss the cultural importance of video games. Finally, we cover the consumption of music and how it relates to the rapidly changing and evolving music industry.

The story of how medieval polyphony and song have been approached in more recent times is the subject of our final chapter. We look at how the appearance of modern editions of medieval poetry allowed composers in the first half of the twentieth century, such as Carl Orff and Benjamin Britten, to set medieval song-texts to new music. It would take until after World War II, however, for the music of medieval polyphony and song to reach wide audiences, and we chart the history of the recordings, concerts, and festivals that have brought this music to listeners from 1950 onwards. We examine the approaches of the pioneering ensembles and directors who first performed and recorded this music in the 1950s and 1960s, looking at their influences and attitudes towards the many unknowns regarding its original performance practice. Situating the re-awakening of medieval music in the wider context of the early music revival and the ‘authentic’ (later, ‘historically-informed’) performance movements, we then move on to consider ‘medievalist’ music, especially in film, television, and video games with medieval settings.

This chapter describes a collaboration between its authors – a professor and an undergraduate (post-secondary) student – to develop an education programme for Play the Knave, a mixed-reality digital Shakespeare game. As part of an effort to bring the game to local elementary and secondary school English classrooms, the authors co-ran an internship programme at our university, where the game was created. Interns, most of whom were English majors interested in education, learned to create and then teach lesson plans for Play the Knave, subsequently researching the game’s impact on learning. Our chapter discusses the challenges of collaborating in a university environment, comparing these to the challenges players experience when interacting with avatars in Play the Knave. Like Knave’s players, participants in our programme faced difficulties connecting with other participants, including ourselves and local teachers. We maintain that flawed connection – which players of digital games describe as ‘glitchiness’ – need not undermine effective collaboration but can actually enhance it, as participants are pushed to adapt constantly to shifting circumstances. In contrast to theories of artistic collaboration that prioritize participants achieving a state of ‘flow’, we argue that, in fact, collaborations can be most successful when marked by fits and starts, lags and the imperfect connections endemic to living in a digital world.

This chapter explores the multi-decade career of Tangerine Dream and their founder, Edgar Froese, with an equal emphasis on the band’s practices during the 1970s and 1980s. We situate Tangerine Dream’s prolific discography within multiple styles such as kosmische Musik, ambient, techno/trance, and synthwave, while highlighting the band’s influences and legacies in live music and Hollywood film scores. First, Tangerine Dream’s evolution during the 1970s is traced, involving the group’s central role in the ‘Berlin School‘ of electronic music. Classic albums on Ohr, from Electronic Meditation to Atem, led to success particularly in Britain and France. With the signing of the band to Virgin Records, the subsequent sections explore landmark albums such as Phaedra and Rubycon, and the important roles of Christopher Franke and Peter Baumann in the group’s classic configuration. We then highlight Tangerine Dream’s iconic live tours, stretching from Australia to America, as well as influential concerts in Eastern Europe. The band’s extraordinary career in film music, especially in 1980s Hollywood, forms the focus of our conclusion, where the mark of Tangerine Dream’s major influence can be seen in media as diverse as the bestselling video game Grand Theft Auto 5 and the Netlix hit series Stranger Things.

In “Digital Nature,” Lai-Tze Fan adapts Lawrence Buell’s criteria for ecofiction in order to demarcate the emergent genre of “digital ecofiction,” which includes hypertext novels, video games, and other forms of multimedia art. Fan contends that the self-reflexive nature of digital texts like J. R. Carpenter’s The Cape and Eugenio Tisselli’s The Gate fosters in readers/users a critical awareness of their implication in environmental degradation through the use of digital technologies. Fan also suggests that digital ecofiction is well suited to address the challenges of the Anthropocene since it evokes alternative temporalities such as deep time and cyclical time.

From videoconferencing to VR, the modern world is fraught with frustrations due to the design of technology. But these frustrations can be reduced or eliminated by "knowing the task" to be performed with the technology and "knowing the user" of the technology. This is the basis of human-centered design. Using the three Vs, videoconferencing, virtual reality, and video games, as examples, the reader is introduced to tools like task analysis. All of the lessons of the previous chapters apply to these three V systems, cementing the idea that understanding the human mind is the first critical piece of any evaluation or design.

Computer games for learning use multimedia elements such as animation and spoken or printed text to foster learning of academic skills or knowledge. Research on game-based learning can be categorized into three research genres: value added research, cognitive consequences research, and media comparison research. Value added research seeks to determine which game features promote learning. Cognitive consequences research seeks to determine whether students learn anything useful playing an off-the-shelf game. Media comparison research seeks to determine whether students learn better from computer games than from conventional media. Future research is needed that adds replication studies to the research base, determines moderating and mediating factors, examines how to implement games in learning contexts and how to balance motivational and cognitive features in games, and provides practical recommendations.

Creativity contributes to both personal and societal growth. Recently, new methods for assessing and fostering creativity using video games have been proposed and tested. In this chapter, we start by presenting the multifarious definitions and theories of creativity. We then examine the effects of video games on creativity via empirical studies, and discuss how video games can be useful for improving creativity. Our main findings show that not all video games can enhance creativity – some game genres have more potential to enhance creativity than others. Specifically, video games that have the most potential for enhancing creativity are those that facilitate flow, allow players to co-create the game, and enhance players’ intrinsic motivation. We conclude with some specific suggestions on ways to increase creativity in video games.

This conclusion places the arguments of Virtual Play within the larger context of virtual and fictional experiences in our culture, and reiterates the stakes of a more participatory, more vicarious criticism for understanding why imaginative literature continues to matter today. It gives a brief account of the ‘patch notes’ to the popular video game The Sims 4, and suggests how the imaginative structure of digital simulations meaningfully parallels the pleasures of novel fiction we have been documenting. Finally, it acknowledges potential problems with and proposes a future direction for this research, pointing to the role that vicarious reading has to play both in raising and answering questions about simulated violence and intimacy.