K/DA, True Damage, And The Virtual Future Of Artist Collaborations
By Tamar Herman
In a global where TikTok
reigns supreme and holographic idol
Hatsune Miku can sell out arenas (and Coachella), where tweets can ignite global conversation in seconds and any physical distance is bridged by an internet connection, efficiency art is undergoing a revolution; assignments like K/DA and True Damage, both tie-ins with the massively popular multiplayer online game
League of Legends, hint to the future of pop culture where the lines between virtual and reality are becoming more and more blurred.
The most successful of these simulated musical acts from
League of Legends, K/DA,
took the world by storm with their single “Pop/Stars” in 2018, and dynamic quintet True Damage followed hot on its heels with “Giants” late last year. The pair of releases share a rapper, Akali, who spits bars with ferocity and fashion as she prepares for battle as one of the in-game stars. “Pop/Stars” and “Giants” were released through music videos and alongside playable skins that players can use — right after buying — inspired by characters who are voiced by some of the hugest global names across a number of genres.
K/DA, which was preceded by the success of rock band
Pentakill, was organized as a virtual K-pop girl sort, featuring the voices of (G)I-dle’s Soyeon and Miyeon, Madison Beer, and Jaira Burns as characters Akali, Ahri, Evelynn, and Kai’Sa, respectively, while hip-hop collective True Damage saw the return of Soyeon’s Akali, joined by Becky G’s Qianna, Keke Palmer’s Senna, Thutmose’s Yasuo, and Duckwrth’s Ekko. Both teams performed at the
League of Legends World Championships, bringing virtual characters to life through augmented reality performances with each artist alongside their corresponding
Legend fighter.
While sponsored content and voice acting are nothing new, the idea of those becoming purchasable elements of the brand itself — in this case in-game skins — opens up a whole can of worms: Just as celebrities
moved into voice acting to add marketable appeal to animated characters, will more brands tap into the power of popular artists by creating computerized counterparts to help sell their product? It definitely seems that way. In back of
League of Legends, Fortnite also has a long history of musical tie-ins ranging from
in-game concerts to skins inspired by celebrities. Yet Riot Games' creation of full-blown groups point to a new direction where musical artistry is split between a musician’s own career and their, potentially more lucrative, artsy collaborations with brands. K/DA’s release didn’t just appeal to gamers; it also garnered widespread interest from
new audiences and seen a major boost to
merchandise sales.
And the video for "Giants" has
amassed more than 70 million views on YouTube to date, signaling a pull from outdoors of
League of Legends's core consumer base.
Riot Games has been working with music talent since 2013, and the organization has regularly broadcasted live collaborations throughout their annual World Championship events. By the time the 2019 League of Legend World Championships rolled around in Paris, the coexistence of reality and virtuality generated an experience that was literally larger than life. “As we do increasingly storytelling, it’s sort of an organic fit as soon as music combines with E-sports,” head of Riot Music Order Toa Dunn tells MTV News. “For us, being really big on narrative, we can almost express real-life narratives, in the content of, ‘Why is True Damage here?’ And while you understand the narrative of Akali and what 'Pop/Stars' was, you begin to understand more of this virtual world [of Runeterra] that we’ve been building.”
For every one of the artists who participated in True Damage, taking on this new medium was a matter of giving themselves a possibility to go behind their usual musicality and connect with a virtual persona in ways that haven’t been done before, essentially building new artsy identities. Keke Palmer describes the mixing of technology and human efficiency as “the experience of a lifetime,” adding that this is precisely what millennials do: “We take in something — gaming — and created its own world and put it on a level that probably generations before us couldn’t imagine.”
Akali voiced by Soyeon / Courtesy of Riot Games As a K-pop star, Soyeon is used to high-intensity performances full of light shows and advanced staging effects, nevertheless augmenting what she does into the realm of virtual reality is a whole new level of production value. “This is making a special culture that’s fresh and new,” she says. To her, K/DA and True Damage show the potential for the new heights creativity can rise to once given the breadth of a fictional universe to explore, and “will help evolve the future of [artistic] culture and gaming.”
And, Duckwrth emphasizes, this categorize kind of teamwork between artists and brands can right now cross geographic and linguistic boundaries in a way that was previously impossible. “Giants” brought with each other a whole crew of international names from across different musical scenes and united them for an efficiency in Paris that was in turn
broadcasted across the globe, while their virtual counterparts danced around them on stage. “The world needs to come with each other way more, so this is one example of the way coming with each other, through gaming and the song,” he says.
And with it comes the next stage of efficiency art: a digital mixture of celebrity, direct-to-consumer gaming, and live concerts. The future possibilities are endless at a time whenever both globalization and technology bring artisans from different industries with each other to make new forms of art, and sooner or later it’s likely the world will visualize more of those medium-blending events where stars become the platform for branding in new and evolutionary ways.
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