Faculty voice: Bridging video games, music and academia on Twitch | MSUToday

Ryan Thompson is an assistant professor of media and information in the MSU College of Communication Arts and Sciences. He serves as the resident musicologist for the college’s top-ranked game design and development program, teaching and researching a variety of issues related to sonic activity in video games. Ryan Thompson is an assistant professor of media and information in the MSU College of Communication Arts and Sciences. Photo by Anthony Valli. In 2017, I began streaming on Twitch, a livestreaming platform primarily focused on video game-related content, as a short-term academic project to help rework a conference presentation I was developing into a book chapter. By the end of the six-week project, I was having so much fun filming episodes with friends that we continued under the name “Ludomusicology Thursdays,” reflecting the discipline we studied — video game music and sound — and time we were available to record and broadcast. A few months later, I interviewed at Michigan State University. During that process, I proposed a course that would teach students how to produce the kind of multi-camera, multi-source broadcasts I had been creating. That idea became MI 334: Esports Broadcasting, a course I have now taught each fall
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