Game Jockey as an Intermediary Between DJ Practice and Video Games

The document proposes the "game jockey," a hybrid figure who performs live mixes of games for players in the way a DJ mixes recorded music, adapting in real time to audience reactions. Its central argument is that core DJ concepts, including live performance, sample culture, mixing, and remixing, can be productively mapped onto games. The author supports this claim by drawing analogies to sports referees, television hosts, game masters, and VJs, and by proposing a triangular Jockey–Game–Player model that frames the performer as an intermediary between a game system and its audience.

The analysis surveys a range of existing practices that approach the concept without fully realizing it. Super Mario Maker, WarioWare: D.I.Y., modding, machinima, and game mash-ups such as Rom Check Fail capture elements of DJ culture, as do board games like Nomic and Fluxx, yet none combine live performance with the mixing of game samples. Nando Sarmiento's work and WarioWare: D.I.Y. are identified as the closest precedents, though neither manipulates a mix of games the way a DJ manipulates samples.

To test the model, the author develops three prototypes: Avoid, Starship, and Rez-Jockey. In each, an operator adjusts difficulty and visuals in response to players, but only Rez-Jockey introduces a modular interface that switches between interchangeable rule-sets as clips. Its game samples are simulated rather than drawn from existing titles, a limitation the author acknowledges. The work concludes that Avoid and Starship fall short of true game jockey performance, since they vary a predefined game rather than mixing games, and it establishes qualification criteria requiring that the jockey hold control over the game, mix multiple games, and go beyond simple variation of a single predefined game.