Serious Beats: Transdisciplinary Research Methodologies for Designing and Evaluating a Socially Integrative Serious Music-Based Online Game

Serious Beats is a transdisciplinary project from Vienna University of Technology and the University of Vienna that aims to design a music-based online social game fostering intercultural friendships among Viennese teenagers aged 14 to 17, many of whom have Turkish or Balkan migration backgrounds. Its central thesis is that a music-centered social game can make interaction among youth from mixed ethnic backgrounds both enjoyable and observable, thereby supporting integration while generating research data. The project combines ethnographic fieldwork, interviews, focus groups, playtesting, and a planned three-month gameplay phase analyzed through network and metric methods, situating game design and social science within a single collaborative process.

The design foundations rest on 48 semi-structured interviews, with further rounds and student interviews planned. Participants showed a strong preference for rap and hip hop, relied heavily on YouTube as their primary music source, and expressed hybrid migrant and Austrian identities, with many reporting intergroup tensions over jobs and housing. Early music-game prototypes were judged to carry a high risk of losing both male and female audiences, prompting a shift toward a social music service built on Facebook and YouTube and integrated with real-world events in youth centers and vocational schools. Analysis of the interview results was still ongoing at the time of writing, and no quantitative findings had been reported.

The evaluation strategy pairs a three-month gameplay period with pre- and post-qualitative interviews, ego and affiliation network analysis, and gameplay metrics. The authors acknowledge a limitation in their methodology: current measures capture short- and mid-term outcomes such as engagement, active player counts, and reviews, but do not establish whether the game can function as a sustained tool for social integration. The paper therefore reads primarily as a methodological and design account rather than a report of outcomes, with its empirical conclusions still pending.