Ludomusicology

In the past two decades, the study of video game music has come into its own and gained acceptance in the academic community. This subdiscipline, now commonly referred as ludomusicology, is still attempting basic questions concerning how it can be researched. This article aims to present the current situation and to reflect about some of the main lines of research related to the music of video games and their culture, a field of ongoing research that has received little attention in Hispanophone academia up to the present time. This article was originally published in Anuario Musical 75 (2020): 181–99 and has been translated for the Journal of Sound and Music in Games. https://doi.org/10.3989/anuariomusical.2020.75.09

Waltzing on Rooftops and Cobblestones

The relationship between music, sound, space, and time plays a crucial role in attempts to define the concept of “immersion” in video games. Isabella van Elferen’s ALI (affect-literacy-interaction) model for video game musical immersion offers one of the most integrated approaches to reading connections between sonic cues and the “magic circle” of gameplay. There are challenges, however, in systematically applying this primarily event-focused model to particular aspects of the “open-world” genre. Most notable is the dampening of narrative and ludic restrictions afforded by more intricately layered textual elements, alongside open-ended in-game environments that allow for instances of more nonlinear, exploratory gameplay. This article addresses these challenges through synthesizing the ALI model with more spatially focused elements of Gordon Calleja’s player involvement model, exploring sonic immersion in greater depth via the notion of spatiotemporal involvement. This presents a theoretical framework that broadens analysis beyond a simple focus on the immediate narrative or ludic sequence. Ubisoft’s open-world action-adventure franchise Assassin’s Creed is a particularly useful case study for the application of this concept. This is primarily because of its characteristic focus on blending elements of the historical game and the open-world game through its use of real-world history and geography. Together, the series’s various diegetic and nondiegetic sonic elements invite variable degrees of participation in “historical experiences of virtual space.” The outcome of this research intends to put such intermingled expressions of space, place, and time at the forefront of a ludomusicological approach to immersion in the open-world genre.

NACVGM 2020 Retrospective

The North American Conference on Video Game Music (NACVGM) has been held yearly as an in-person conference. NACVGM 2020 was originally scheduled to occur in April 2020 in Ithaca, New York. As a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, many academic events in 2020 were shifted online, including game music conferences like Ludo2020 and NACVGM. The organizing committee for NACVGM decided to hold the full conference digitally as a live event. After hosting NACVGM 2020 live on his personal Twitch.tv page, Ryan Thompson explains the technical means that made it possible and offers a series of recommendations for other individuals considering shifting in-person meetings to online events. This reflection provides one perspective on hosting an academic conference during lockdown.

Finding Untitled Goose Game’s Dynamic Music in the World of Silent Cinema

There are three unusual things about Untitled Goose Game’s music. First, for an independent video game produced by a small studio, the music is dynamic and reactive to a high degree. The game uses pre-recorded, non-generative musical performances and yet will respond to onscreen events within a buffer of only a few seconds at maximum. Second, the music takes inspiration not from other dynamic music systems in video games but from the varying practices of musical accompaniment for silent cinema and early comedy, aiming to replicate affect rather than process. Finally, the music for Untitled Goose Game takes the unusual step of adapting pre-existing classical music from the public domain—in this case, six of Claude Debussy’s Préludes for solo piano—rather than creating an original score intended from its conception to be dynamic. Accordingly, this article outlines the dynamic music system at work in Untitled Goose Game and the influence drawn on for this system from non–video game approaches to musical accompaniment. The article discusses the varying practices for music for the silent era of cinema, the theoretical frameworks used to conceptualize these many divergent approaches, and how closely we might recognize their legacy at work in Untitled Goose Game’s soundtrack. Ultimately, this article argues that by looking to approaches beyond more familiar debates about dynamic music for video games, Untitled Goose Game helped shortcut familiar problems that confront developers and composers when working with dynamic and reactive music.

Cultural Imperialism in Capcom’s Mega Man Series

With its diverse “orchestral” palette and complex forms, the Nintendo NES repertoire stands as a monument to innovation—a creative outpouring driven by a compositional challenge inherent to the NES medium: how to create music that repeats extensively without drawing attention to the fact that it is repeating. In response to this challenge, composers developed ways to create the illusion of variety. On the one hand, they pushed the limits of the 2A03 sound chip by crafting timbral and textural effects to deepen its well of possibilities. On the other hand, they employed modular and layered compositional techniques to simultaneously maximize and disguise repetition. Innovative as they are, these methods capture only a portion of the NES repertoire’s sophisticated makeup. This article moves beyond the details of technique and form to examine NES music from a new angle, one that centers on the impressive network of cultural meanings with which it engages. By treating deviations from normative musical traits as hermeneutic windows, my work draws on Japanese cultural studies, postwar Japanese history, and anime to interpret Capcom’s Mega Man series, and in particular Mega Man 2 (1989), as an allegory of cultural imperialism.

Harmonic Chains

Omega Quintet (Idea Factory International, 2014), a role-playing video game released for the Sony PlayStation 4, centers around the concept of weaponizing musical entities and apparatuses to combat threats in a dystopian universe. Omega Quintet weaponizes music literally, supernaturally, and economically, both inside and outside of the game narrative. In this article, we interpret these types of weaponization as an extended allegory for consumption. On one level, the surface narrative denotes sound as a murder tool, on another level the player enables violent consumption of these tools, and yet another level reveals the weaponization of agency within a gendered labor market. The story of Omega Quintet is set in a dystopian Japan overrun by monsters known as the BEEP. Protagonist Takt and his childhood friend, Otoha, join an organization that develops special idols known as Verse Maidens to fight the BEEP. Surviving members of humanity provide the fan base for the Verse Maidens. The Verse Maidens depend on fan support to fuel their powers. Battles in Omega Quintet feature an assortment of musical weaponization. Examples include Sound Weapons as the main conduit for physical attacks, Verse Maidens’ unique songs to play during extended attack sequences known as Live Mode, and special joint attacks known as Harmonic Chains. The battles take the commodification of idols to such an extreme that they are simultaneously consumed and used as weapons. Presented as a duality of fragility and strength, beauty and brutality, art and war, the Verse Maidens are consumed in a complex system of cultural and narrative implications.

Dungeons, Dragons, and Music

Since 1974, Dungeons & Dragons (D&D) has existed on the fringes of popular culture alongside many other tabletop roleplaying games. In recent years, however, D&D and other RPGs have emerged at the forefront of gaming culture. The allure of fantasy and magic draws players into creating and roleplaying characters in a mediated fantasy space through social interaction. Though largely untheorized, Dungeons & Dragons has been examined through sociological and philosophical lenses, though these studies often ignore the performative aspects of the game itself. During gameplay, Dungeon Masters (DMs) often exploit sensory detail, music specifically, in order to encourage roleplay in their players. The fifth edition handbook of D&D states that DMs can use “music, art, or recorded sound effects to help set the mood, and many players and DMs alike adopt different voices for the various adventurers, monsters, and other characters they might play in the game.” The following research explores the use of music within D&D as it relates to the players’ ability to immerse themselves within the game, drawing on research in ludomusicology and applying a lens of reflexive and close ethnography. Additionally, this research explicates a growing popularity of D&D on the internet through shows such as Critical Role and the live storytelling genre, as well as how it has altered ideas concerning the performance of voice. Based on interviews with players and observations of D&D games in person and via online streaming services, this article asserts that music allows players to immerse themselves within the setting of the game, which in turn creates a form of participatory performance for both the players and the Dungeon Master.