This book offers a comprehensive overview of how video game sound and music represent cultures, spaces and personal identifications. Focusing on the concept of identity, the volume brings together issues as diverse as belonging to an ethnic or cultural group, identifying with certain sexualities or being able to deduce the historical or geographical context of a game. This volume explores whether the musical and sound identities linked to video games are based on clichés and stereotyped arrangements that span cultures and times. It includes case studies that analyse the mechanisms used by game producers, composers and sound designers to “characterise” and represent different identities to broad audiences of potential players, as well as how the players perceive these sonic inputs. The book is organized into three main sections, covering topics as the representation of historical periods, musical stereotypes of cultures from different geographic locations, representations of identity in fictional spaces and sonic depictions gender.
1. Introduction: Music, Sound and Identity in Video Games.- 2. “A Few Billion Timelines Might Take a While”: Temporality, Disruption, Folklore and Fantasy in Assassin’s Creed.- 3. Musical Representations of Tudor England in Video Games.- 4. Mixed identities: Picturing Spanish Music in World-travelling Games.- 5. Gaming the Lonely Road of Americana: Authenticity and Identity in Where the Water Tastes Like Wine.- 6. (Re)Packaging Japanese Musical Identity in Ghost of Tsushima, Genshin Impact and Ōkami.- 7. Immersive Environments in Video Games as a New Stage for Popular Music Performance.- 8. Spatializing Music in VR Experiences.- 9. Uncanny Landscapes and Cosy Dungeons: from Sonic Spaces to the Musical Narratives of Elden Ring and Dark Souls.- 10. Dehumanization through Sound: Musical Representations of Fantastic Cultures in World of Warcraft.- 11. Queering Cloud: Music, Gender and Sexuality in Video Games.- 12. Music and Masculinities in Game Space.- 13. Voice of the Fembot: An Analysis of the Subservient and Sinister Vocal Depictions of the Gynoid in Sci-Fi Games.- 14. “I’ll Show You”: K/DA and the Role of the Virtual Popstar in the Games Industry.
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