Analyzing music's contributions to video games' narrative and thematic meanings.

This book provides semiotically focused analyses and interpretations of video game music, focusing specifically on the musical representation of three demographic diversity traits. Adopting a narratologist orientation to supplement existing ludological scholarship, these analyses apply music semiotics to crucial modern-day issues such as the representation of gender, race, and religion in video games.

An original and welcome contribution to the field, it considers musical meaning in relation to the aspects of gender, race, and religion. This book will help readers develop language and context in which to consider video game music in terms of society and representation and will encourage future research in these critical areas. Containing twenty-five detailed analytical case studies of musical representation in video game music, the book sets out theoretical and conceptual frameworks beneficial for interpreting musical meaning from video game soundtracks. Though players and commentators may be tempted to view a game’s soundtrack as mere background music, this research demonstrates video game music’s social relevance as a major factor impacting players’ cultural attitudes, values, and beliefs.

Part I explores immersion, interactivity, and interpretation in video game music, proposing a theory of interpretative interactivity to account for players’ semiotic agency in dialogue with their ludic agency. Part II explores musical gender representation in a trajectory from conventional gender construction, alternative femininities and masculinities, and the potential for nonbinary representational possibilities. Part III explores the musical representation of nationality, culture, and race, proposing the concept of racialized fantasy and applying frameworks from race scholarship to connect media representations of race to real-world racial justice movements. Part IV examines religion, introducing the concept of sonic iconography to connect theological meanings to the use of sacred music in video game music.