At the Push of a Button: Player/Avatar Fusion and the 'Gestural Potential' of Video Game Music
Year: 2024
Type: conference-paper
Abstract: Videogame music engages players, summoning us into the magical, virtual world it soundscapes, encouraging us to adhere to the ludic parameters at play.In this paper, I outline a new gestural analytical framework better suited to the playful audiovisual individualities of videogame design in order to reveal how players might become immersed in games and their virtual playgrounds.I will present a new analytical theory, graphically mapping gestures so as to determine the ways in which videogame music can successfully engage players to feel part of the ludo-narrative journey through a concept I term the 'gestural potential' of music.This paper presents a remapped recontextulisation of musical gesture theories presented by Robert Hatten (2004;2018) in combination with a further fusion of scholarship, synthesising concepts from film and media studies, dance pedagogy and art research that have, so far, been marked by their limited contact.By exploring ideas of design (Isbister, 2017; Bódi, 2023), culture (Kassabian, 2013), and analysis (Summers, 2016;Middleton, 1993), we can identify how best to examine videogame music to reveal how players engage with games.Music is as much a visual-kinetic art form, a vessel for the translation of spatial and virtual shape into sound, as it is a purely aural one.Musical shaping-be that through phrases and the rise and fall of melodies for example-is analogous to the gestures of humans and those we find in our interactions with the virtual avatars we can embody in videogames.Prior theories of musical gesture pose problems in the context of game music.Firstly, the idea of the listener as recipient is problematic.Video game players are multiple things: listeners but also performers with agency over game play as they move within the virtual land-and soundscape.Players are creators of a sort, and a remapping of musical gesture would need to take this into account and consider the role of the player at the heart of such a framework.Secondly, not all players play in the same way.Players, as humans, are not the same, each bringing their own biographical individualities to the games we play, just as we bring them to the music we listen to.Significantly, this analysis will highlight a framework for visualising individual player movement and audiovisual gesture.Graphs and gestural shapings will illuminate a method of understanding the way a competing for our attention, this paper's analysis of how that very attention can be grasped is a timely one.
Author: James Ellis
Institution: Royal Holloway University of London
Language: English
Subfield: Music
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: gold
OpenAlex ID: W4413478669