Gender, Race and Religion in Video Game Music

This book provides semiotically-focused analyses and interpretations of video game music, focusing specifically on 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 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 to 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. Yee analyses music's contributions to video games'narrative and thematic meanings, specificallyconcerning three master categories of identity -gender, race and religion. Containing twenty-fivedetailed analytical case studies of musicalrepresentation in video game music, it sets out theoretical and conceptual frameworks beneficialfor interpreting musical meaning from video gamesoundtracks. Though players and commentatorsmay be tempted to view a game's soundtrack asmere 'background music', this researchdemonstrates video game music's socialrelevance as a major factor impacting players'cultural attitudes, values, and beliefs. Part I explores immersion, interactivity and interpretationin video game music, proposing a theory of'interpretative interactivity' to account for players'semiotic agency in dialogue with their ludicagency. Part II explores gender representation in atrajectory from conventional gender construction,alternative femininities/masculinities and potentialfor non-binary representational possibilities. Part IIIexplores musical representation of nationality,culture and race, proposing the concept of'racialised fantasy' and applying frameworks fromrace scholarship to connect media representationsof race to real world racial justice movements. PartIV examines religion, introducing the concept of'sonic iconography' to connect theological meanings to the use of sacred music in videogame music.