Research concerning game music and identity has included discussions of gender (Austin, 2018), class (Ivănescu, 2018) and disability (Plank, 2018). This paper addresses issues of queer sexuality. In the spirit of Bonnie Ruberg’s Video Games Have Always Been Queer (2019), this paper considers how queer aesthetics are important elements of game music. It does so by blending queer games studies (Harper/Adams/Taylor eds, 2018; Ruberg/Shaw eds, 2017) with queer musicology (from McClary, 1991 to Walker, 2015). It considers how game music resists hegemonic logics of musical structures, timbres and identities in games.

Games present an intimate relationship between music and the player: music is connected to the gamer’s corporeal engagement. Players use their bodies to affect or resist musical change (in dialogue with the game). As a result, both in composition and during play, games subvert power dynamics of traditional, desire-driven, non-interactive musical structures.

Games frequently challenge dominant timbral aesthetics of perfection and realism, and instead unashamedly prize unrealistic timbres, non-traditional instrumentation, and non-homogenous (diverse) soundworlds. Beyond sonic alterity, these timbres resist the assumed superiority of technologically advanced approaches. Players may use avatars with radically different identities to their own (including sexual identities). Yet music mediates between character and player. In musically blurring the boundaries between player and avatar, game music presents a non-essentialist perspective on identity beyond affiliation or assimilation. Illustrated by games including Tomb Raider and Undertale, the paper argues for recognizing the ‘queering’ power of game music, as it challenges linear narratives of progression and homogeneity.

Bio

Tim Summers researches and teaches music in Western popular culture at Royal Holloway University of London, with a particular focus on music for film, television and video games. His books include Understanding Video Game Music, The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time – A Game Score Companion and The Cambridge Companion to Video Game Music. He edits the Journal of Sound and Music in Games for University of California Press. The main recurring theme of his research is an attempt to understand the musical experiences and educations that mass media provide for the huge audiences they address.