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1-2: Playing with Voice: Listening for Audio-Visual Expressions and Representations of Voice, Vocality and Speech Acts in Games
  • ISSN: 2057-0341
  • E-ISSN: 2057-035X

Abstract

Theories of voice have almost exclusively focused on the human voice, generally ignoring or only very briefly accounting for other, nonhuman voices. In this article, I am interested in the voice outside of the assumed (and strictly) human – simply put, posthuman voices. I use these posthuman voices to address a larger phenomenon: that of existentialism in popular culture. What I call the ‘existential voice’ – a voice rooted in song and creation as a way of positioning selfhood within the world – has permeated science fiction since its literary inception with Mary Shelley’s (1818). In more recent years, the topic of overt existentialism has become a recurring and increasingly common trope in various screen media, such as (1982, 2017), (1995, 2017) and (2013–present). In this article, I examine the use of the posthuman existential voice in postmillennial popular media. Drawing from voice studies, feminist posthuman studies and existential philosophies, I focus on the voices heard in PlatinumGames’s (2017) to examine how the ‘existential voice’ is employed in the gameworld. In , we have entered a truly posthuman, post-Anthropocene world, wherein androids and robots vie for and question their existence. I demonstrate how the many voices in this game play a critical role in addressing the game’s overtly existential narrative. I conclude my article with a consideration of the ethics bound up in posthuman existential voices.

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2025-05-27
2026-04-14

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/content/journals/10.1386/jivs_00088_1
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The lament[s] of the (post)human: Existential voice and/in NieR: Automata (2017)1
Journal of Interdisciplinary Voice Studies 9, 79 (2024); https://doi.org/10.1386/jivs_00088_1
/content/journals/10.1386/jivs_00088_1
/content/journals/10.1386/jivs_00088_1
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  • Article Type: Article
Keyword(s): ethics; existentialism; ludomusicology; NieR: Automata; posthumanism; Simone de Beauvoir; video game music; voice studies

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