Journal of Interdisciplinary Voice Studies - 1-2: Playing with Voice: Listening for Audio-Visual Expressions and Representations of Voice, Vocality and Speech Acts in Games, Nov 2024

This article examines the Nintendo 64 video game Banjo-Kazooie and its unique approach to vocalization, wherein designers chopped and rearranged sound samples into abstract, nonsensical grunts to represent character dialogue. Drawing upon queer and lyric theory, I argue that what at first seems like slapdash gobbledygook is in fact deeply poetic in nature, with the method used to disassemble and reassemble the sound samples ensuring they retained their metrical qualities. The resulting language, with its blend of poetic metre and abstract speech, engenders an unruly and distinctly queer sensation of vocality that allows us to imagine, or more aptly to hear, the possibility of new aural futures in gaming.

Whilst Welsh voices are used consistently within western film and television to denote Wales, across diverse multimedia spaces like Star Trek: Discovery (2017) and The Last Kingdom (2015), Welshness appears othered and fixed in the ‘magical’ in video games. English localizations of Japanese video games use Welsh voices and accents to encourage a connection with these magical spaces, and Celtic fetishized histories, for players who can identify this accent – which is primarily British audiences. This article highlights the impact of Welsh voices in signifying the mythological and magical game world across a combination of accent, language and music. I identify how Welsh voices are used in these spaces where other ludomusicology scholarship often does not acknowledge language and accent when discussing aural and sonic elements of video games, specifically focusing on localizations of Japanese role-playing games so consistently by analysing games such as Ni No Kuni, Xenoblade Chronicles 2 and 3, and Elden Ring.

In this article, I analyse the free-to-play RPG Path Out (2017), which includes video commentary from the migrant whose story the game is based on, to examine the performance and politics of encountering ‘the migrant’s voice’ in a gameplay setting. First, I discuss the tendency in migration scholarship to ascribe agency to any instance of migrants speaking about their conditions and the importance of accounting for the process of mediation in evaluating whether or how migrants are able to speak out. Second, I consider the importance of performing authenticity for migrants to be taken seriously when telling their story. By analysing how Path Out replicates yet undermines these two tendencies, I argue that the video commentaries within the game turn out to be a lot more ambivalent than merely an opportunity to provide ‘a voice to the migrant’.

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 Frankenstein (1818). In more recent years, the topic of overt existentialism has become a recurring and increasingly common trope in various screen media, such as Blade Runner (1982, 2017), Ghost in the Shell (1995, 2017) and Rick and Morty (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 NieR: Automata (2017) to examine how the ‘existential voice’ is employed in the gameworld. In NieR: Automata, 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.

Video game worlds and play often allow us to engage with fictionalized versions of ‘real life’ history. Historically relevant games with complex narratives like those in the Assassin’s Creed franchise invite players to imagine not only what ancient history was like overall, but crucially, what it might have sounded like. For the franchise’s 2017 title, Assassin’s Creed: Origins, the designers endeavoured to develop the target accents and language used by the characters we encounter in the game authentically, and researched as much as they could about the linguistic backdrop of the game’s Ancient Egyptian setting. In this article, I address the challenging complexities involved in determining what kind of authenticity can even be built into a historical narrative like AC Origins through the use of vocal performance. I build on the work of Stephanie Lind (2023), to similarly problematize the use of the term ‘authenticity’ as it applies to vocal performances within video game worlds, and address how deeply subjective and contextually dependent the design and reception of those vocals can become.

This piece elucidates modes of embodying non-human animal avatars, experimenting with the alternative vocalities afforded to me as a player by the sound design that enrich my embodied imaginative play as I play as, relate to, and imagine my corporeality as I play characters beyond the human. Drawing from ethnographic gameplay, I use the non-human main characters of two games that I refer to animal avatar games: Untitled Goose Game where you play as a goose and Stray where you play as a stray cat. These novel avatar identities and the treatment of avatar vocality offer the exploration of novel processes of representation, imagining, embodiment and worldmaking.

Review of: Queering Vocal Pedagogy, William Sauerland (2022)

Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 282 pp.,

ISBN 978-1-53816-668-0, e-book, £30.00

ISBN 978-1-5381-6667-3, p/bk, £30.00

ISBN 978-1-5381-6666-6, h/bk, £77.00