Soundtrack, The - Volume 8, Issue 1-2, 2015

2014 marks the 30th anniversary of Alexei Pajitnov’s puzzle game Tetris. The simple, addictive interface created an instant sensation upon its 1989 US release. The anniversary thus represents a convenient occasion to reexamine this 8-bit classic, now a vaunted member of the ludic canon.

Reflecting anxieties about what lay behind the Iron Curtain, video games of the 1980s tended to represent Soviets as vodka-addled adversaries. Tetris was the first to present Soviet elements in a more positive light, illuminating changing US attitudes at the end of the Cold War. Once western game developers obtained marketing licenses, they emphasized the game’s origins with red packaging, images of the Kremlin, and the hammer and sickle. Russian musical selections added geographical specificity and commercial interest. The Soviet elements drew gamers’ attention, and the game’s addictive nature created habitual – even compulsive – players. Tetris afforded gamers a metaphorical connection to previously forbidden, exotic territory. The construction of a new ludic Soviet sets Tetris apart from other games of this era. By exploring Tetris’s historical narrative in a context of more hostile representations, we craft a new understanding of the game’s role in constructing a new cultural discourse situated at an important moment in US history.

This article argues that the dichotomization of aesthetic and social experiences is reductive. Music in popular Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games (MMORPGs) provides a provocative and relevant perspective on aesthetic experiences that are simultaneously social. A case study will consider music as both a gameplay mechanic and as a performative art in The Lord of the Rings Online (2007–), with Star Wars: Galaxies (2003–2011) as a point of comparison. This provides a more nuanced understanding of the interrelatedness of aesthetic and social experience, and touches on wider-ranging issues pertinent to the fields of ludomusicology, video game studies and performance studies, as well as musicology and aesthetic theory. In particular, the article will address the gamification of music, and the emerging possibilities of video games as both mass culture and aesthetic art.

Film noir is a genre that is essentially conflicted: not only does it have both love and death at its essence, but it is also a story about impending failure enveloped in style, beauty and smoke. This contradictory core is also reflected in a number of ways in the paradoxes of one of the most prominent noir games of recent years, the appropriately titled L.A. Noire (Team Bondi and Rockstar Games, 2011): the seemingly open world contradicts the linear narrative and, while the gameworld is firmly rooted in a meticulously researched historical past, it is also heavily stylized and grounded in a cinematic legacy. This is also reflected in the music of the game: along with the original soundtrack composed by Andrew and Simon Hale (with additional songs written by The Real Tuesday Weld), borrowed music helps place the game both in a particular place and time and in a particular genre. In this article, I explore the multiple functions that music plays in L.A. Noire, acting as temporal signifier but also reflecting the themes and tropes of film noir. Finally, I argue that Baudrillard’s concept of the hyperreal can be used to better understand how appropriated music in video games relates to music history.

This article examines how the ‘Battlefield’ (EA Games) series of games generates authenticity in its soundtrack both through a meticulous approach to modelling the physical world and through the appropriation of audio characteristics from our, typically mediated, experience of conflict. It goes on to examine how we might reconcile such ‘authentic’ audio with the more ludic features of the soundtrack, required to support gameplay, that are typically presented as inauthentic. The absence of these sounds during narrative-based sequences and the acceptance of them without negative impact on immersion during gameplay implies that these inauthentic sounds appear not to disrupt the immersive qualities of the ‘authentic’ but only when clearly positioned as ego-ludic (heard only by the player, non-spatialized and synthetic in quality) and only within the context of challenge-based sequences of the game.

In the late twentieth century, the mixtape was a popular way in which fans shared their taste in music with others in their social network; the author of a mixtape would record a compilation of music, often an assortment of works by various artists, onto an audio cassette, and presented this playlist as a curated, thematic listening experience for the recipient of the mixtape. Since then, the mixtape has moved beyond tangible recording media to online peer-to-peer file sharing services (such as Napster) and shared, user-curated playlists on commercial music streaming services such as Spotify. In recent years, these playlists have been gamified – elements of competition, achievement and self-expression have been added to curated listening experiences in games wherein players create in-game musical playlists, share these playlists with others, challenge other players to quiz games about songs in their favourite genre, etc. Viewing social video games as transmutations of the mixtape, the article focuses on ways in which these games are emerging as vehicles of self-expression and taste sharing by examining the various degrees and methods of curatorial control afforded to players (and game creators) regarding the selection and sharing of musical content in gameplay and extending into ‘real life’.

A Composer’s Guide to Game Music, Winifred Phillips (2014) Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 288 pp., ISBN: 9780262026642, h/bk, £20.95

Sound Play, William Cheng (2014) Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 240 pp., ISBN: 9780199969968, h/bk, £65.00 ISBN: 9780199969975, p/bk, £16.99