Through examples of video games and related media, this article provides historical, cultural, and music-theoretical groundwork for creating an associative soundscape of alcohol in multimedia experiences. While these studies raise serious concerns about drug and alcohol content in games, they primarily focus on the presence and stereotypical use of alcohol, offering limited attention to related sounds and music, or the increased integration between sound design and game-play. Some recent studies (Olsen, in The video game debate: unraveling the physical, social, and psychological effects of digital games, Routledge, New York, pp 39–53, 2016 Cranwell et al., Cyberpsychol Behav Soc Netw 19(2):426–434, 2016) examine representations of drugs and alcohol in video games. This article develops a framework for associations between sounds, alcohol, and video games. In “Canon Anxiety?” Karen Cook pulls together various issues of academic canons to question the scope, focus, and diversity of the growing field in which the Journal of Sound and Music in Games exists. In “The Difficult, Uncomfortable, and Imperative Conversations Needed in Game Music and Sound Studies,” Hyeonjin Park highlights issues of diversity and representation in the field of video game music and sound studies, with respect to the people and music that make up the subjects of the field, the people who produce scholarship in the field, and the people who engage with game music and sound. In “On Canons as Music and Muse,” Julianne Grasso views the music originally presented in a video game as itself a type of canon and argues that official and fan arrangements of original game music may provide windows into lived experiences of play. In “Rewritable Memory: Concerts, Canons, and Game Music History,” William Gibbons examines the ways in which concerts of video game music may create canons and reinforce particular historical narratives. Each author considers an aspect of canonization and argues for a wider purview. The four authors in this colloquy interrogate issues of canons relating to video game music and sound from a variety of perspectives. Here, music plays an important role in terms of environmental storytelling, both as semiotic shorthand, and as a reflection of the affordances available to the inhabitants of the city.Ĭanons-of music, video games, or people-can provide a shared pool of resources for scholars, practitioners, and fans but the formation of canons can also lead to an obscuring or devaluing of materials and people outside of a canon. This article draws connections between these two underexplored areas and analyses the musical characterisation of class in the 1994 cyberpunk adventure game, which takes places largely in a literally stratified metropolis where the three levels of the city act as representations of the three social classes. Furthermore, the relationship between video game music and socio-cultural aspects of video game studies is also rarely examined beyond issues of race, ethnicity, and cultural appropriation. While other issues of representation have been studied extensively within game studies (gender representation in particular), the representation of class remains an underexplored area. This article proposes Revolution Software’s Beneath a Steel Sky (1994) as a starting point for the analysis of the relationship between music and social class in video games.
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