The Queerness of Video Game Music

Video game music is a significant site of queerness, challenging normative demands, suspending or loosening musical value systems, and complicating essentialist notions of identity. It explores musical structures that provide queer temporal alternatives, retro or chiptune timbres that queer notions of technological progress, and music that queers the self/other binary of identity. Games offer ways to listen to, engage with, and understand music that challenge inherited assumptions and reductive or monolithic values, practices, and identities.

Format: Paperback / softback
Length: 75 pages
Publication date: 31 August 2023
Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Video game music serves as a profound realm of queer exploration, where conventional expectations are challenged, suspended, or loosened. Games actively resist hegemonic musical logics, interrogate musical value systems, and utilize music to complicate essentialist notions of identity. This Element presents three areas of queerness, each representing distinct relationships between queer design and queer engagement, spanning from unintentional resistance to explicit engagement with identity.

Firstly, this Element delves into musical structures that offer alternative temporal narratives to normative linear progression, as well as interactive systems that redefine the power dynamics between musical material and the listener. Secondly, it explores retro or chiptune timbres that queer notions of technological progress, challenging chrononormativity and embracing alternative timelines. Lastly, the Element examines music that queers the self/other binary of identity, challenging traditional notions of personal and collective identity.

Games present unique ways of listening to, engaging with, and understanding music, offering opportunities to challenge inherited assumptions, reductive values, practices, and identities. Through their interactive nature, games enable players to actively participate in shaping musical experiences, challenging the boundaries between creator and audience, and fostering a deeper understanding of the multifaceted nature of music and its role in shaping our lives.

Weight: 136g
Dimension: 152 x 229 x 7 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9781009371407