Gender, Race and Religion in Video Game Music

This book provides semiotically-focused analyses and interpretations of video game music, focusing specifically on musical representation of three demographic diversity traits. Adopting a narratologist orientation to supplement existing ludological scholarship, these analyses apply music semiotics to crucial modern-day issues such as representation of gender, race, and religion in video games.

An original and welcome contribution to the field, it considers musical meaning in relation to the aspects of gender, race, and religion. This book will help readers to develop language and context in which to consider video game music in terms of society and representation and will encourage future research in these critical areas.

Yee analyses music's contributions to video games' narrative and thematic meanings, specifically concerning three master categories of identity – gender, race and religion. Containing twenty-five detailed analytical case studies of musical representation in video game music, it sets out theoretical and conceptual frameworks beneficial for interpreting musical meaning from video game soundtracks. Though players and commentators may be tempted to view a game's soundtrack as mere 'background music', this research demonstrates video game music's social relevance as a major factor impacting players' cultural attitudes, values, and beliefs.

Part I explores immersion, interactivity and interpretation in video game music, proposing a theory of 'interpretative interactivity' to account for players' semiotic agency in dialogue with their ludic agency. Part II explores gender representation in a trajectory from conventional gender construction, alternative femininities/masculinities and potential for non-binary representational possibilities. Part III explores musical representation of nationality, culture and race, proposing the concept of 'racialised fantasy' and applying frameworks from race scholarship to connect media representations of race to real world racial justice movements. Part IV examines religion, introducing the concept of 'sonic iconography' to connect theological
meanings to the use of sacred music in video game music.