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Understanding Video Game Music
Understanding Video Game Music develops a musicology of video game music by providing methods and concepts for understanding music in this medium. From the practicalities of investigating the video game as a musical source to the critical perspectives on game music - using examples including Final Fantasy VII, Monkey Island 2, SSX Tricky and Silent Hill - these explorations not only illuminate aspects of game music, but also provide conceptual ideas valuable for future analysis. Music is not a redundant echo of other textual levels of the game, but central to the experience of interacting with video games. As the author likes to describe it, this book is about music for racing a rally car, music for evading zombies, music for dancing, music for solving puzzles, music for saving the Earth from aliens, music for managing a city, music for being a hero; in short, it is about music for playing.
264 pages, Paperback
Published October 25, 2018
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
August 24, 2021
I really liked it!! The first academic book I read that I was so intrigued by that I was reading it non-stop and didn't want to put it down! It was very interesting and I would recommend it to people that want to get into the base of video game music!
April 4, 2024
I really hated this.
Uses the context of an academic text mainly as a force to obfuscate basic realities about video game music.
Summers references Proust, Kant, and Baudrillard (!), to make such insightful points as:
Video game music exists.
It can add flavor/texture to a game or just be for fun.
Sometimes it communicates important things to the player.
Sometimes it's inspired by film... but it's different than film music.
He lacked the restraint to NOT bring up Wagner and "leitmotif" during his discussion of Final Fantasy VII. Read to me like a very long essay in a communications/media studies course, artificially inflated with ten dollar words and different repeated ways of saying the same thing, and genuinely, as far as I can tell, lacks any interesting insight at all.
Uses the context of an academic text mainly as a force to obfuscate basic realities about video game music.
Summers references Proust, Kant, and Baudrillard (!), to make such insightful points as:
Video game music exists.
It can add flavor/texture to a game or just be for fun.
Sometimes it communicates important things to the player.
Sometimes it's inspired by film... but it's different than film music.
He lacked the restraint to NOT bring up Wagner and "leitmotif" during his discussion of Final Fantasy VII. Read to me like a very long essay in a communications/media studies course, artificially inflated with ten dollar words and different repeated ways of saying the same thing, and genuinely, as far as I can tell, lacks any interesting insight at all.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews