Un Forastero. Issues of Virtuality and Diegesis in Videogame Music.

¡Un Forastero! Issues of Virtuality and Diegesis in Videogame Music Author(s): Isabella van Elferen Source: Music and the Moving Image, Vol. 4, No. 2 (Summer 2011), pp. 30-39 Published by: University of Illinois Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5406/musimoviimag.4.2.0030 Accessed: 25-10-2016 01:51 UTC REFERENCES Linked references are available on JSTOR for this article: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5406/musimoviimag.4.2.0030?seq=1&cid=pdfreference#references_tab_contents You may need to log in to JSTOR to access the linked references. JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

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Music and the Moving Image Vol. 4, Issue 2.

¡Un Forastero! Issues of Virtuality and Diegesis in Videogame Music Isabella van Elferen Videogame music offers musicology a great challenge as it finds itself at the cross section of music and new media studies. Not only is game music now one of the most popular and lucrative types of music, its contribution to gaming immersion and navigation can hardly be underestimated. A game soundtrack draws players into the game space's atmosphere with heroic melodies, exotic drums, or spooky white noise; it enables them to identify characters and situations through leitmotifs and underscorings; with 3-D sound clues, it warns them of imminent danger and helps them navigate through fights. Despite its vital importance for users and the commercial success it has generated—game music is one of the fastest growing branches of the current music industry—the academic study of videogame music has only just begun to emerge, with only one monograph, Karen Collins's Game Sound, and a handful of articles on the topic. This essay is a call for greater musicological involvement with videogame music and its theoretical implications, offering a first investigation into the role that music plays in videogame virtuality and diegesis. The first part of the essay explores the interplay between the virtual reality of gaming and that engendered by musical experience itself, arguing that the philosophical ramifications of listening prompt important differentiations to current conceptions of virtuality, hyperreality, and magic circle. Secondly, music's contribution to gaming hyperreality is assessed through an analysis of the narrative functions of cinematic game music, on the one hand, and the interactive flexibility of gameplay music, on the other. This combination of narratology and ludology makes the analysis of game music compatible with current approaches to graphic, textual, and interactive dimensions of computer games, and thus enables a precise demarcation of music's medium-specific contribution to gaming. Finally, an evaluation of diegetic and nondiegetic levels in game music raises questions regarding the involvement of real-life surroundings and embodiment in the gaming magic circle. Music, I argue, supradiegetically expands the gaming magic circle into the real-life surroundings of the player; in this way it underlines the potentially uncanny dimension of videogaming. Game Music and Virtuality To identify the ways in which music contributes to gaming virtuality, magic circle, and hyperreality, these basic game theoretical concepts themselves require a close (re)examination. The first of these is virtuality, a simulated spacetime that is experienced as a reality other than that of the day-to-day and that emerges, in this case, in a computer game. Virtuality is understood here as a nonmanifest dimension of reality that escapes, precedes, or exceeds actualization—that which is virtual is separated from manifest reality by its not-yet-being-actualized. 1 Virtual reality, then, is quite literally a form of reality that is virtual (i.e., nonmanifest); it can be created by computer games and other digital media (cyberspace) but also by other media such as film and TV, theater, text and poetry, . . . and by music. The virtual reality in videogames is as important as a constituent factor of the "magic circle" of play. The magic circle is defined as the accumulation of game rules, gameplay, and immersion that delineate the game experience as a separate space outside the ordinary world.2 The magic circle has an ambiguous relationship with the "reality" that surrounds the game: while the game experience seemingly separates gamers from their "real" environment, this environment simultaneously functions as the physical location within and against which the game space comes into being. In order to enter the magic circle, a psychological state of mind that is described by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi as flow is required: "being completely involved in an activity for its own sake. The ego falls away. Time flies. Every action, movement, and thought follows inevitably from the previous one, like playing jazz. Your whole being is involved, and you're using your skills to the utmost." 3 When the gamer is brought inside the magic circle by this flow, the virtual reality of game narrative and gameplay functions as a transparent overlay of the player's real-life physical environment. It is the combination of these factors—virtuality, magic circle, flow, player's real-life surroundings—that causes game immersion. In the case of computer games, the magic circle seems to be readily established by the digital media that process the game, and REAL-LIFE seems less important a factor in immersion. It is often argued that mediatized entertainment such as videogaming engenders a hyperreality, a medial simulacrum without reference to an a priori

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reality or, in Jean Baudrillard's often-quoted words, "the simulation of something which never really existed." 4 In Vital Illusion, Baudrillard argues that the omnipresence of hyperreality in today's overmediatized world has blurred the lines between the real world, the physical day-to-day reality predating mediatization, and the virtual, simulated realities. This highly polemic, binary view has been nuanced by game theorists such as Jesper Juul, who notices a dual structure in computer game reality: Video games are two rather different things at the same time: video games are real in that they are made of real rules that players actually interact with; that winning or losing a game is a real event. However, when winning a game by slaying a dragon, the dragon is not a real dragon, but a fictional one. To play a video game is therefore to interact with real rules while imagining a fictional world and a video game is a set of rules as well a fictional world.5 In cinematic terms, Juul argues that while the fictional world created in a computer game establishes a firm diegetic basis, the game rules move in the liminal space on the edge of the magic circle and function as a powerful glue between diegesis and extradiegesis. Based on these observations, Juul argues that computer games operate within a "half-real" between reality and fiction, REAL-LIFE and virtual reality, and that the magic circle of video gaming comprises both.6 When music is brought into the practical as well as theoretical equation, the concepts of virtuality, magic circle, flow, and hyperreality become less stable than even Juul's half-real can account for. Consider the case of Guitar Hero (which premiered in 2005). Players select a song from the playlist, switch on the little guitar or the little drum kit, and start rocking—and that means three things in this theoretical context: firstly, they are playing a computer game according to set rules of pressing the right button at the right time, and that the flow of that gameplay leads the player into the magic circle of this game; secondly, in order to do this, the player is physically playing an actual rock classic on a tangible (if somewhat unusual) guitar or drum kit, which means that the flow governing this magic circle also encompasses real-life elements, like Juul argues; thirdly and most interestingly, the player becomes part of a form of reality that, through the performative agency of music, is decidedly different than real life or virtual reality. The combination of the first two factors—gameplay and physical activity—with the hyperreality of the computer graphics and the live rock music being played engenders in players an altered sense of reality that escapes the division between real and virtual. The Guitar Hero can see his or her virtual avatar on the screen performing the same rock song that he or she is playing in real-time with a performance on a material instrument in his or her own living room, and both personae are "rocking out"; the musical flow binds both personae together in a universe that, although certainly related to the game in terms of game rules and visual correspondence, is generated by purely musical factors such as the progression of the chords played, the beat of the rhythms drummed, the song melody and lyrics, and the subjective meanings that these musical elements evoke. This is not a purely mediated hyperreality nor a half-virtual–half-real but an alternate reality mixing these elements with the virtuality of personal memory and emotion. The mixed reality created by Guitar Hero carries within it both components of the half-real—game rules and a fictional world—but these seem to be simultaneously blended together and enhanced by the active role of music in this game. If the game rules move in between reality and virtuality, the music that is the narrative and ludic content as well the gameplay of this game is a particularly interesting nexus of half-reality: the rock songs are part of the game but also of the player's cultural memory, evoking in his or her mind emotions, memories, and identifications that are rooted firmly outside the game diegesis. 7 Guitar Hero's rock music thus bridges the gap between real life and virtual reality, because it binds together such very personal, very real qualities with the computer game's hyperreality. But the suturing together of game diegesis and a player's real-life environment by way of rock connotations is only the beginning of what the performative forces of music can achieve in terms of virtual/reality. My argument is that music creates its own virtuality and its own flow, quite independently of those of the computer game but complementing and intensifying it. Various theorists have described the ways in which musical experience reconfigures space, time, and subjectivity. Csíkszentmihályi argues that listening to or playing music creates a highly immersive form of flow, which is characterized by a sense of timelessness and complete absorption in the propulsive force of the music. 8 Quantitative research into listening practices shows that the flow of listening to or making music can take us away from the here and now and relocate us into other times and spaces by way of its strong connotations. 9 This musical associativity is part of a complex emotional and cognitive process that takes place on levels way beyond the grasp of consciousness. Not only does hearing a piece of music bring back former experiences of listening to the same music, but also unfamiliar music—even small elements like a melodic curve, a rhythmical structure, or a particular timbre—inescapably evokes musical and cultural connotations. This musical mémoire involontaire destabilizes the fixedness of temporal and spatial referentiality and makes past, present, and future meanings virtually overlap. 10 "To be listening," says Jean-Luc Nancy, "is always to be on the edge of meaning"; 11 listening always means to be almost-ascribing meaning to the music


heard, and to the listening self in relation to it. "On the edge of meaning," "almost-ascribing meaning"—music itself defies referentiality and signification, and its acquired significance is always related to other, past, present, and future meanings. The fluid temporality and spatiality of such musical (self-)interpretation results in the emergence of an alternative, musically summoned, sense of time and space. Nancy describes musical space-time in terms that are very interesting when read against the virtuality discourses that surround game studies: [The presence of musical experience] is first of all presence in the sense of a present that is not a being (at least not in the intransitive, stable, consistent sense of the word) but rather a coming and a passing, an extending and a penetrating. . . . The sonorous present is the result of space-time: it spreads through space, or rather it opens up a space that is its own, the very spreading out of its resonance, its expansion and its reverberation. This space is immediately omnidimensional and transverses all spaces: the expansion of sound through obstacles, its property of penetration and ubiquity, has always been noted. 12 Music, in Nancy's reasoning, generates a spatiotemporality that is characterized by transience and by becoming, not by stasis and being, which despite and thanks to the evanescence of the musical moment functions as a line of flight with unknown destination. 13 Two simple examples can illustrate the powerful virtual performativity of music. Mobile music devices like the Walkman and the MP3 player create private bubbles of musical virtuality that overlay real life, even in the public sphere. 14 Cyberpunk author and inventor of the term cyberspace William Gibson is a famous Walkman enthusiast for exactly this reason: he exclaims that it "has done more to change human perception than any virtual reality gadget."15 And anyone who has the experience of (literally) dancing the night away in a club can testify that clubbing space and time are determined by music rather than by walls or opening hours: just like when playing Guitar Hero, musical connotations and flow establish in the club an alternate reality that is neither strictly virtual nor entirely real in the ordinary, day-to-day sense. Don Ihde takes this line of thinking further in arguing that musical experience is characterized by a radical phenomenological re-creativity, an aspect of listening that he calls auditory imagination: Through the creation of music humans can manipulate the mysteries of being and becoming, of actuality and potentiality, and through the vehicle of music they can legislate the schedule of a phenomenon's passage from its total being to its absolute annihilation. 16 Musical experience itself could therefore be described as a form of hyperreality, a simulacrum radically detached from any prior model. It is a form of virtual reality created by a medium—music—but one that is much less easily distinguished from real life than that created by other media; this is because of its rootedness in collective and personal emotions and connotations, on the one hand, and the necessary temporal simultaneity of such musical virtuality with day-to-day reality, on the other. In a sense, musical virtuality is neither real nor virtual, whereas the game's half-real is both. It is this musically evoked altered reality that demonstrates how music can reveal the slippery nature of concepts like the magic circle, real life, virtual reality, and hyperreality—concepts that are buzzing through current academic debates, to which musicology can and should contribute valuable insights. In order to analyze the interplay between the hyperreality generated by computer games and that engendered by musical virtuality and flow, it is important to make musical and game analytical terminology compatible so as to enable a cross-medial analysis. How do these factors combine into an intermedial hyperreality? Intermedial Hyperreality and the Musical GPS Zach Whalen has noted that "music [is] one component in [the game] which generates meaning through the coinvolvement of its parts." 17 The magic circle in videogaming is established by the cooperation of a range of media— computer graphics, spoken and written text, interactive interfaces, sound design, a musical soundtrack. These various media join in the creation of the content of the game, so that the player is presented with a multimedial aggregation that speaks to various senses at once. When s/he interacts with it, the meanings and appropriations that emerge will result from the combined agencies of those media and the personal interpretations and associations they evoke. The survival horror game Resident Evil IV (2007) can provide an example. The game player has the role of Leon S. Kennedy, a U.S. agent who has to rescue the president's daughter, Ashley Graham. Ashley has been kidnapped by an evil Spanish sect, and Leon's mission is to free her from the eerie deserted village where zombielike creatures lurk around every corner with unconcealed bad intentions. The computer graphics paint a bleak landscape in grays and browns, and the player steers quite naturally through empty houses, a moor, a haunted castle, and a biotechnological laboratory with the haptic interfaces of the Wii remote and nunchuk. Now and then, some spoken or written text gives


story-line information about the locations or Leon's mission. But the action really starts when the player hears a rough voice cry out "¡Un Forastero!" from around this or that corner, followed by a hollow, thumping beat and echoing, metallic drones. Any of the media alone could not have the effect that their combined force does—the player jumps, Leon turns around with one nunchuk motion, and a zombie carrying an axe or a chainsaw can be seen approaching. The music speeds up in crescendo just as the monsters move faster and Leon's movements and shooting become more urgent. The player gets unstoppably drawn into the game by the cumulative influences of graphics, music, and inter/action. Because of such inseparably intertwined workings, Freda Chapple and Chiel Kattenbelt define intermediality as the performative convergence of a number of media and their audience: We locate intermediality at a meeting point in-between the performers, the observers, and the confluence of media involved in a performance at a particular time. The intermedial inhabits a space in-between the different realities that the performance creates. 18 The analysis of intermedial processes cannot but focus on the ways in which various agents (visuals, text, sound, and affective/cognitive/imaginative reception) interact in the creation of a multimedial event, in the evocation of its emergent meanings, and in the immersion of the audience therein. "Intermedial researchers occupy the space inbetween;" 19 my question is, how can musicology contribute to such literally intermedial analysis? In game-music research, such intermedial analysis to date has focused mainly on the application of film-music principles to the analysis of videogame music, there are indeed many functional similarities between music for film and music for games.20 Traces of film scoring can be found in cutscenes (film or animation scenes between sections of gameplay), which are mostly accompanied by traditional film musical tropes; in a similarly cinematic way, various locations, game situations, or avatars are characterized through music or branded through leitmotifs. Mickey mousing, the underlining of on-screen action through hurried melodies and rhythms, is in games to intensify the gamer's own action. In Resident Evil's horror context, sudden stingers serve to scare the player just like in scary movies, and the zombies are announced by a leitmotif in the shape of a returning threatening melody, and fights are accompanied by drones whose nerve-racking beat speeds up as the action increases. In film theorist Claudia Gorbman's terms, this cinematic game music provides semiotic ancrage (anchoring), and sutures together jump cuts, scene changes, and fast edits. 21 Cinematic game music immerses players very directly into game plot and play, but the film-music approach alone does not suffice to analyze videogame music. Some of the most powerful and intriguing characteristics of game music can be found outside the cinematic dimension. The difference between the two types of music can easily be tested by trying to play a computer game while the sound is switched off. While horror movies, for instance, become decisively less scary when watched without a soundtrack, survival horror games simply can't be played without sound (even when there are subtitles), because players will then miss vital clues related to navigation, approaching danger, and game missions. 22 The Resident Evil player can hear zombies approaching Leon before he or she can actually see them, because the zombie's screams are followed closely by the beat and drones that announce their presence. When the game is played with 3-D sound, players can even perceive the precise direction from which they is going to be attacked. At the moment when all zombies in a fight are eliminated, the music will stop, and the player knows that she or he can advance. From these brief examples, which are taken from a survival horror game but whose relevance exceeds that genre, it becomes clear that videogame music has much more autonomous agency than film music. Especially in the 3-D surroundings that have become the standard for videogaming, it is almost the player's partner. Just like game analysis proper, therefore, game-music analysis needs to combine narratological and ludological 23 approaches in order to analyze the narrative functions of film music with the emergent interactivity of the gameplay music. The gameplay soundtrack, which will be referred to here as ludic sound, can roughly be divided into four categories: diegetic, as in the case of in-game walkie-talkies or gunshots; nondiegetic; half-diegetic—that is, consisting of diegetic screams plus nondiegetic music—such as the leitmotifs tied to game characters; and interface sounds such as the (leit)motif indicating that an avatar has died. These musical motifs and sounds are induced by, as well as directive for, game interaction and are therefore both action based and action guiding. 24 As the aforementioned example from Resident Evil demonstrates, the gamer often depends on these auditory clues for the progress of the gameplay. Ludic sound steers the player's navigation through the game space; as an auditory (and often 3-D) addition to the game's virtual spatiality, it gives directions for gameplay development and determines actions. In order to analyze the virtual navigation and spatiality in videogames, Henry Jenkins and Mary Fuller have explored Michel de Certeau's ideas about the "spatial practice" of walking through the city in a gaming context. 25 De Certeau asserts that abstract place (lieu) can become lived, practiced, meaningful space (espace) through the act of


navigation through and thereby appropriation of it. 26 He therefore considers walking a "narrative action" that creates cultural meaning; 27 Jenkins and Fuller argue that just like in the real-life city that De Certeau describes, walking also is a narrative spatial practice—albeit a virtual one—for an avatar in a game world. Gaming can therefore be described as a form of interactive world building induced by these narrative aspects of navigation. Considering the importance of game music for both establishment of a virtual game space and navigation through it, music is a prime factor in the interactive narrative world building described by Jenkins and Fuller. I therefore want to suggest that it works as much more than just as a cinematic soundtrack: ludic game music also functions as a GPS (gaming positioning system), a navigational aid that guides players in the spatial practice of gaming. Ludic game music is often nonlinear in design, because it is unpredictable in which order and over how much time a player will move through the game; melodies and harmonies meander in repeated loops rather than progressing toward cadences that would suggest a certain type of closure—only when larger missions have been accomplished or chapters ended can cadences be heard. Computer game soundtracks are devised to accompany hybrid, interactive narratives, and therefore the music has to be flexible enough to underscore or even anticipate the constant changes in the game narrative. This is why ludic game music is often designed in such a way that it can (to a certain extent) adjust to spontaneous change. Karen Collins discusses such dynamic game music, which she divides into interactive and adaptive audio, focusing, from a compositional perspective, on the nonlinearity of game soundtracks and the variability in musical parameters like rhythm, volume, melody, harmony, and form that enable the required lack of direction in the game score. 28 She describes in great detail just how game music attempts to undo or at least evade the chronology that is inherent in most Western music. In this way, dynamic audio can support the unpredictable temporal structure of the game narrative and gameplay. Combining the metaphorical functions of cinematic game music with musical flow and virtuality, videogame music adds a personalized affective coloring to the multimedial hyperreality. Musical meaning converges with visual, narrative, and haptic meanings, blending its own strong connotations with those of the other media and powerfully influencing the intermedial game experience for players. The imperative nonlinearity and variability of dynamic game music, however, render this coloring all but predictable, illustrating once again that game-music analysis needs to step beyond a solely cinematic approach. Collins wonders whether game music can generate any meaning at all if its nonlinearity and associativity result in nothing but an all-pervasiveness of emergent meanings: In other words, the close synchronization of audio with any series of images does not exist in games. Analyses of music and the moving image . . . , although valuable, have used a fixed text, which is the same every time it is played back. Without this fixedness, what becomes of the meaning? Are the meanings different every time, or do they carry similar meanings, despite different timings? If the latter is the case, are the studies of the close synchronization of music and image redundant? 29 These questions may be induced by videogame music, but their importance exceeds the confines of that research field. Computer game music urgently reminds musicologists that the usefulness of studying fixed musical meanings and their cultural contexts is limited; videogame music invites us to look, rather, at the ways in which music, as one agent among graphics, text, and interface, contributes to meanings emerging from intermedial and synaesthetic performative processes. This emergent meaning is similar, but not identical to, Juul's notion of emergent gameplay, which is "either an aspect of the game itself, a subjective experience of the player, or an interaction between the player and the game."30 Cinematic game music gives the game hyperreality a personalized coloring and underlines its narrative; ludic game sound further increases the immersion into this hyperreality through the intensification of the gameplay. Together they establish what can be called a musical gaming positioning system through the intermedial virtuality of the computer game, enhancing the game flow by way of music's performative strength. Just like the GPS system in a car, the musical GPS addresses itself directly to players and gives them directions—only this GPS is affective as well as navigational, which makes the game's magic circle expand itself and stretches the borders of hyperreality right into the player's lived space. Time to take another look at Guitar Hero. Hyperrealize This!? Supradiegetic Kinesonic, Uncanny Returning to the first case study, Guitar Hero, with the foregoing analytical framework in mind, it becomes clear that despite the differences between this music game and the survival horror game Resident Evil in terms of functions and relative weight of the media involved, the establishment of a hyperreality in both games works along the same


principles. In both cases, each of the various media expresses its version of the game diegesis—the rescuing of Ashley Graham from a zombie sect or the performance of a rock classic in front of an audience—and these convergent media establish an intermedial virtual reality that enables players to "hear visuals" and "touch sound" while they navigates through an alternate reality. And in both cases this alternate reality cannot be described satisfactorily as virtual or real: on top of the game rules and live interaction that constitute Juul's half-real, music's inherent virtuality and flow (see paragraph 1) expand the gaming magic circle over the boundaries of mediated hyperreality. But whereas the game music, as argued earlier, colors the gameplay in Resident Evil, it is the gameplay in Guitar Hero, a gameplay generated by the player with a guitar that she or he holds in her or his own hands. This situation is indicative of an problem in game-music studies. If this is diegetic music, the fact that the player produces it means that the player is a founding part of the diegesis. But this in turn means that a new definition of diegetic game music is required, since the music in Guitar Hero is operative within both the ranges of diegesis and extradiegesis, inseparably linking these two parts of the magic circle. What, then, is diegetic game music? Nor does this problem occur only in a live music game such as Guitar Hero. The half-diegetic leitmotifs in Resident Evil epitomize the problem. The diegetic character Leon hears the call "¡Un Forastero!" when zombies approach, but not the extradiegetic music that accompanies it. Players who navigates Leon through the game, however, hear both the call and the music, as, strictly speaking, their ears are located outside the game diegesis. This is complicated. Leon is the avatar, the representation of the player inside the diegesis, the persona by means of whom she or he is able to actually play this game—yet the player hears more than the avatar, as s/he can also hear nondiegetic sounds. And to complicate things further, it is this nondiegetic music that influences the player's in-game actions rather than the diegetic scream. The question repeats itself: What is diegetic game music? It clearly cannot be distinguished from nondiegetic music quite as markedly as in film, considering its importance for navigation and gameplay progress. Just like the music produced by the player in Guitar Hero, the half-diegetic music in Resident Evil demonstrates the ways in which game music blurs boundaries between diegesis and nondiegesis, narrative and ludic components. A significant portion of game music should be therefore described as supradiegetic music that extends over the entire magic circle, moving through diegesis, half-diegesis, and extradiegesis. Guitar Hero, moreover, also illustrates the involvement of extradiegetic surroundings and physical embodiment in the gaming magic circle. In this game, the actual gameplay—the performance of a rock song—happens off screen, while the graphic avatar merely represents these actions on screen. The player's physical body as well as the avatar, and the real-life environment as well as the intermedial hyperreality, are involved in the gameplay. It is the space generated by the interaction among all these factors that effectively can be identified as the location of the game magic circle,31 which thereby becomes kinetic rather than hyperreal. Of course, this does not only hold true for Guitar Hero; other Wii games operate with similar real life–involved kinetic magic circles. 32 The important role of music in Guitar Hero, however, ensures that a significantly large part of this kinesonic (to borrow Drew Hemment's neologism from "Corpus of Sound") magic circle is taken up by the music-induced virtuality described in the first paragraph of this essay. Hemment's kinesonic conflates the kinetic and the sonic and is therefore an apt description of the effect of game music. The guitar heroic circle, like that of any other game, consists of game rules, gameplay, intermedial hyperreality, and immersion; and, as in any other game, this magic circle is provided with the personalized virtuality of musical connotations. But since the supradiegetic music of this game dominates the game narrative and the gameplay, musical virtuality and flow acquire an even greater influence on the immersive experience than they have in, for instance, survival horror games. This means that the real-life component in Guitar Hero's kinesonic circle loses its fixed grounding in reality through the phenomenological re-creativity of musical experience described earlier. This quality of musical virtuality can make the borders between real life and virtual reality disappear in a much stronger way than can games without a soundtrack: because of music's strong virtualizing potencies, game music doubles, undoubles, and redoubles gaming virtuality while simultaneously radically destabilizing the reality around it. In this way, game music expands the magic circle, as far as musical associativity goes: almost infinitely. As a never-ending magic circle, an infinite virtuality, music foregrounds the uncanny dimension of videogames, the very source for the many parental and societal concerns regarding this cultural phenomenon that are expressed in the anxious question "But it isn't real, or is it?!" It is, as much as it isn't; and this uncanny overlap of reality and virtuality in computer games becomes almost tangible in the analysis of the music that accompanies them. Music enables virtuality to pervade reality, as it always-already allows ghosts of meanings past to haunt the present. The soundtrack for Resident Evil is often literally spectral because it voices ghosts and zombies ("¡Un Forastero!"); these absent presences make themselves heard through the spectral medium of recorded sound. Recording and replaying sound, after all, means disconnecting "live" sound from its origin, thereby making it unlive while it's also undead. What remains is a "voice from the void," a ghostly communication that is detached from any form of origin. 33 Recorded voices are phantom voices that, like phantom pain, are the perceivable though disembodied ghosts of their former physical selves calling out.34 If such musical phantom voices induce a virtual experience, this virtuality is located not only beyond the realm of manifest reality, but, as its very existence is established by nonoriginary spectres, beyond the realm of origin.


The game musical hyperreality should therefore be defined as a phantom space in which the player wanders around like a spectral presence. The game musical GPS, in summary, is virtual as well as actual, affective as well as navigational, supradiegetic as well as kinesonic. It is because of these qualities that music becomes one of the most immersive and one of the most uncanny components of a computer game. The Game-Music Challenge The aim of this essay has been to demonstrate the ways in which game music evokes a methodological crossfertilization between musicology and new media studies. The study of videogame music urges a new approach to musical analysis: it requires an active involvement with debates surrounding computer games, virtuality, and intermediality, and it forces us to rethink the theoretical understanding of music as a medium. Musicological involvement with computer games can, I believe, spark new insights regarding musical performativity, musical experience, and musical emergent meaning, and thus enrich our understanding of music's cultural work. Not only musicology can gain from game music research: the aspects of game music discussed in this essay demonstrate that a musical analysis of computer games can be a valuable contribution to current academic debate in this field. Music dismantles the borders between virtual and real spaces, undoing the computer interface and replacing it with the 3-D interface of aural imagination. It widens the kinetic magic circle and guides players with its GPS. Computer game music urges theorists not to think of hyperreality in terms of a Baudrillardian dichotomy between real life and virtual reality but as an organically moving alternate universe: the re-creative, intermedial, and yet uncanny virtuality of music is elastic, comes out of the speakers, and envelops the listener in its flow. Because of these qualities, music gives a "non-catastrophic point of view" to hyperreality, as it does not oppose the real and the virtual or even the actual and the virtual, very much in the way Pierre Levy envisioned: The virtual is by no means opposite to the real. On the contrary, it is a fecund and powerful mode of being that expands the process of creation, opens up the future, injects a core of meaning beneath the platitude of immediate physical presence. 35 Levy's description of the virtual matches seamlessly with the performative powers of music. Music overlays dayto-day reality, as well as mediated hyperreality, with an infinity of personalized meanings. The alternate reality it thereby establishes is at the same time real and virtual, simultaneously immersive and deeply ambivalent. The paradoxical nature of this reality raises question after question, both for musicologists and game analysts: How real, virtual, hyperreal, or even spectral is computer gaming when one of its most immersive components, musical virtuality, escapes those categories? How does music contribute to the emergent meanings of the intermedial event that is a computer game? These and similar questions continue to build up an exciting new field of research—the game-music challenge. Endnotes 1 Cf. Levy, "Language, Technology, Contract," 91–93. 2 Based on Johan Huizinga's definition of the magic circle of play as "a temporary world within the ordinary

world, dedicated to the performance of an active part" (Homo Ludens, 23), Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman have defined the location of a videogame as a magic circle also (Rules of Play, 23). 3 Geirland, "Go with the Flow." Cf. Csíkszentmihályi, "Enjoyment." 4 Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation. 5 Juul, introduction, 1. Cf. "Rules and Fiction." 6 Based on similar observations, Mia Consalvo even argues, "There Is No Magic Circle." 7 This in itself can already be considered virtuality, see Deleuze, "Memory as Virtual Coexistence." 8 Csíkszentmihályi, "Body in Flow," 108–13.


9 See, for instance, DeNora, "Music as a Technology." 10 On this principle, see de Vries and van Elferen, "Musical Madeleine." 11 Nancy, Listening, 7. 12 Ibid., 13. 13 Cf. Deleuze and Guattari's argument that music is "on the side of the nomadic" (Nomadology, 88). 14 Cf. Bull, "Sounding Out Cosmopolitanism." Bull quotes users who describe their iPod experience as "almost

like watching a movie, but you're in it" (41). In view of the iPod's relation to mobility and navigation, the GPS metaphor seems as appropriate here as in the context of computer games. 15 Gibson, Time Out. 16 Ihde, "Listening," 223. 17 Whalen, "Case Study," 71. 18 Chapple and Kattenbelt, "Key issues," 12. 19 Ibid. 20 For an overview of the dis/similarities between film music and video game music, see Collins, "Gameplay,

Genre"; and Whalen, "Case Study." 21 Cf. Gorbman, "Why Music?" 22 Kristine Jørgensen's empirical research confirms that in certain game genres a large amount of user control

depends on audio ("Left in the Dark"). 23 Ludology as a research method focuses on the interactive aspects of a game such as gameplay, game rules,

and game mechanics rather than on game narrative. Although ludology and narratology are often described as opposed schools, both have their acknowledged merits for game research (cf. Frasca, "Ludologists Love Stories"). 24 Cf. Whalen, "Case Study," 76. 25 Jenkins and Fuller, "Nintendo® and New World." 26 De Certeau, "Spatial Stories," 116–17. 27 Ibid., 116. On "walking rhetorics," see also 100–102. 28 Collins, "Compositional Approaches." 29 Collins, "Conclusion," 169. 30 Juul, "Rules," 76. 31 It is interesting in this context that Chapple and Kattenbelt speak of a "location" and a "space" in their

definition of intermediality. 32 One of the first studies that acknowledge and investigate embodied videogames is Behrenshausen, "Toward a


(Kin)Aesthetic." 33 Sconce, "Voice from the Void," 59. 34 Cf. van Elferen, "And Machine Created Music." 35 Levy, introduction, 16.

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Un Forastero. Issues of Virtuality and Diegesis in Videogame Music.

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