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sound

August 30th

…inspired articles this week examining masculinity along different axes in popular games, exploring how different masculinities are constructed, and how those conversations are necessarily incomplete without doing right by the feminine characters, too.

  • It’s just a manly man thing: Doom (2016), sound and hegemonic masculinity | Andrew’s Gaming Notes Andrew studies how Doom (2016)’s sonic landscape–or possibly its lack of one–underscores and reinforces the game’s privileging on an apex, all-subverting hegemonic masculine power fantasy.
  • Yakuza’s nuanced discussion of masculinity makes its treatment of women more disappointing | Polygon Sam Greszes identifies a lack of feminine agency in

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Breath of the Wild

…several recent AAA open world games and claim that BotW is about Hyrule rather than any character. They also highlight the music and sound design, describing it as “turning the volume down” and augmenting your exploration, which Scruffy (autocaptions), 8-Bit Music Theory (autocaptions), and Brown (manual captions) each explore in greater detail.

Sleepless in Hyrule

Mikey Newman, for FilmJoy¸ distinguishes BotW from the darkness of past titles (manual captions) with its emphasis on loneliness. Haunted by the voice of the aeonic figure of Link, he describes the game as an act of accepting one’s loneliness (echoing Ford above). This…

Kotaku UK archive

…of Cthulhu subverts the horror genre with player choice

  • Partying with Steel Rats
  • Another view on the Vampyr
  • Battlefield V: how not to reveal a game
  • Rumu and Juliet
  • More like Persona 510 amirite?
  • Taro Yoko on friendship, religion, and killing kids
  • Inside the 100000 magic deck
  • MGS5’s soundtrack is all about the kojima konami split
  • The landscape of the Last of Us
  • The artists and paintings that bleed through Bloodborne
  • The doomed heroes of Dark Souls
  • Why Gwyn must die
  • The games that dare to sail…

    • October 11th

    …cosmic horror mystery game when real life already has an ever-present upticking Doom Meter.

  • Prometheus Was Right | No Escape Kaile Hultner examines how mystery and horror are baked into Marginalia‘s narrative struture, sound cues, and the subtle nudges in its environmental design.
  • First-Person Disconnect | Bullet Points Monthly Dani Maddox considers the original Amnesia as a competent horror experience, but ultimately cannot identify with yet another white man tortured to madness by his own mistakes.

    • “Evoking Lovecraft’s idea of a slow loss of mental stability is a cheap way to make subversive horror. It…

    July 4th

    …that wider audience. This haunts me. The presumed reader looks or sounds nothing like me, and yet here I am, leading a video game site.”

    Bonus Action

    Moving along, we’ve got a genre-specific segment here, this time focused on RPGs along historical, conventional, and formal axes, as well as disruptions therein.

    • Everything We Know About 1970s Mainframe RPGs We Can No Longer Play | The CRPG Addict: Chester Bolingbroke gathers together just about everything known about an array of some of the earliest computer-based role-playing games, from a weird time when computers were byzantine humming…

    January 3rd

    …series with a conteporary perspective, recognizing both the exaggerated jingoism of its era and the enduring success of its technical art direction.

    “Yes, it is fundamentally uncritical of the American war machine but through its mission structure, sound design, and look, it becomes a portrayal of war as a sort of heightened dreamscape through hell and neverending violence.”

    Come Together

    I’ll admit: sociality is a somewhat loose way to group these next five articles together. But each of them, nonetheless, loops back around to ideas about community, about shared spaces, shared play, or even

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    Alenda Y. Chang | Keywords in Play, Episode 13

    …environmental media, histories and theories of the digital, game studies, science and technology studies and sound studies. And her articles have appeared in numerous journals, among them interdisciplinary studies in literature and environment, and feminist media histories. And her first book ‘Playing Nature: Ecology in Video Games’ is what we’re talking about on this episode. So, I was really interested in just the structure of the book and how much ground it covers.

    Alenda: Oh, thanks, Emilie.

    Emilie: Yeah, it’s really fun to read. And I enjoyed how it really approaches, you know, the ecological perspectives on games…

    Emilie Reed | Keywords in Play Podcast, Episode 2

    …that you were asking?

    Emilie: ‘Katakata’ is basically an interactive sculptural work. It’s by Kirsty Keatch, who is a Scottish sound artist, software game designer. She makes a lot of games that use interesting procedural audio techniques. So this is, this is a sculpture that’s basically like a very large Jacob’s ladder, so that toy, that kind of, you flip the top of it and all the other parts of the toy kind of clatter down. It’s one of those that is attached to like a large stand, it has a servo-motor at the top and that motor is…

    June 27th

    …the same fucking games. My nes emits a buzzing sound sometimes, my game boy color has a distorted and blurry display, and my mega drive garbles graphics, sometimes. Probably bad, but I have spares. The chance of technological failure and the ways that failure audiovisually expresses itself continues to be a fascinating vector of expression that emulation can only sort of replicate, but not as easily or randomly. Like glitches but isolated to the hardware level, so it has less artistic implications, and like I alluded to earlier, feels like it interfaces with the technocratic side of videogame expression…”

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    Víctor Navarro-Remesal and Thiago Falcão | Keywords in Play, Episode 11

    …will say and I don’t want to sound too pessimistic, but we have been always kind of slipstreaming behind the North, or slipstreaming behind America and behind the Nordic countries or behind England. So, it’s been a situation where lots of people kind of discovered that they can analyze video games in university. And they try to import game studies, into their departments into the realities. So, what they look for, is normally the big names, normally the big debates, the big references, the big things they have to use, as kind of a self-validation process. So, we have been…