This book looks at the uses of popular music in the newly-redefined category of the nostalgia game, exploring the relationship between video games, popular music, nostalgia, and socio-cultural contexts. History, gender, race, and media all make significant appearances in this interdisciplinary work, as it explores what some of the most critically acclaimed games of the past two decades (including both AAA titles like Fallout and BioShock, and more cult releases like Gone Home and Evoland) tell us about our relationship to our past and our future. Appropriated music is the common thread throughout these chapters, engaging these broader discourses in heterogeneous ways. This volume offers new perspectives on how the intersection between popular music, nostalgia, and video games, can be examined, revealing much about our relationship to the past and our hopes for the future.

A wide-ranging survey of video game music creation, practice, perception and analysis - clear, authoritative and up-to-date.

From historical games to hyperrealism to retro gaming, Authenticity in the Music of Video Games explores, the shifting understanding of authenticity among players. What do gamers believe authenticity to be? How are their expectations structured by the soundtrack? And how do their actions impact the overall interaction of sound with narrative? Ranging from harmonic analysis to more multimedia approaches, the book links musical analysis to the practical experience of gamers.

Video games are a global phenomenon, international in their scope and democratic in their appeal. This is the first volume dedicated to the subject of apocalyptic video games. Its two dozen papers engage the subject comprehensively, from game design to player experience, and from the perspectives of content, theme, sound, ludic textures, and social function. The volume offers scholars, students, and general readers a thorough overview of this unique expression of the apocalyptic imagination in popular culture, and novel insights into an important facet of contemporary digital society.

Video game music is a significant site of queerness where normative demands are questioned, suspended or loosened. Games resist hegemonic musical logics, challenge musical value systems and use music to complicate essentialist notions of identity. This Element proposes three areas of queerness, each representing different relationships between 'queer design' and 'queer engagement', ranging fromunintentionally resistive to explicit engagement with identity. First, this Element examines musical structures that provide queer temporal alternatives to normative linear development, and interactive systems that reframe the power relationship between musical material and listener. Second, it considers 'retro' or 'chiptune' timbres that queer notions of technological progress to be improvements, rejecting chrononormativity. Finally, the Element discusses music that queers the self/other binary of identity. Games present ways of listening to, engaging with and understanding music that provide opportunities to challenge inherited assumptions and reductive or monolithic values, practices and identities.

Bringing together dozens of leading scholars from across the world to address topics from pinball to the latest in virtual reality, The Oxford Handbook of Video Game Music and Sound is the most comprehensive and multifaceted single-volume source in the rapidly expanding field of game audio research.

Traveling Music Videos offers a new interdisciplinary perspective on how contemporary music videos travel across, shape, and transform various media, online platforms, art institutions, and cultural industries worldwide. With the onset of digital technologies and the proliferation of global video-sharing websites at the beginning of the 21st century, music video migrated from TV screens to turn instead to the internet, galleries, concert stages, and social media. As a result, its aesthetics, technological groundings, and politics have been radically transformed. From the kinaesthetic experience of TikTok to the recent reimaginations of maps and navigation tools through music video cartographies, from the ecofeminist voices mediated by live-stream concerts to the transmedia logic of video games and VR, from the videos' role in contemporary art galleries to their political interventions -the chapters map the ways music video is continually reconfiguring itself. The volume tracks music video's audiovisual itineraries across different geographies, maps its transmedia routes, and tackles the cultural impact that it has on our current media ecosystem.