Bodies in Play: Representations of Disability in 8- and 16-bit Video Game Soundscapes

Dissertation

Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Doctor of Philosophy in

the Graduate School of The Ohio State University

By

Dana M. Plank, MM

Graduate Program in Music

The Ohio State University

2018

Dissertation Committee

Arved Ashby, Advisor

Graeme Boone

David Bruenger

Neil Lerner

1

Copyrighted by

Dana M. Plank

2018

2

Abstract

This dissertation explores sonic signifiers of injury, disease, and mental illness in 8- and 16- bit video game soundscapes. The immediacy and invasiveness of the medium makes game sound uniquely positioned to influence players’ personal identification and immersion within the narrative, and incorporation within the body of the avatar. Games replicate social discourse about the meanings of bodies, and tell stories that matter in a medium that engenders an unusually deep personal engagement. In order to confront these sonic signifiers, I subject my own transcriptions of game audio to analysis drawing on disability studies, ludomusicology (the study of music and play, usually focusing on video games), and music cognition literatures to implicate games in broader discourses of human difference and media representation. In games, bodily impairments are treated not as part of a nuanced spectrum of lived experience, but as obstacles to overcome. Game sound often represents these mechanics in the abstract, to communicate changes in game states to the player, and so the soundscape becomes a vital arbiter of meaning and action. Players’ responses to these aural cues is to seek a cure, reading disabilities as temporary setbacks in performance, cues to restore the avatar to “normal.” Game sounds reinforce ableist ideals, promoting an unrealistic view of the idealized normative body and mind as achievable constants and reflecting deep cultural anxieties about the implications of bodily difference.

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Dedication

For my brother, Matthew Plank.

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Acknowledgments

I would like to acknowledge my advisor, Arved Ashby, for years of mentorship and support.

I am deeply grateful to my committee members—Graeme Boone, David Bruenger, and Neil

Lerner—for the opportunity to defend and engage in discourse that can suggest not only future expansions and iterations of this work, but also entirely new avenues of inquiry. I am exceedingly fortunate to take part in a brilliant and welcoming community of scholars and would be remiss not to acknowledge your collegiality and dear friendship over the past few years: William Gibbons, Julianne Grasso, Karen Cook, Ryan Thompson, Steven Reale, Reba

Wissner, Kate Galloway, Michael Austin, Jesse Kinne, Kevin Burke, and Matthew

Thompson, among many others. I am eager to continue learning from you all. Thanks to my students, fellow teachers, and performer colleagues who keep me grounded, attentive, and focused on the music. Thanks to Sam, Kelly, and the rest of the Side Quest community for fostering an inclusive space and sharing enthusiasm for all things scholarly and supremely nerdy. I completed so many of my transcriptions in that space and found nothing but excitement, encouragement, and new friendships at each stage of the process. My profuse gratitude to Alana Sealy for her insights on transcribing fighting game sounds into IPA for the fourth chapter (and for over a decade of deep and musical friendship that proceeded this—from the moment I first sat next to you in music theory). Thanks to my favorite player two, Joseph Mitchell, for his ludologist’s perspective on video games that constantly

iv challenges me to explore unfamiliar approaches. Even if you never check the clocks for elixirs, you enrich my life and provide compelling perspectives; you are my archive and a continual source of new discoveries in gaming history, and I couldn’t have finished this dissertation without you. Finally, thanks to my parents, Paul and Kathy Plank, and the rest of my large and wonderful family who provided love and support through a long and complicated process of learning and becoming.

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Vita

2005 Lakewood High School (Lakewood, Ohio)

2009 B.A. Magna cum laude, Violin Performance, Music History, Case Western Reserve University (Cleveland, Ohio)

2011 M.M., Violin Performance, Cleveland State University (Cleveland, Ohio) Graduate Instructor: Molly Fung-Dumm

2012-2013 Graduate Teaching Associate, Department of Musicology, The Ohio State University (Columbus, Ohio)

2014-present Instructor of Record, Department of Musicology, The Ohio State University (Columbus and Marion campuses, Ohio)

Publications

“From the Concert Hall to the Console: The 8-bit Translation of BWV 565.” BACH: Journal of the Riemenschneider Bach Institute (forthcoming 2019).

“The Penultimate Fantasy: Nobuo Uematsu’s Score for Cleopatra no Mahoū (1987).” In Music in the Role-Playing Game: Heroes and Harmonies, edited by William Gibbons and Steven Reale. New York: Routledge (forthcoming 2019).

“Mario Paint Composer and Musical (Re)Play on YouTube.” In Music Video Games: Performance, Politics, and Play, edited by Michael Austin. New York: Bloomsbury, 2016.

“ ‘From Russia with Fun!’ Tetris, Korobeiniki, and the Ludic Soviet,” The Soundtrack 8, no. 1 & 2 (2015).

Fields of Study

Major Field: Music

vi

Table of Contents

Abstract ...... ii

Dedication ...... iii

Acknowledgments ...... iv

Vita ...... vi

List of Musical Examples ...... ix

List of Figures ...... xiv

Chapter 1. “It’s Dangerous to Go Alone!” Disability Studies, Video Games, and Music...... 1

Chapter 2. Towards an Aesthetics of Video Game Sound: Taxonomies of Form and

Function ...... 55

Chapter 3. Affecting Effects: A Cognitive-Emotional Approach to Sound in Video Games

...... 139

Chapter 4. Paging Dr. Mario: Injury and Illness in the Video Game Soundscape ...... 188

Chapter 5. Frightful Energy: Musical Madness in Final Fantasy VI ...... 236

Chapter 6. Epilogue: Incorporation and Opportunity ...... 294

vii

Bibliography ...... 310

viii

List of Musical Examples

Example 2.1. Paul Webb, Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves (Sculptured Software, 1991), “Duel 2,” mm. 17-20...... 63

Example 2.2. Nobuo Uematsu, Final Fantasy V (Square, 1992), “Intention of the Earth,” mm. 4-8...... 64

Example 2.3. Koji Kondo, Super Mario Bros. 2 (Nintendo, 1988), “World Clear.” ...... 82

Example 2.4. Kenji Yamamoto and Minako Hamano, Super Metroid (Nintendo, 1994),

“Opening: Destroyed Academy Research Station,” mm. 1-8...... 85

Example 2.5. Kenji Yamamoto and Minako Hamano, Super Metroid (Nintendo, 1994),

“Theme of Super Metroid,” mm. 1-6...... 86

Example 2.6. Kenji Yamamoto and Minako Hamano, Super Metroid (Nintendo, 1994), “Big

Boss Confrontation,” reduction, mm. 1-2...... 87

Example 2.7. Kenji Yamamoto and Minako Hamano, Super Metroid (Nintendo, 1994),

“Planet Zebes—Arrival on Crateria,” mm. 1-16...... 88

Example 2.8. Yoshio Hirai, StarTropics (Nintendo, 1990), “Cave,” mm. 7-12...... 89

Example 2.9. Yoko Shimomura, Super Mario RPG (Nintendo, 1996), “Beware the Forest

Mushrooms,” mm. 4-8...... 90

Example 2.10. Yasunori Mitsuda, Chrono Trigger (Square, 1995), “Singing Mountain,” mm. 1-

6...... 98

ix

Example 2.11. Yasuaki Fujita, Mega Man 3 (Capcom, 1990), “Dr. Wily’s Map.” ...... 100

Example 2.12. Hiroyuki Masuno, Déjà Vu (Kemco, 1990), “Danger.” ...... 110

Example 2.13. Takashi Tateishi, Mega Man 2 (Capcom, 1988), “Wily Stage 3-5,” mm. 1-16.

...... 112

Example 2.14. Koji Kondo, Super Mario Bros. (Nintendo, 1985), “Underground.” ...... 115

Example 2.15. Koji Kondo, Super Mario Bros., (Nintendo, 1985), “Underwater.” ...... 116

Example 2.16. Koji Kondo, Super Mario Bros. (Nintendo, 1985), “Castle.” ...... 118

Example 2.17. Yasuaki Fujita, Mega Man 3 (Capcom, 1990), “Break Man’s Whistle.” ...... 127

Example 2.18. Yasuaki Fujita, Mega Man 3 (Capcom, 1990), “Whistle Concert,” mm. 1-3. 129

Example 2.19. Yasuaki Fujita, Mega Man 3 (Capcom, 1990), “Whistle Concert,” mm. 25-33.

...... 129

Example 2.20. Judye Pistole, Captain Comic (Color Dreams, 1989), “Toccata and Fugue,” mm. 1-15...... 133

Example 3.1. Koji Kondo, The Legend of Zelda (Nintendo, 1986), hit sound effects...... 140

Example 3.2. Koji Kondo, The Legend of Zelda (Nintendo, 1986), small treasure sound effect.

...... 140

Example 3.3. Koji Kondo, The Legend of Zelda (Nintendo, 1986), secret...... 145

Example 3.4. Koji Kondo, Super Mario Bros. (Nintendo, 1985), “Hurry!” ...... 148

Example 3.5. Tomohiro Nishikado, Space Invaders, (Taito, 1978)...... 166

Example 3.6. Hirokazu “Hip” Tanaka, Metroid (Nintendo, 1986), “Item Found.” ...... 169

Example 3.7. Koji Kondo, The Legend of Zelda (Nintendo, 1986), “Death.” ...... 169

Example 3.8. Nobuo Uematsu, Final Fantasy II (Square, 1988), “Dead Theme.” ...... 170

x

Example 3.9. Manami Matsumae, Mega Man (Capcom, 1987), Mega Man landing...... 176

Example 3.10. Yoko Shimomura, Super Mario RPG (Square, 1996), “Sad Song,” mm. 1-5. 177

Example 3.11. Yoshio Hirai, StarTropics (Nintendo, 1990), “Mica.”...... 178

Example 4.1. Manami Matsumae, Mega Man (Capcom, 1987), Mega blaster hit, pulse 1 channel...... 195

Example 4.2. Koji Kondo, Super Mario Bros. (Nintendo, 1985), sound effects...... 196

Example 4.3. Koji Kondo, The Legend of Zelda (Nintendo, 1986), “Dungeon.” ...... 199

Example 4.4. Koji Kondo, The Legend of Zelda (Nintendo, 1986), danger in the dungeon, mm.

1-4...... 200

Example 4.5. Hirokazu “Hip” Tanaka, Dr. Mario (Nintendo, 1990), “Fever,” mm. 1-8...... 224

Example 4.6. Hirokazu “Hip” Tanaka, Dr. Mario (Nintendo, 1990), “Fever,” mm. 15-18.. 225

Example 4.7. Hirokazu “Hip” Tanaka, Dr. Mario (Nintendo, 1990), “Fever,” mm. 37-42.. 225

Example 4.8. Hirokazu “Hip” Tanaka, Dr. Mario (Nintendo, 1990), “Chill,” mm. 1-6...... 226

Example 4.9. Hirokazu “Hip” Tanaka, Dr. Mario (Nintendo, 1990), “Chill,” mm. 41-51. .. 227

Example 4.10. Hirokazu “Hip” Tanaka, Dr. Mario (Nintendo, 1990), “Fever,” pulse channels, m. 12...... 230

Example 4.11. Hirokazu “Hip” Tanaka, Dr. Mario (Nintendo, 1990), “Chill,” pulse 1 and triangle channels, m. 10...... 230

Example 5.1. Nobuo Uematsu, FFVI (Square, 1994), “???” ...... 259

Example 5.2. Nobuo Uematsu, FFVI (Square, 1994), “Kefka,” mm. 1-13...... 263

Example 5.3. Nobuo Uematsu, FFVI (Square, 1994), “Under Martial Law,” mm. 1-10. ... 263

Example 5.4. Nobuo Uematsu, FFVI (Square, 1994), “Troops March On,” mm. 7-9...... 264

xi

Example 5.5. Nobuo Uematsu, FFVI (Square, 1994), “Kefka,” mm. 24-37...... 265

Example 5.6. Nobuo Uematsu, FFVI (Square, 1994), “Kefka,” mm. 38-46...... 266

Example 5.7. Nobuo Uematsu, FFVI (Square, 1994), “Kefka,” mm. 88-100...... 267

Example 5.8. Nobuo Uematsu, FFVI (Square, 1994), “Opening Theme #2,” mm. 1-16. .. 270

Example 5.9. Nobuo Uematsu, FFVI (Square, 1994), “Dancing Mad Part 1,” mm. 18-27. 272

Example 5.10. Nobuo Uematsu, FFVI (Square, 1994), “Dancing Mad Part 1,” mm. 47-48.

...... 274

Example 5.11. Nobuo Uematsu, FFVI (Square, 1994), “The Wedding Waltz—Duel (Part

4),” mm. 47-49...... 275

Example 5.12. Nobuo Uematsu, FFVI (Square, 1994), “Dancing Mad Part 2,” mm. 1-7. . 276

Example 5.13. Nobuo Uematsu, FFVI (Square, 1994), “Dancing Mad Part 2,” mm. 41-54.

...... 277

Example 5.14. Nobuo Uematsu, FFVI (Square, 1994), “Dancing Mad Part 3,” mm. 1-8. . 279

Example 5.15. Nobuo Uematsu, FFVI (Square, 1994), “Dancing Mad Part 3,” mm. 9-15. 280

Example 5.16. Nobuo Uematsu, FFVI (Square, 1994), “Dancing Mad Part 3,” mm. 25-26.

...... 281

Example 5.17. Nobuo Uematsu, FFVI (Square, 1994), “Opening #1/Dancing Mad Part 4.”

...... 283

Example 5.18. Nobuo Uematsu, FFVI (Square, 1994), “The Unforgiven,” mm. 5-6...... 284

Example 5.19. Nobuo Uematsu, FFVI (Square, 1994), “Dancing Mad Part 5,” mm. 43-45.

...... 286

xii

Example 5.20. Nobuo Uematsu, FFVI (Square, 1994), “Dancing Mad Part 5,” mm. 53-62.

...... 287

xiii

List of Figures

Figure 1.1. A pacifist approach, Undertale (Toby Fox, 2015) ...... 7

Figure 1.2. A first-person avatar, Portal (Valve, 2007) ...... 36

Figure 1.3. A third-person player-character, Mike from StarTropics (Nintendo, 1990) ...... 36

Figure 1.4. A customized avatar, Stardew Valley (Chucklefish, 2016) ...... 37

Figure 1.5. 2-D play on 3-D spaces, Super Mario Odyssey (Nintendo, 2017) ...... 53

Figure 2.1. Mario’s two sizes, Super Mario Bros. (Nintendo, 1985) ...... 106

Figure 2.2. Ace’s condition worsens, Déjà Vu (Kemco, 1990) ...... 111

Figure 2.3. Underground level, Super Mario Bros. (Nintendo, 1985) ...... 114

Figure 2.4. Castle level, Super Mario Bros. (Nintendo, 1985) ...... 117

Figure 2.5. Final cut-scene, Mega Man 3 (Capcom, 1990) ...... 128

Figure 4.1. T.J. Combo and Orchid, Killer Instinct (Midway and Nintendo, 1994) ...... 211

Figure 4.2. Orchid in battle, Killer Instinct (Midway and Nintendo, 1994) ...... 212

Figure 4.3. Orchid knocked out, Killer Instinct (Midway and Nintendo, 1994) ...... 212

Figure 4.4. Performing the sick role, The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past (Nintendo, 1991) ...... 218

Figure 4.5. Gameplay, Dr. Mario (Nintendo, 1990) ...... 221

Figure 5.1. Initial encounters with Kefka, FFVI (Square, 1994) ...... 237

xiv

Figure 5.2. Final battle with Kefka, in-game graphics and original concept art by Tetsuya

Nomura, FFVI (Square, 1994) ...... 239

Figure 5.3. Kefka’s love of spectacle and delusions of grandeur, FFVI (Square, 1994)...... 254

Figure 5.4. Kefka’s delight in chaos and flames, FFVI (Square, 1994) ...... 255

Figure 5.5. Kefka’s hatred, FFVI (Square, 1994) ...... 256

Figure 5.6. Kefka’s nihilism, FFVI (Square, 1994) ...... 257

xv

Chapter 1. “It’s Dangerous to Go Alone!” Disability Studies, Video Games, and Music

Perhaps, in this moment of eclipse, the classic games have something to show us. So by all means necessary, be a gamer, but be a gamer who thinks—and acts—with a view to realizing the real potentials of the game, in and against this world made over as a gamespace. You might start with the curious gap between the games you love and an everyday life which, by the light of the game, seems curiously similar, and yet somehow lacking. –McKenzie Wark1

This dissertation explores bodies and boundaries. It speaks to vulnerability in video games, communication, health bars and hit points, and the replication of tacit anxieties and reductively-ableist cultural discourses in media. Most importantly, it investigates sound as the bridge connecting across the “curious gap”–a site implicating, incorporating, and intertwining the body of the player and the game body of the avatar, with consequences that extend both into the game world and into the lived experience of the player. This dissertation confronts representations of normality and abnormality by examining sonic signifiers of disability in early video game soundscapes. By looking into the ways games use musical and non-musical sounds to depict these constructs as unnatural and “other,” I will illuminate constructions of ability and health.

Broad beliefs about disability tend to proliferate (often unconsciously) on a local level in video games. The unconscious nature of this proliferation is all the more troubling, because the standard representational tropes reinforce ableist ideals and set up reductive, either/or categories. This binary division lacks the nuance of lived experience in which the

1 McKenzie Wark, Gamer Theory (Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 2007), 25.

1 body will move fluidly through a spectrum of various states, and enhances an unrealistic view of the idealized, normative body and mind as achievable constants.2 This overriding concern over one’s health and strength in the game reflects a deep anxiety about the implications of the disabled body in the real world.

Video games may seem an unusual place to study sound and the representation of disability, because they are often dismissed as juvenile entertainment or escapist fantasy in the popular imagination. Games reach vast audiences of all ages, however, and gaming is a major source of vernacular identity creation.3 Exposure to a video game tends to be much longer and more active and intense than in most media. Representing a nexus of technological innovation, entertainment commodification, cultural projection, and virtuality, games have tremendous potential as art form and as social discourse: they tell stories that matter in a medium that engenders an unusually deep personal engagement. All games create virtual worlds for players, and music helps to bring that world into being.4 And so I embark on my own form of media archaeology, an excavation “…digging under the screen in order to reveal the conditions of the present as embedded in the workings of the machine.”5 As

2 William Cheng, Sound Play: Video Games and the Musical Imagination (New York: Oxford, 2014), xv-xvi; “games allow us to imagine what isn’t but might be: utopic moments (the ludic again) hiding in the shadows of the dystopic real world (all too familiar). To state things bluntly, the game of life has but one outcome. The ludic provides an imaginary interruption of that inevitability and the myriad fears and setbacks that confront us: the darkness within and the darkness without.” 3 Tobin Siebers, “Disability and the Theory of Complex Embodiment—For Identity Politics in a New Register,” in The Disability Studies Reader, ed. Lennard J. Davis (New York and London: Routledge, 2002), 325; “All identity is social theory. Identities are the theories that we use to fit into and travel through the social world.” 4 Tim Summers, Understanding Video Game Music (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 86; “Music is part of how the game ‘projects’ its world (to use Juul’s term), ‘cueing’ the player’s understanding of the universe and the game’s rules…nearly all games, including puzzle games and racing games, create virtual worlds, even if they are not interacted with in quite the same way as ‘open world’ games. Games create worlds for us to play in and with. Music is part of how we come to know and understand these virtual universes.” 5 Jussi Parikka, What is Media Archaeology? (Cambridge and Malden, MA: Polity, 2012), 39.

2

Jussi Parikka suggests, games “…act as conduits of power, governance, economy, and relations between humans and non-humans.”6 Recognizing the implication of these narratives, I argue that games are a vital component in understanding both the social construction of disability (as a manifestation of power) and the relationships of bodies (real, virtual, or a hybrid of the two) to themselves and to one another.

Sid Meier (the creator of the Civilization games) famously defined a good game as “a series of interesting decisions.”7 Although this notion of choice indirectly references the agency of the player, many definitions focus on the boundaries of the game itself—in the ways its rules and affordances create the space in which play can occur. In Homo Ludens,

Johan Huizinga defined a game as: “…a free activity standing quite consciously outside

‘ordinary’ life as being ‘not serious,’ but at the same time absorbing the player intensely and utterly. It is an activity connected with no material interest, and no profit can be gained by it.

It proceeds within its own proper boundaries of time and space according to fixed rules and in an orderly manner.”8 One can view games as social objects, consumer commodities, or as narrative forms remediating and replicating the stories of television and film; others have chosen to structure inquiries into digital games based on the qualities that render them unique. In this view, games are an expression of procedural rhetoric whose aesthetic depends

6 Parikka, What is Media Archaeology?, 39. 7 Sid Meier, “Interesting Decisions.” (paper presented at the Game Developers’ Conference, San Francisco, California, March 2012); This is one of the great pithy quotes of game history, typically mentioned in texts anecdotally. In 2012, Sid Meier gave a follow-up talk in which he claimed to have made this statement “Long, long ago at a GDC far, far away.” While often cited as a definition of a video game, Meier has qualified that this was his personal definition of a good video game, not games in general, but the quote has taken on a life of its own. 8 Johan Huizinga, Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play Element in Culture (New York: Routledge & Kegan Paul Ltd., 1949), 15.

3 a great deal on algorithm.9 For example, Jesper Juul defines a game as "a rule-based system with a variable and quantifiable outcome, where different outcomes are assigned different values, the player exerts effort in order to influence the outcome, the player feels emotionally attached to the outcome, and the consequences of the activity are optional and negotiable."10

Juul’s definition has interesting implications for disability in the game space—injury and disabling conditions are assigned negative values, influencing the player’s choices to either avoid or combat these outcomes.

However, I do not see game designers as consciously or callously manipulating player fears about the implications of the non-normative body in order to intentionally create social distance and discrimination. Instead, I believe these game mechanics themselves developed within a much broader disablist system that rendered exclusionary attitudes invisible or

“natural,” acting upon and through creators who do not notice the paradigm in order to challenge it.11 As Jussi Parikka suggests, “…media are always formed in intermedial relations, and as conditions for sensation.”12 Music and the soundscape are also particularly rife with potential to disguise disablist gameplay mechanisms as seemingly neutral. As Sherry Turkle

9 Wark, Gamer Theory, 023; “What is specific to games is at the level of form, not content.” 10 Jesper Juul, Half Real: Video Games between Real Rules and Fictional Worlds (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2005); 5, emphasis original; for other definitions see Roger Callois, Man, Play, and Games, trans. Meyer Barash (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1961), 10-11; …an activity which is essentially: free (voluntary), separate [temporally and spatially], uncertain, unproductive, governed by rules, make-believe.”; Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman, Rules of Play: Game Design Fundamentals (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2003), 96; “A game is a system in which players engage in an artificial conflict, defined by rules, that results in a quantifiable outcome.” 11 Siebers, “Complex Embodiment,” 317; “Ideology does not permit the thought of contradiction necessary to question it; it sutures together opposites, turning them into apparent complements of each other, smoothing over contradictions, and making almost unrecognizable any perspective that would offer a critique of it.” In using the term disablist, I draw from Carol Thomas, Female Forms: Experiencing and Understanding Disability (Buckingham: Open University Press, 1999); she introduced the term disablism specifically to align with other “isms” such as racism and sexism. 12 Parikka, What is Media Archaeology? 39.

4 suggests, “We have learned to take things at interface value;” we do not look beyond the contingencies of the current moment of play.13 Nicholas Cook has further suggested that

“…music is discourse that passes itself off as nature: it participates in the construction of meaning, but disguises its meanings as effects. Here is the source of its singular efficacy as a hidden persuader.”14 While I see the utility and value of examining the unique qualities of games, I do not think procedural rhetoric alone will suffice to explain the effects of these games on the players and in the real world. Meaning is never made in a vacuum—the process is far more interdependent and contingent upon player reception and the broader social landscape than simple definitions can attest.

Unlike most linear media, games allow players the agency to act in and upon their world through their avatar, an inhabited character or even a digital prosthesis extending consciousness into the game world.15 In order to remain invested in the game, the mechanics must create an opportunity for dynamic interaction—the player must experience either intrinsic or extrinsic motivation to continue, must feel a connection to some kind of goal that keeps them involved in the game world.16 This is known as the

Mechanics/Dynamics/Aesthetic (MDA) framework by Robin Hunicke, Marc Leblanc, and

13 Sherry Turkle, Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet (New York: Touchstone, 1995), 23. 14 Nicholas Cook, Analysing Musical Multimedia (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), 21. 15 Cheng, Sound Play, 114; the concept of the digital prosthesis is widespread. For examples, see: Jessica Aldred, “Characters,” in The Routledge Companion to Video Game Studies, ed. Mark J.P. Wolf and Bernard Perron (New York and London: Routledge Taylor & Francis Group, 2014); Casey Hart, “Getting Into the Game: An Examination of Player Personality Projection in Videogame Avatars.” Game Studies, 17, no. 2 (2017); Luca Papale, “Beyond Identification: Defining the Relationship Between Player and Avatar.” Journal of Game Criticism 1, no. 2 (2014), 1-12; and Bruno Fraschini, “Videogiochi & New Media,” in Per una cultura dei videogames. Teorie e prassi del videogiocare, ed. M. Bittanti (Milan: Edizioni Unicopli, 2004). 16 Robin Hunicke, Marc Leblanc, and Robert Zubek. “MDA: A Formal Approach to Game Design and Research.” Semantic Scholar (2004), https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/MDA-%3A-A-Formal-Approach- to-Game-Design-and-Game-Hunicke-Leblanc/b5b1af7fa6e037ad9acfeb7f8d223afcf0ceaa24

5

Robert Zubek, and it advocates designing games from the outside in with the ultimate user experience in mind. As Richard Rouse III describes it,

This framework allows developers and scholars alike to consider games as flowing out of their lowest-level rules (the mechanics), the dynamics those rules create, and the aesthetic/emotional response the player may have. Thinking about games in this way, developers can consider the consequences of the mechanics they choose to use and how they change the feeling of being in a game. We often think of aesthetics in games as being the art, writing, sound, and music perhaps, but what is interesting about this framework is that it suggests that gameplay itself creates an aesthetic, that the nature of the play creates what the game really means.17

An example of gameplay creating the aesthetic is Undertale (Toby Fox, 2015), a role-playing game (RPG) in which the player’s choices alter the game world on subsequent playthroughs, causing players to reflect on the consequences of their ludic actions. Players encounter enemies and can fight them as in a traditional RPG (known as the genocide route); however, gameplay also allows for a mercy run (in which the player fights to weaken their opponents, but spares enemies in combat rather than killing them) and a pacifist run (in which the player chooses nonviolent options to avoid combat; see Figure 1.1). The game mechanics respond to the player’s decisions and shape the player experience, as in most games with branching narrative structures; however, the player cannot simply restart the game to try a different path, because the monsters in the game remember the player’s previous choices even in a new save file. In order to experience all of the game content, a player must either follow careful strategic walkthroughs online, or be willing to remove and completely reinstall the game on subsequent playthroughs to avoid the game’s memory of past actions closing off certain paths.

17 Richard Rouse III, “Game Design,” in The Routledge Companion to Video Game Studies, ed. Mark J.P. Wolf and Bernard Perron (New York and London: Routledge Taylor & Francis Group, 2014), 84.

6

Figure 1.1. A pacifist approach, Undertale (Toby Fox, 2015)

Video games, like many virtual experiences, are empowering: they offer an escape from the fallibility of the human body and connect gamers to a community and a cultural tradition that transcends the screen. And yet they also reinforce and manipulate tacit anxieties.18 Games (and, more broadly, narratives in other media) often take the notion of balancing at the edge of a precarious binary—between normality and deviation, health and

18 Cheng, Sound Play, 9; “What role-play affords is not the facile transcendence of corporeal existence, but rather effortful renegotiations of this existence’s material contingencies and experiential boundaries. As freeing as gaming can be, it seldom entails the straightforward possession of agency or some boundless capacity for action.”

7 illness, wholeness and injury—as a fundamental element of game design, creating arresting gameplay while endorsing the able body as the better of the two states.19 Few (if any) creators would say this constructed duality is intentional; creating an avatar that the player wants to preserve or protect fosters identification and incorporation into the narrative, and has been an effective mechanism for decades of game history because of the deep connection it engenders.

Sound and music must often represent game mechanics (such as health) in the abstract in order to communicate with the player, and so the video game soundscape becomes a vital arbiter of meaning and action. In any medium, sounds have special powers over us because they are immediate and invasive, and yet carry potential for abstraction into the symbolic realm. When a sound becomes symbolic, its meanings are no longer simply referential, natural, and inherent: meaning is socially constructed and cemented through repetition. Sounds can color our experiences, influence our moods, and help us interpret what we see. To explore the sounds of disability in games is a challenge: to ask difficult questions and reflect on the ways in which these seemingly-innocuous artifacts mirror culture and tacitly replicate the status quo. Games can make us think and make us feel. They should also encourage us to consider and evaluate, to constructively reshape the real world through the virtual.20

My mission statement echoes Tobin Siebers’s work on disability and art: I am seeking to use video games, in part, to “…define the ideology of ability and to make its

19 Lennard J. Davis, Enforcing Normalcy: Disability, Deafness, and the Body (London and New York: Verso, 1995), 4; Binaries are “…part of an ideology of containment and a politics of power and fear.” 20 This is my assertion, but definitely draws on Wark’s ideas on the conflation of gamespace in the real and virtual realms in Gamer Theory.

8 workings legible and familiar, despite how imbricated it may be in our thinking and practices, and despite how little we notice its patterns, authority, contradictions, and influence as a result.”21 While I find the idea of designing from the outside in to be vital to the creation of good video games, I do not think that the meaning of a game flows unidirectionally outward, defined as some singular consequence of the source code. Like Hunicke, Leblanc, and

Zubek, I believe that meaning is co-created by the interaction of the player and the game.

The rulesets create the possibilities for interaction, but also partner with the representational scheme and the narrative in order to create a compelling experience. Games are complex systems of meaning. Aesthetic meaning can derive from the individual elements of the system—such as the gameplay mechanics, the visuals and music, or the plot—but they require play, require the body of the player in order to exist.

Definitions of Disability and Impairment

All of us experience impairment throughout life, and most of us become disabled at some point, whether on account of genetics or through accident, illness, or age.22 According to the World Health Organization (WHO), disability

…is an umbrella term, covering impairments, activity limitations, and participation restrictions. An impairment is a problem in body function or structure; an activity limitation is a difficulty encountered by an individual in executing a task or action; while a participation restriction is a problem experienced by an individual in involvement in life situations. Disability is thus not just a health problem. It is a

21 Siebers, “Complex Embodiment,” 317; Theodore Gracyk. Rhythm and Noise: An Aesthetics of Rock (Durham, NC: Duke University Press 1996), 208; An ideology, according to Theodore Gracyk, is “a system of concepts, attitudes, and values at the core of a distinct worldview. Ideology is of particular concern when it structures social institutions and reinforces power arrangements by entrenching binary oppositions into our worldview.” 22 Siebers, Disability Aesthetics (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2010), 45; “All people, by virtue of being human, move in and out of disability identity, and people recognized as disabled in one context may not be thought disabled in another…Human disqualification viewed in isolation, based on individual appearance, has little meaning; its meaning emerges by association, placement in context, and aesthetic technique.”

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complex phenomenon, reflecting the interaction between features of a person’s body and features of the society in which he or she lives.23

Prior to the modern definition, the WHO published the International Classification of

Impairment, Disability, and Handicap (ICIDH) in 1980; these earlier definitions that were widespread, influencing both legal and organizational language and policies for at least two decades:

Impairment: Any loss or abnormality of psychological, physiological, or anatomical structure or function.

Disability: Any restriction or lack (resulting from an impairment) of ability to perform an activity in the manner or within the range considered normal for a human being.

Handicap: A disadvantage for a given individual, resulting from an impairment or disability, that limits or prevents the fulfillment of a role (depending on age, sex, social and cultural factors) for that individual.24

Some of the criticisms of the ICIDH definition have emphasized its individualization of these issues—the implication that impairment alone causes disability and handicap. These medical definitions have been prominent, particularly outside of academia.25

As Simi Linton describes it, most common definitions of disability in the legal or medical literatures have involved “…incapacity, a disadvantage, deficiency, especially a physical or mental impairment that restricts normal achievement; something that hinders or incapacitates, something that incapacitates or disqualifies…Disability so defined is a medically derived term that assigns predominantly medical significance and meaning to certain types of

23 World Health Organization, “Disabilities” (2018). http://www.who.int/topics/disabilities/en/ 24 Simi Linton, “Reassigning Meaning,” in The Disability Studies Reader, ed. Lennard J. Davis (New York and London, Routledge, 2002), 224; Linton quotes these definitions in order to examine the language. 25 Thomas, Female Forms, 8; Carol Thomas wrote that disabilities have been defined as “…those variations in the structure, function and workings of bodies which…are medically defined as significant abnormalities or pathologies.”

10 human variation.”26 She also acknowledges the root of the prefix “dis” has shaped our relationship and influenced the construction of a binary:

…the prefix dis connotes separation, taking apart, sundering in two. The prefix has various meanings such as not, as in dissimilar; absence of, as in disinterest; opposite of, as in disfavor; undo, do the opposite of, as in disarrange; and deprive of, as in disenfranchise. The Latin root dis means apart, asunder. Therefore, to use the verb disable, means, in part, to deprive of capability or effectiveness. The prefix creates a barrier, cleaving in two ability and its absence, its opposite. Disability is the ‘not’ condition, the repudiation of ability.27

The meaning assigned to disability is often negative and stems from an anxious relationship to variability and vulnerability; Lennard J. Davis has suggested that disability is “an actively repressed memento mori for the fate of the normal body.”28 Our reluctance to engage with disability is often rooted in a deep anxiety about our own mortality and the ways in which disabled bodies remind us of the existence of pain, fragility, and our own uncertainties.29

Certain forms of human variation are absorbed into the fabric of social life, accommodated and largely unnoticed. Although I wear eyeglasses to mitigate a visual impairment, that impairment does not typically disqualify or exclude me; my eyes function

26 Linton, “Reassigning Meaning,” 224. 27 Linton, “Reassigning Meaning,” 235. 28 Lennard J. Davis, “Constructing Normalcy: The Bell Curve, the Novel, and the Invention of the Disabled Body in the Nineteenth Century,” in The Disability Studies Reader, ed. Lennard J. Davis (New York: Routledge Taylor & Francis Group, 2006), 1; see also Lennard J. Davis, Enforcing Normalcy, 13; this anxiety or outright rejection may appear to be a personal response, but Davis suggests that it is socially conditioned: “What is repulsion after all but the personal, internalized version of the desire to repel, repress, extroject, annihilate the object? Repulsion is the learned response on an individual level that is carried out on a societal level in actions such as incarceration, institutionalization, segregation, discrimination, marginalization, and so on.” 29 Susan Wendell, “Toward a Feminist Theory of Disability,” in the Disability Studies Reader, ed. Lennard J. Davis (New York and London: Routledge, 2010), 352; “…if someone tells me she is in pain, she reminds me of the existence of pain, the imperfection and fragility of the body, the possibility of my own pain, the inevitability of it. The less willing I am to accept all these, the less I want to know about her pain; if I cannot avoid it in her presence, I will avoid her. I may even blame her for it. I may tell myself that she could have avoided it, in order to go on believing that I can avoid it. I want to believe I am not like her; I cling to the differences. Gradually, I make her ‘other’ because I don’t want to confront my real body, which I fear and cannot accept.”

11 above a certain threshold of sight deemed necessary for participation in most of public life.

If, however, I sought to become a fighter pilot, my eyesight could prevent me from attaining that goal. This example begins to outline the contextual construction of the binary of ability and disability, a dichotomy whose boundaries are seemingly as ill-defined as they are absolute.30 Indeed, as Simi Linton has suggested, “The question of who ‘qualifies’ as disabled is as answerable or as confounding as questions about any identity status. One simple response might be that you are disabled if you say you are.”31 A personal identification or claim of disability is meaningful to one’s experience of being in the world.

However, it is also accurate to suggest that you are disabled if others say that you are—regardless of whether you claim the identity—and that this distinction is often the basis of discrimination, dehumanizing the subject by designating their form of bodily variety as unacceptable.32 Disabilities create curiosity and demand explanation, when they present themselves to others.33 Disabilities only come into being when they manifest in either function or appearance and are judged against a normative standard of how to do something

(e.g., move or speak); certain abilities are centered in public life more than others. As Davis describes it, “This aspect of disability is of course part of a continuum of the many things

30 Davis, Enforcing Normalcy, 1; “The term ‘disability,’ as it is commonly and professionally used, is an absolute category without a level or threshold. One is either disabled or not…A concept with such a univalent stranglehold on meaning must contain within it a dark side of power, control, and fear.” 31 Linton, “Reassigning Meaning,” 225; Linda Martin Alcoff, Visible Identities: Race, Gender, and the Self (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 42; After all, “identity is not merely that which is given to an individual or group, but it also a way of inhabiting, interpreting, and working through, both collectively and individually, an objective social location and group history.” 32 Siebers, “Complex Embodiment,” 318; “The sharp difference between disability and ability may be grasped superficially in the idea that disability is essentially a ‘medical matter,’ while ability concerns natural gifts, talents, intelligence, creativity, physical prowess, imagination, dedication, the eagerness to strive, including the capacity and desire to strive—in brief, the essence of the human spirit.” 33 Davis, Enforcing Normalcy, xvi.

12 that people can or cannot do…The construction of disability is based on a deconstruction of a continuum. The functional modality has to do with standards of movement, sight, hearing and so on that have been established in a quantitative way.34 The notion of disability manifesting by appearance suggests that some impairments are latent, and that culture works to render invisible qualities apparent and identifiable—a notion we will explore further in

Chapter 5 with regard to mental disability.35 This suggests that disability itself is a cultural product or discourse, a way of making sense of the existence of norms and the consequences of variety according to context.36

But what if we could speak candidly and earnestly about the experience of the disabled body without resorting to limiting narrative pretense, to stories of cures and overcoming adversity? What if we could examine change, loss, and lack of certain abilities

(whether temporary or permanent) not as inherently lamentable, but as embodied knowledge, and as new ways of being in the world? How empowering that world would be!

Disability helps us understand each other and ourselves in new ways, in sickness and in health. In short, it is important to articulate disability because doing so helps us understand our relationship to the body in society and culture. This is some of the work of disability studies writ large.

34 Davis, Enforcing Normalcy, 11. 35 Siebers, “Complex Embodiment,” 323; “…identifiability is tied powerfully to the representation of difference. In cases where an existing minority group is not easily identified and those in power want to isolate the group, techniques will be used to produce identifiability…It is not the fact of physical difference that matters, then, but the representation attached to difference—what makes the difference identifiable. Representation is the difference that makes a difference.” 36 Laurie Stras, "Sing a Song of Difference: Connie Boswell and a Discourse of Disability in Jazz,” Popular Music, 28, no. 3 (2009): 299; Rosemarie Garland-Thompson, “Introduction,” in Sounding Off: Theorizing Disability in Music, ed. Neil Lerner and Joseph N. Straus (New York and London: Routledge, 2006), xiv.

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Disability Studies

What disability studies does specifically is confront exclusionary social practices— such as misconceptions and representation in the arts and in popular culture—and suggest more inclusive models. As many scholars have pointed out, disability has never been far from representation in the arts.37 In fact, as Rosemarie Garland-Thompson puts it,

“Disability is everywhere once you know how to look for it. The intellectual work of cultural disability studies is to show that the concept of disability saturates the cultural fabric.”38

Indeed, disability is so entwined with our bodily sense of self that it represents a vitally- important component of identity. Disability scholars therefore situate themselves in a broader sphere of identity studies, and in that role speak to almost all people; forging vital connections with studies of gender, race, ethnicity, and sexuality. All of these realms of identity studies, in their turn, have political importance: scholars inform and drive advocacy, demonstrating ways the academy might challenge and dismantle long-standing hegemonic, normative discourses, both in the ivory tower and in society at large. Disability studies confronts

…how disability as a category was created to serve certain ends and how the category has been institutionalized in social practices and intellectual conventions…It aims to expose the ways that disability has been made exceptional and to work to naturalize disabled people—remake us as full citizens whose rights and privileges are intact, whose history and contributions are recorded, and whose often distorted

37 Davis, “Disability, Normality, and Power,” in The Disability Studies Reader, ed. Lennard J. Davis (London and New York: Verso, 1995), 10-12; “…almost any literary work will have some reference to the abnormal, to disability, and so on…even in texts that do not appear to be about disability, the issue of normalcy is fully deployed.” See also Siebers, Disability Aesthetics, 2-3; “What I am calling ‘disability aesthetics’ names a critical concept that seeks to emphasize the presence of disability in the tradition of aesthetic representation…Note that it is not a matter of representing the exclusion of disability from aesthetic history, since no such exclusion has taken place, but of making the influence of disability obvious.” 38 Garland-Thompson, “Introduction,” xiii.

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representations in art, literature, film, theater, and other forms of artistic expression are fully analyzed.39

Disability studies creates a lens through which to examine constructs of human value; what it means to be in/competent, whole or incomplete, in/dependent, un/healthy, and how our relationships to these constructs change over time.40

Some disability work has attempted to expand definitions and remove the binary to encapsulate a far broader spectrum of experience. This work suggests that everyone is disabled in some way—due to our natural affordances and limitations—and is useful in restructuring thought about the meanings of disability. Deficit definitions fail to account for what a disabled body can do; in art and media, there are things that different bodies can articulate or produce that ‘normal’ bodies cannot, and this specific and situated embodied knowledge creates a richer tapestry of human experience.41 As Ann M. Fox writes, an inclusive conception of bodily variety allows for “…the intermingling of embodiments, experiences, and exuberance beyond exclusionary or monolithic kinds of identification.”42

Fox’s vision for disability studies is instructive; she believes the field should strive to create visibility, but not in the ways of marking as deficient or identifying in the process of othering: “This happens in so many ways: rewriting history, questioning representational systems, giving voice to experiences once ignored or erased. To nurture empathy and creativity…We may not write policy, but our work intervenes into the material fates of

39 Simi Linton, “What is Disability Studies?” PMLA, 120, no. 2 (2005), 518. 40 Simi Linton, Susan Mello, and John O’Neill. “Disability Studies: Expanding the Parameters of Diversity,” The Radical Teacher, 47 (1995): 5. 41 Linton, “What is Disability Studies,” 522; Siebers, Disability Aesthetics. 42 Ann M. Fox, “We Must Be Critical: The Current Purpose of Disability Studies,” Disability Studies Quarterly 37, no. 3 (2017). http://dsq-sds.org/article/view/5925/4688; Fox was speaking here to the dance at the Society for Disability Studies as a metaphor for disability studies as a whole.

15 bodies, even if that change is not always immediately apparent.”43 This statement serves as another mission statement for my work: critiquing existing systems in order to participate in the creation of a more informed, empathetic, sensitive, celebratory, and inclusive mode.

Responses to Disability

Disability involves several related social processes of prejudice, stereotype, and discrimination. Categorizing difference is natural and even necessary, a result of the brain making sense of sensation.44 However, the naming or categorizing of difference can easily serve exclusionary practices and negatively impact the lives of those designated as disabled.

Robert Bogdan and Douglas Biklen define prejudice as “…any oversimplified and overgeneralized belief about the characteristics of a group or category of people,” whereas

“…stereotype refers to the specific content of the prejudice directed toward specific groups.”45

Stereotypes are based on social knowledge structures—collective mental schemas that proliferate between groups of people; as Maputo and Rouner describe it, these schemas about disability “consist of collectively agreed upon thoughts about groups of persons.”46

Chris Barker has alternatively defined stereotypes as “…vivid but simple representations that reduce persons to a set of exaggerated, usually negative characteristics.”47 Prejudice and

43 Fox, “We Must Be Critical.” 44 Colin Cameron, Disability Studies: A Student’s Guide (Los Angeles: Sage, 2014) 43; “In everyday human interactions, people make sense of unexpected information presented to the senses by relating it to similar, already internalized perceptions.” 45 Robert Bogdan and Douglas Biklen, “Handicapism,” in Foundations of Disability Studies, ed. Matthew Wappett and Katrina Arndt (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 4. 46 Nicole Maputo and Donna Rouner. “Narrative Processing of Entertainment Media and Mental Illness Stigma.” Health Communication 26 (2011), 597. 47 Chris Barker, Cultural Studies: Theory and Practice (London: Sage, 2004), 263.

16 stereotype thus form the beginning stages of the social process of disablement (which

Bogdan and Biklen called Handicapism in the 1970s):

First peers and culture support the transmission of stereotypes and therefore constantly reinforce them. Second, groups like the handicapped are isolated, have few opportunities for intimate relations to develop between themselves and the so called normal people, and consequently have little chance of disproving the stereotypes. Last, and perhaps most important, handicapped people are treated in ways that correspond to their stereotypes and are rewarded for living up to others’ image of them.48

Discrimination is a social process involving structural and behavioral aspects that result from prejudice and stereotype.49 Prejudice and stereotype often appear individually, in personal interactions between people; discrimination manifests in social processes such as media representation, barriers to participation (whether physical or based on some form of literacy), laws, rules, regulations, and exclusion from social organizations. Further, prejudice and stereotype create a strange simultaneous marking and erasure of difference that both inaccurately portrays the disabled and limits the range of available narratives with which a person might hope to make sense of their own experience.50 The most common stereotypes cited in disability studies are: (a) the disabled as an object of pity or pathetic victim of misfortune; (b) the disabled as tragic but brave, struggling to triumph over adversity (used as a source of inspiration when the narrative features overcoming); and (c) the disabled as bitter

“crips with chips” on their shoulder, a source of fear or object of ridicule.

48 Bogdan and Biklen, “Handicapism,” 4-5. 49 Bogdan and Biklen, “Handicapism,” 5. 50 Iris Marion Young, Justice and the Politics of Difference (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991), 59.

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Responses to disability are often understood in emotional terms; deeply rooted in the body and arising from processes of internal categorization.51 As Bill Hughes writes, “The impact of discrimination and exclusion is augmented by a disablist interaction order in which people with impairments are patronized, ignored, abused, and subjected to the subcutaneous violence of the intrusive, demeaning and disturbing non-disabled gaze.”52 Hughes goes on to explore three emotions that serve as foundational to the construction of the ableist paradigm: fear, pity, and disgust. Fear involves a rejection or attempt to distance oneself from insecurities about the ephemerality of the body. Pity, in Hughes’s estimation, is “a pure act of ‘othering,’ ” creating hierarchy and separation.53 Disgust emanates from that which is

“ambiguous and anomalous,” and Hughes also describes it as “a form of cowardice in the face of inevitability.”54 Feelings may seem deeply personal or involuntary, but are in fact conditioned by society, culture and aesthetics.55 All three emotions arise from anxious denial and a desire to separate oneself from disability, invalidating bodily variety in the attempt to create distance.

51 Bill Hughes, “Fear, Pity, and Disgust: Emotions and the Non-Disabled,” in the Routledge Handbook of Disability Studies, ed. Nick Watson, Alan Roulstone, and Carol Thomas (London and New York: Routledge, 2012), 67-68; “In the phenomenological tradition emotions are the means by which consciousness apprehends objects and attaches value (or disvalue) to them….Emotions are, of course, bodily forms of knowing, corporeal moments of sensation.” 52 Hughes, “Fear, Pity, and Disgust,” 68. 53 Hughes, “Fear, Pity, and Disgust,” 71. 54 Hughes, “Fear, Pity, and Disgust,” 73. 55 Siebers, Disability Aesthetics, 25; “Aesthetics studies the way that some bodies make other bodies feel…Aesthetics is the domain in which the sensation of otherness is felt at its most powerful, strange, and frightening. Whether the effect is beauty and pleasure, ugliness and pain, or sublimity and terror, the emotional impact of one body on another is experienced as an assault on autonomy and a testament to the power of otherness.”

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Carol Thomas refers to the effects of stereotypes and discrimination as psycho- emotional disablism that occurs in direct and indirect forms.56 Direct psycho-emotional disablism involves personal responses to disability such as laughing, pointing, or making thoughtless comments, aligning with Bogdan and Biklen’s definitions of prejudice and stereotype. Indirect psycho-emotional disablism is a consequence of structural discrimination: barriers to participation (such as an inaccessible building) that may cause embarrassment, hurt, anger, or isolation. Both the direct and indirect forms suggest collateral cumulative damage to well-being that results from constant exposure to disablism. As

Donna Reeve has said, it is not just the encounter itself that is disabling; it is the way that these experiences prime a person for their subsequent experiences, never knowing how the next person is going to react or how the next situation might cause feelings of frustration, shame, or awkwardness.57 Psycho-emotional disablism thus creates a second stage of oppression, because the disabled person often has to perform a great deal of emotional labor in responding to the person or circumstance. Drew Leder’s work on the dys-appearing body resonates here, suggesting that our bodies only come to our attention or conscious awareness at moments when we notice something wrong with it—or when others notice

56 Thomas, Female Forms; Thomas, Sociologies of Disability and Illness: Contested Ideas in Disability Studies and Medical Sociology (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007). 57 Donna Reeve, “Psycho-Emotional Disablism,” in the Routledge Handbook of Disability Studies, ed. Nick Watson, Alan Roulstone, and Carol Thomas (London and New York: Routledge, 2012), 88; see also Donna Reeve, “Psycho-Emotional Dimensions of Disability and the Social Model,” in Implementing the Social Model of Disability: Theory and Research, ed. Colin Barnes and Geof Mercer (Leeds: The Disability Press, 2002); and Donna Reeve, “Towards a Psychology of Disability: The Emotional Effects of Living in a Disabling Society,” in Disability and Psychology: Critical Introductions and Reflections, ed. Dan Goodley and Rebecca Lawthom (London: Palgrave, 2006).

19 something wrong with it.58 Thomas and Reeve would argue that these moments of dys- appearance are typically a direct result of psycho emotional disablism.

Disability History: Normality and Eugenics

Although it is difficult to see beyond one’s own paradigm, interrogating video games based on disablement allows for a vital critique of these seemingly-invisible processes; as

Siebers suggests, “…oppressed social locations create identities and perspectives, embodiments and feelings, histories and experiences that stand outside of and offer valuable knowledge about the powerful ideologies that seem to enclose us.”59 One way of understanding the current paradigm is to examine historical models of disability to understand how it has been conceptualized prior to the advent of modern medicine and the fields of statistics and demographics in the nineteenth century.

The word ‘normal’ entered the English language between the 1840s-1860s, and originally had applications in carpentry; a norm was a square tool, and normal referred to a perpendicular angle.60 The rise of statistics created notions of bell-curves and typical distribution, creating a “hegemony of the middle” that rendered certain traits as desirable and others as deviant, transforming the notion of normality to suggest averages and modes.61

In unboxing the carpenter’s square, we boxed in extraordinary bodies, the beginnings of modern social processes of disablement. Prior to the invention of the norm, bodies were compared against a divine ideal, and it was understood that no one person could embody the

58 Drew Leder, The Absent Body (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1990). 59 Siebers, “Complex Embodiment,” 317. 60 Davis, “Disability, Normality, and Power,” 1-2. 61 Davis, “Disability, Normality, and Power,” 2.

20 ideal. Davis describes an example of the Greek artist Zeuxis trying to depict Aphrodite by combining the best parts of the most beautiful women in the area. The ideal represented a kind of averaging, but without the social pressure to alter any single body to conform to this average.62

This is not to say that disabled bodies faced no discrimination before the twentieth century; Henri-Jacques Stiker has shown that disability has been viewed as a mark of divine disfavor or sin.63 And Colin Barnes has discussed how disability has been treated as an individual medical issue or sign of personal tragedy in the West.64 The introduction of the norm collapsed the exceptional ideal into something attainable, a property of a the majority of bodies instead of an illusory model. Most fields in the medical and social sciences have built upon normalcy; for example, psychology began with the articulation of normal expressions of sexuality and mental functioning, setting up opposing categories of perversion, abnormality, and pathology.65

Mitchell and Snyder have described disability as a narrative prosthesis, “the master trope of human disqualification.”66 A great deal of literature has explored how other forms

62 Wendell, “Feminist Theory of Disability,” 342; The creation of the bodily ideal became the purview of advertising and the media in a consumerist society, suggesting that certain procedures or products can help us achieve an ideal or come close to it: “Idealizing the body prevents everyone, able-bodied and disabled, from identifying with and loving her/his real body. Some people can have the illusion of acceptance that comes from believing that their bodies are ‘close enough’ to the ideal, but this illusion only draws them deeper into identifying with the ideal and into the endless task of reconciling the reality with it.” 63 Henri-Jacques Stiker, A History of Disability, trans. William Sayers (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000). 64 Colin Barnes, “Understanding the Social Model of Disability: Past, Present and Future,” in The Routledge Handbook of Disability Studies, ed. Nick Watson, Alan Roulstone, and Carol Thomas (London and New York: Routledge, 2012), 12. 65 Davis, “Disability, Normality, and Power,” 8. 66 David T. Mitchell and Sharon L. Snyder. Narrative Prosthesis: Disability and the Dependencies of Discourse (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000), 3.

21 of social oppression (e.g., sexism, racism) construct difference with an undergirding of assumed biological inferiority; as Laurie Stras writes,

Again, like gender and race, the language of disability has historical correlations with the language of censure…that which was dangerous, defective, subversive, repugnant or corrupting might also be described in terms of a disability: lame, crippling, idiot, retarded, freakish, monstrous, crooked. Moreover, the dark side of ‘variation’ shared a vocabulary with that which was diseased and that which was dangerous: deformed, perverted, degenerate, abominable, unnatural, deviant, abnormal, aberrant, malignant.67

Barnes has suggested evidence for the integration of impairments into broader communities before the industrial revolution, even if prejudice and oppression continued to operate in these contexts. Throughout the nineteenth century, discriminatory practices began to be organized into institutionalized policies:

Industrialization, urbanization, changing work patterns and accompanying ideologies: liberal utilitarianism, medicalization, eugenics and social Darwinism—all contributed to and compounded ancient fears and prejudices. Taken together, these structural forces provided intellectual justification for more extreme discriminatory practices; notably the systematic removal of disabled people from mainstream economic and social life.68

At worst, these ideas influenced eugenicist thinking.69 The United States in the post-WWII era sought to expand state services and create agencies to respond medically to disability.

Although this shift represented a desire to create distance from former lethal eugenicist ideologies perpetuated by the Nazis, it was still predicated on the deficit model of disability,

67 Stras, “Sing a Song of Difference,” 300. 68 Barnes, “Understanding the Social Model,” 13; see also Brendan Gleeson, Geographies of Disability (New York: Routledge, 1999); Anne Borsay, Disability and Social Policy in Britain since 1750: A History of Exclusion (New York: Palgrave, 2004). 69 Joseph N. Straus, “Normalizing the Abnormal: Disability in Music and Music Theory.” Journal of the American Musicological Society 59, no. 1 (2006), 132.

22 fostering isolation (through institutionalization) and paternalistic medical practices.70 This medicalization of disability arose partially out of a sense of moral responsibility to care for those injured in the war; however, an increase in material wealth in the United States and advances in medical science also led to an remarkable growth in the disabled population. The medical model of disability named and pathologized deviations from normal bodily functions, but also extended the length of life as well as its quality. The medical model thus paradoxically creates impairments and seeks to eradicate them to normalize the body.

The politicization of disability began in the mid-twentieth century, with theorists separating impairment from disability and challenging the causal relationship between the two that had been assumed by the medical profession. The Rehabilitation Act of 1973, §

504, prohibited discrimination against disabled people in any federally-funded program, making one of the first major pieces of legislation resulting from disability scholarship and activism. The second was the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 42 U.S.C. § 12101

(ADA), a watershed civil rights law that prohibits discrimination based on disability, requires employers to provide accommodation for disabled employees, and places requirements for accessibility in public spaces, places of employment, and government services. Despite these advances, the ADA was a law ahead of its time. Courts have consistently made rulings narrowing the scope of the original mandate, placing restrictions on the interpretation of the term disability, effectively preventing many people from bringing a claim under the act.71

70 Barnes, “Understanding the Social Model,” 13; See also Vic Finkelstein, Attitudes and Disabled People (New York: World Rehabilitation Fund, 1980); Mike Oliver, The Politics of Disablement (Basingstoke, Macmillan, 1990); Mike Oliver, Understanding Disability: From Theory to Practice (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1996). 71 Elizabeth F. Emens, “Disabling Attitudes: U.S. Disability Law and the ADA Amendments Act,” in The Disability Studies Reader, ed. Lennard J. Davis (London and New York: Verso, 1995), 42.

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The ADA Amendments Act (Public Law 110-325, ADAAA) of 2008 was an attempt to restore the broader vision of the original legislation by clarifying and broadening the definition of disability, but it is likely that activism will remain vital in ensuring these protections and preventing the proliferation of judicial exceptions that undermine the spirit or letter of the law.

Models of Disability: The Medical Model

What disability scholars have called the medical model is an individualizing impulse, focusing on personal limitation due to medically-classified impairment. The WHO’s use of words such as loss, abnormality, restriction, and lack in the 1980 ICIDH aligned with a treatment of disability as deficit or personal tragedy, conceiving of impairment as misfortune.

This view of disability as a personal struggle has several repercussions. First, the medical model continually reinforces certain states of being as representative of health, and pressures those whose bodies differ from that norm to reject, endure, or battle with impairment in seeking restoration of normal function.72 Siebers has noted the inherent contradiction in such individualized, medical attitudes toward the body: “On the one hand, bodies do not seem to matter to who we are…On the other hand, modern culture feels the urgent need to perfect the body…We hardly ever consider how incongruous is this understanding of the body—that the body seems both inconsequential and perfectible.”73 The pursuit of body perfection suggests that some of the only ways of negotiating the body under the medical model are (unsurprisingly) through medical intervention, often in specialized fields:

72 Cameron, Disability Studies, 117. 73 Siebers, “Complex Embodiment,” 316.

24 prevention through screening, monitoring function, early detection through tests, diagnosis and treatment plans, rehabilitation, therapy, or the use of assistive technologies, and treatments that repair, restore, or normalize function.74

Under the medical model, social responsibility to disabled bodies takes the form of medicine and charity rather than to critiquing systemic disabling attitudes.75 This is not to suggest that medical intervention itself is inherently problematic; as suggested earlier, medicine has extended the average human lifespan and eradicated or minimized certain diseases. Medicine can vastly improve one’s quality of life, and the relationship of the disabled body to medicine is complex and contextual. Although the underlying assumptions of the medical model are often problematized in the field, disability studies does not advocate for the refusal of medical treatment.76 Rather, it seeks to uncover paternalistic attitudes and the creation of hierarchical relationships between medical practitioners and patients, and to challenge the notion that all bodies need to conform or seek normalization in order to be valued as fully human.

74 Marcia H. Rioux, “Disability: The Place of Judgment in a World of Fact,” Journal of Intellectual Disability Research 41, no. 2 (1997), 102-111; Siebers, Disability Aesthetics, 62; there is a second method of negotiating the body that is perhaps less invasive but just as prevalent: “…concealment, cosmetic action, motivated forgetting, and rituals of sympathy and pity.”; Linton, Mello, and O’Neill, “Expanding the Parameters of Diversity,” 5. 75 Siebers, Disability Aesthetics, 25. 76 Barnes, Understanding the Social Model,” 22; “To reiterate the social model impairment disability dichotomy is a pragmatic one that does not deny that some impairments limit people’s ability to function independently. Nor does it deny that disabled people have illnesses at various points in their lives and that appropriate medical interventions are sometimes necessary.” See also Tom Shakespeare, Disability Rights and Wrongs (London: Routledge, 2006), 116; “severe forms of impairment will often cause considerable problems and limitations and sometimes suffering and distress for individuals and their families. The goal of promoting cultural respect and social acceptance for people with impairment should not distract us from the importance of mitigating or preventing impairment via individual medical or psychological therapies.”

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Models of Disability: The Social Model

Likely as a partial response to the ICIDH definitions, and to the deficit, personal tragedy, and medical models of disability, Mike Oliver articulated the social model of disability in 1981.77 The social model, as I have alluded to elsewhere, views disability as the result of a deeply-engrained social process rather than as a natural consequence of physical impairment. The model has been useful politically, identifying instrumental social and psychological barriers to participation and advocating for accommodations and access. The social model has also been useful in providing a sense of community or collective identity, improving individual self-esteem, deconstructing negative representation, and suggesting alternative modes of identifying with disability.78

One of the first issues arising in response to the adoption of the social model involved the use of language; Oliver promoted the term “disabled people” over “people with disabilities,” suggesting that the latter diminished the material reality of impairment. Despite this claim, the debate between person-first and identity-first language has continued, and usage differs by field. Most style guides recommend person-first language out of a belief that it reduces stigma; however, as Mortan Ann Gernsbacher has shown, this is not true in practice and often imparts negative bias.79 Simi Linton has problematized other terms such

77 Mike Oliver, Social Work with Disabled People (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1983). 78 Brendan Gleeson, “Lost and Found in Space: The Geographical Imagination and Disability,” in Foundations of Disability Studies, ed. Matthew Wappett and Katrina Arndt (New York, N.Y.: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013); 74; “The articulation of the social model of disability did several important things: “It was [a] shift in language, conception, and practice that achieved (or tried to) three things at once: (1) liberation from oppressive medicalized understandings that rendered the disabled body a passive, pathologized subject; (2) humanization meaning release, at least partially, from pathology but also from hurtful language; and (3) emancipation, at least potentially, by reversing the onus of responsibility for disability away from impaired body towards the disabling social structures and environments.” 79 Mortan Ann Gernsbacher, “The Use of Person-First Language in Scholarly Writing May Accentuate Stigma.” The Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry 58, no. 7 (2017), 859-861.

26 as physically challenged, the “able disabled,” “handicapable,” and “special” for their inherent paternalism.80 Brendan Gleeson suggested that this “squabbling” over language “…was right and inevitable, because disability was at least enlisted to social theory, itself an unavoidably contentious and shifting enterprise.”81

Over time, the weaknesses in the social model became apparent: in an attempt to distance disability from individual experience, the model can have the effect of unintentionally denying impairment and medical responses to it that are significant to being in one’s body in the world.82 The distinction between disability as a social process and impairment as a biological fact has itself been challenged. Disability is a social construction, but impairment is equally constructed by the normative gaze of the medical institution. Carol

Thomas introduced used the term “impairment effects” in 1999 to highlight the nature of this construction, even if its contours seem to mirror definitions of disability. Impairment effects are “…restrictions of activity [which] may be directly related to, or caused by, having a physical, sensory or intellectual impairment (not being able to do certain things because of the absence of a limb or the presence of chronic pain or fatigue, for example.”83 Under the medical model, impairment is individualized; the social model attempted to shift focus to broader, systemic discrimination, recasting impairment and disability as a social consequence

80 Linton, “Reassigning Meaning.” Linton also problematizes language of passivity and victimization (e.g., suffering from, afflicted with, or “bound to a wheelchair” vs. “using a wheelchair”). 81 Gleeson, “Lost and Found in Space,” 74. 82 Shakespeare, “The Social Model,” 270; “Any researcher who does qualitative research with disabled people immediately discovers that in everyday life it is very hard to distinguish clearly between the impact of impairment, and the impact of social barriers. In practice, it is the interaction of individual bodies and social environments which produces disability.” 83 Thomas, Female Forms, 42.

27 of developing definitions of normalcy, with the effect of erasing discussions of impairment from the scholarly discourse.

Critiques of the social model have accused it of attempting to create a grand unified theory that denies personal and experiential aspects of disability. Approaches such as the feminist, postmodernist, post-conventionalist, and Critical Disability Studies (CDS) models have sought to complicate or nuance traditional understandings of the relationship between biology and culture in the creation and articulation of disability. Many of these approaches advocate for a certain kind of return to individual experience in an attempt to add greater nuance to existing theory. Feminist disability theory has advocated for the inclusion both of female voices within disability studies and the inclusion of disabled voices within mainstream feminism.84 Feminist disability theory has also emphasized that knowledge is situated and embodied, and that the introduction of this approach into disability studies allows for new perspectives to enter the field that can enrich and deepen existing theory and expand to include inconvenient or painful aspects of existence. Social model proponents have cautioned that a return to individualization could fall prey to the impulses of the medical or personal tragedy models and impede social progress in removing systemic barriers. Too much of an emphasis on individual bodily experiences has the potential to fragment and weaken disability activism, bogged down by the specificities of each impairment and preventing useful coalition-building and collective action. As Susan Wendell summarizes,

Not only the ‘normal’ roles for one’s sex, society, and culture, but also ‘normal’ structure and function, and ‘normal’ abilities to perform an activity, depend on the society in which the standards of normality are generated. Paradigms of health and

84 Ana Bê, “Feminist Disability Studies,” in Disability Studies: A Student’s Guide, ed. Colin Cameron (Los Angeles: Sage, 2014), 60.

28

ideas about appropriate kinds and levels of performance are culturally dependent. In addition, within each society there is much variation from the norm of any ability; at what point does this variation become disability? …The idea that there is some universal, perhaps biologically or medically describable paradigm of human physical ability is an illusion.85

Just as I argued that the meaning or aesthetic of a video game does not derive solely from the source code, disability scholars are starting to suggest that unidirectional models

(disability as produced by biology or as produced by society) are overly simplistic, and that disability arises from the reciprocal and mutually-transforming interaction between the two.86

Postmodernism, Critical Disability Studies, and the Affirmation Model

The postmodernist model (also referred to as the post-conventionalist model or as

Critical Disability Studies or CDS) seek to build on the intersectional framework advocated by the feminist disability scholars, to examine how disability influences our understanding of all bodies across all categories of difference. This model incorporates aspects of postcolonial, queer, and feminist theories (as well as politics of class, race, and ethnicity).87 If modernism privileged homogeneity and the whole, postmodernism seeks heterogeneity and a celebration of the variety of the individual parts that make up the whole.88 Work in CDS questions the utility of certain terms altogether; for example, problematizing the treatment of impairment as some “objective, transhistorical and transcultural entity which biomedicine accurately

85 Wendell, “Feminist Theory of Disability,” 338. 86 Siebers, “Complex Embodiment,” 328. 87 Dan Goodley, “Futures: Four Approaches and Three Key Themes of Critical Disability Studies,” in Disability Studies: An Interdisciplinary Introduction (Los Angeles, London: Sage Publications), 191-213. 88 Tobin Anthony Siebers. The Subject and Other Subjects: On Ethical, Aesthetic, and Political Identity (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1998), 32-34.

29 represents.”89 Postmodernist disability scholars have attempted to encourage “an awareness of the workings of the cultural imaginary; a deconstruction of binary thought in favor of the fluidity of all categories; and a recognition that emotion and affect are as important as the material aspects of life.”90 Additionally, this approach deconstructs existing definitions of disability, suggesting that the existing constructions are not only reductive but also a shifting target socio-historically and geopolitically.91 Although the social model purports to interrogate or deconstruct the binary of ability and disability, Margrit Shildrick has suggested that disability advocacy has been forced to uphold this construction as a strategic tactic to work for social change, and that political organizing itself has an unfortunate effect of flattening and silencing internal division.92

Shildrick has suggested fragmenting or disbanding existing coalitions in favor or pursuing “temporary and partial affinities, ad hoc alliances that would give leverage to socio- political claims without solidifying and policing the reductive coils of sameness and difference.”93 Although this path is intriguing, it seems destabilizing to the point of futility in the current political landscape and the potential challenges and changes to the existing structures of law and healthcare. It is difficult enough to effect real change even if a group comes together and strives for a shared cause; while I remain fascinated by the work of

89 Shelly Tremain, “On the Subject of Impairment,” in Disability/Postmodernity: Embodying Disability Theory, ed. Mairian Corker and Tom Shakespeare (London and New York: Continuum, 2002), 32. 90 Margrit Shildrick, “Critical Disability Studies: Rethinking the Conventions for the Age of Postmodernity,” in The Routledge Handbook of Disability Studies, ed. Nick Watson, Alan Roulstone, and Carol Thomas (London and New York: Routledge, 2012), 32. 91 Shildrick, “Critical Disability Studies,” 32; Rosemarie Garland-Thompson, Extraordinary Bodies (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), 13. 92 Shildrick, “Critical Disability Studies,” 338. 93 Shildrick, “Critical Disability Studies,” 33.

30 postmodernist scholars, I find it abstract in practice and struggle with mobilizing or operationalizing these approaches outside of scholarship to effect change in material reality.94 Critiques of the postmodernist approach echo my discomfort about advocacy, suggesting that the approach “downplays the material reality of disabled people’s lives,” and gives up on the possibility of real political solutions.95 If activism reifies the binary of ability/disability, it does so because it relies on these distinctions in order to articulate the workings of oppressive structures and advocate for material improvements; it is an important (even vital) intellectual exercise to deconstruct or seek nuance, but the applicability of the model to political activism and social change has not yet become apparent.

Despite these reservations, there are several elements of the CDS approach that appeal to my sensibilities. For example, their conception of identity: the self is “always embodied, dependent on its others, unsettled, and always in process.”96 Additionally, post- humanist work aligns with CDS or postmodernist approaches, redefining the body by exploring extensions of human competencies and capacities through technology and prosthetics.97 Donna Haraway’s work asserts that humans are already “chimeras, theorized

94 Shildrick, “Critical Disability Studies,” 34; If, as Shildrick describes it, “all putative categories are slippery, unfixed, permeable, deeply intersectional, intrinsically hybrid and resistant to definition,” then how can one form even a temporary or partial affinity? I do find the theory fascinating for how it is redefining what it means to be human and the processes in play in the creation of identity, the categorization of bodies, and the maintenance of social realities. 95 Barnes, “Understanding the Social Model,” 23. 96 Shildrick, “Critical Disability Studies,” 37. 97 Goodley, “Futures,” 202-204; see Erica Burman, “The Child and the Cyborg: (IM)possibilities of Feminist Developmental Psychology,” in Cyberpsychology, ed. Angel J. Gordo-López and Ian Parker (New York: Routledge, 1999); Rosi Braidotti, “A Theoretical Framework for the Posthumanities,” Theory, Culture, & Society, https://doi.org/10.1177/0263276418771486.

31 and fabricated hybrids of machine and organism,” suggesting the universality of prosthesis.98

As Goodley writes, “The disabled body is already cyborg because it pushes at the margins of the idea of the embodied self.”99 The tantalizing intersection of posthuman scholarship with disability studies suggests extending cognition through technology, and fully realizing individual potentials through a partnership with the prosthetic.

There is a great deal of good to extract from these approaches to the field, as

Gleeson suggests:

Taking some jewels from the smoking embers of postmodernism, we might postulate disablement as a field of oppression, yes, but also—dialectically—as a rich realm of human wisdom, especially insight into the irreducibly important issues of embodiment and care. This is perhaps to have a Foucauldian faith in disablement as a place where power is created, enacted, and contemplated, just as it is a site of disempowerment and delimitation.100

In response to the debates between the social model and its alternatives, Swain and French proposed the affirmation model in 2000. The affirmation model is “…a non-tragic view of disability and impairment which encompasses positive social identities, both individual and collective, for disabled people, grounded in the benefits of a lifestyle of being impaired and

98 Donna Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York: Routledge, 1991). 99 Goodley, “Futures,” 202-203. He continues: “Cyborgian and disabled humanities are aware of their needs, respectful of their histories and anticipating the future. The cyborg raises important questions about human rights (individual or collective), independence (or inter-dependence) and co-dependence. These questions are very much at east with the workings of the dis/ability complex, the potentiality of crip studies while troubling the individualism at the heart of ableism. Both disability and the cyborg urge a moment of human reflection— how do we interconnect with one another (with human or non-human)? The cyborg captures the material interconnectedness of (disabled) bodies and social and technological worlds. Used carefully, the cyborg envisages a future transcending the limits of normalcy.” 100 Gleeson, “Lost and Found in Space,” 71; the specter of Foucault looms large—notions from Madness and Civilization, The Archaeology of Knowledge, The Birth of the Clinic, and Discipline and Punish all appear throughout this dissertation and in those that I cite—I plan to make these connections more explicit in future iterations of this work.

32 disabled.”101 The affirmation model emphasizes: (a) being different and thinking differently about being different, both individually and collectively; (b) the affirmation of unique ways of being situated in society; (c) disabled people challenging presumptions about themselves and their lives in terms of not only how they differ, but also about the assertion on their own terms of human embodiment, lifestyles, quality of life, and identity; and (d) ways of being that embrace difference.102 The affirmation model does not cast aside examinations of oppressive and disabling encounters and contexts, but seeks to provide avenues for positive identification and an understanding of bodily difference as a site of alternative competency.103 Colin Cameron has proposed alternate definitions of impairment and disability based on the affirmation model:

Impairment: physical, sensory, emotional, and cognitive difference, divergent from culturally-valued norms of embodiment, to be expected and respected on its own terms in a diverse society

Disability: a personal and social role which simultaneously invalidates the subject position of people with impairments and validates the subject position of those considered normal.104

Colin Cameron summarizes the model this way: “In naming impairment as difference to be expected and respected on its own terms, the affirmation model allows for a respectful stance to be taken towards disabled peoples physicality. In naming disability as a role, it

101 John Swain and Sally French, “Toward an Affirmation Model of Disability,” Disability & Society, 15, no. 4 (2000), 569-582; 569. 102 John Swain and Sally French, Understanding Disability: A Guide for Health Professionals (Philadelphia, PA: Elsevier, 2008), 185. 103 Karen Mogendorff, “Constructive Counter-Hegemony.” Disability Studies Quarterly 37, no. 3 (2017), http://dsq-sds.org/article/view/5971/4692; “When I was underage children with whom I was not acquaintanced would mimic my a-normal walking style and sometimes call me names…Once there was a girl who tried to copy my atypical walking style but failed at this…The episode highlighted for me that my impaired body is primarily a skilled and competent body—a very counter-hegemonic notion.” 104 Cameron, Disability Studies, 6.

33 identifies disability as a productive as well as a restrictive relationship.”105 All of these models play a role in the development of my own theoretical approach to the issues of representation of disability through music and sound in games.

A Hybrid Model

I see the value in deconstructing binaries and recognizing the inherent multiplicity and complexity of the experience of disability. Postmodernism feels too immaterial as a foundation for cultural disability work in the present moment. I am wary of any attempt to break down allegiances and potentially weaken advocacy; the notion of breaking off into individual subcategories of difference seems like it could silence a voice that is still not quite loud enough in the current political climate. What I have read has called for more nuanced and varied spectrums of lived experience, and I support the conception of identity as process, as perpetual becoming. Criticism and deconstruction are useful projects in the intellectual realm, but seem to lack a clear sense of the material applications or where to take this theory from the academy to advocacy; how can one serve as both wrecking ball and bricklayer in building a more inclusive future?

Perhaps one of the ultimate lessons of this dissertation for me will be to stop thinking of my own scholarship as some fixed entity--a culmination rather than as a catalyst for continual renewals of inquiry. I have already seen how time, distance, and perspective enacts transformation in my own work. If I am going to make any claims to the notion of identity as a process of continual becoming, then why do I not allow my work this same freedom to evolve? These snapshots, even once fixed or published, are only doorways to

105 Cameron, Disability Studies, 6.

34 future development, cultivation, and growth. Therefore, this is what I believe and how I structure my approach to disability in the present moment:

• I explicitly discuss both binaries and spectrums of lived experience, and do not see

the two notions as antithetical. One can experience nuance and depth without

denying that social reality erects a barrier (even if that barrier is fluid and contingent

upon history, society, and culture);

• I believe in identity as a process of continual becoming;

• I believe in media representation as social discourse, constructing the meanings of

ability and disability (and, often, commodifying those reactions to difference for

profit and popular entertainment), and I believe and that interrogating this process is

vital to enacting change.

A hybrid model has the potential to expose the workings of discourse in media representation and challenge normative, hegemonic attitudes and behaviors. I hope that my work can participate in this critique, and that the conversation can continue in the decades to come.

The Body of the Avatar

What is an avatar? The word derives from the Sanskrit अवतार (Avatara), meaning descent; avatars are incarnations or bodily manifestations of Hindu deities.106 Despite this lofty etymology, the term has more general applications in video games, describing the entity controlled by the player—the player’s bodily manifestation inside the game world. The avatar

106 Zach Waggoner, My Avatar, My Self: Identity in Video Role-Playing Games (Jefferson, NC and London: McFarland & Company Inc., Publishers, 2009), 8.

35 can take the form of a pair of arms or a gun extending into the space (see Figure 1.2), a character ostensibly inhabited or possessed by the player (see Figure 1.3), or a customized representative of the player’s own design (see Figure 1.4).

Figure 1.2. A first-person avatar, Portal (Valve, 2007)

36

Figure 1.3. A third-person player-character, Mike from StarTropics (Nintendo, 1990)

Figure 1.4. A customized avatar, Stardew Valley (Chucklefish, 2016)

37

Traditional definitions refer to the avatar as a construct, surrogate, agent of action, virtual self, or as a prosthetic body extending into the gamespace.107 Yet, there is inherent tension in the avatar relationship.108 Jessica Aldred has discussed a continuum where at one end an avatar is a projection of the player’s identity (an extension of the self), and at the other end is character, a separate fictional entity perceived by the player.109 Yet, rather than shifting between modes, the player seems to bilocate within both of these modes simultaneously; identifying both as the avatar and with them as a character. Is the avatar, as Aldred writes, “a rich and vital site upon which to play with identity,” or is it a relationship between the bodies of the game and the gamer?110

Avatars inherently invoke questions of identity. Postmodern theories mentioned before privilege identity as process but also the notion of fragmented selves, multiple identities, and the creation of contextual identities based on both internal and external stimuli—concepts that are relevant to gaming and identification with an avatar. If modernism championed constancy and bodily integrity, postmodernism celebrates the

107 Waggoner, My Avatar, My Self; Miroslaw Filiciak, “Hyperidentities: Postmodern Identity Patterns in Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games” in The Video Game Theory Reader, ed. Mark J.P. Wolf and Bernard Perron, 87-103 (New York: Routledge, 2003), 89; Rikke Toft Nørgård, “The Joy of Doing: The Corporeal Connection in Player-Avatar Identity,” (paper presented at the Philosophy of Computer Games Conference, Athens, Greece, 2011), https://gameconference2011.files.wordpress.com/2010/10/thejoy1.pdf 108 Waggoner, My Avatar, My Self; 8; “Who are we when we’re also someone else in virtual play and space?” He goes on to differentiate between what he calls “mere operators of player action” found in early gaming (Sonic, Mario, Mega Man, Lara Croft, etc.) and player-designed characters in long-form role-playing games, which grow and change and involve more of a player’s projected identity; James Newman, “The Myth of the Ergodic Videogame: Some thoughts on player-character relationships in video games.” Game Studies, 2, no. 1 (2002); Newman suggests that characters are merely “sets of available capabilities and capacities;” for example, a player does not care who Lara Croft is; they only care how far she can jump. I am less certain of these arguments, which seem a bit teleological to me (customizable avatars are more common in modern games). A player- designed avatar can be just as much of an empty vessel, just as much an “mere operator of player action,” whereas there can be a kind of intimacy with earlier characters forged of intense, sustained engagement with those games. 109 Aldred, “Characters,” 355. 110 Aldred, “Characters,” 358.

38 protean and processual, seeing identities as “multiple but integrated.”111 The avatar is a tabula rasa whose body easily resets optimal functioning rather than experiencing permanent loss or change. The avatar in this construction is then a specter, a utopic dream of modernist bodily integrity in an era that questions the very notion of the stable self.112

It is fitting to mention ghosts at this juncture—video games have a strange relationship to death. In the era of coin-operated arcades, lives were finite but replaceable with the insertion of another quarter—games were difficult, and loss and game over conditions were frequent and common. Developers had to make the game challenging enough that players would feed quarters into the machines, but compelling enough to keep them from giving up in frustration. But this relationship continued from the coin-op into the console era: there is no finality to death in most games, because the game needs the player to continue play in order to exist. Death is recast a temporary setback, causing a player to restart a level, respawn, resurrect, or return to a previous safe point or saved game.113 But death is a bizarre mechanic in games; it disrupts a player’s immersion in the game narrative.

As Michael Tomsen writes, “As the digital ooze of early video game design began to take shape, death became the natural incarnation of fail states…Death in games generally has nothing to do with death. It's a lie based on a creative inability to communicate player failure

111 Waggoner, My Avatar, My Self, 29; Waggoner, drawing on Sherry Turkle, describes identity as similar to a computer desktop running multiple programs concurrently. “Each program’s windows can be minimized at will, and the user can bring any of them to the forefront as desired…is similar to the different aspects of our self-identity: different facets that can be given primacy depending on our needs and wants.” 112 Jennifer Iverson, “Mechanized Bodies: Technology and Supplements in Björk’s Electronica,” in The Oxford Handbook of Music and Disability Studies, ed. Blake Howe, Stephanie Jenson-Moulton, Neil Lerner, and Joseph N. Straus (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016), 159; In this way it fulfills Iverson’s suggestion that a prosthetic inherently “…masquerades as wholeness or fullness, but its true function is one of replacement and compensation.” 113 Karin Wenz, “Death,” in The Routledge Companion to Video Game Studies, ed. Mark J.P. Wolf and Bernard Perron (New York and London: Routledge Taylor & Francis Group, 2014), 313.

39 in a more honest way.”114 In many early console games, a player had a certain number of lives or tries before receiving a game over screen—but even the game over is merely an obstacle, sending the player back to the beginning rather than ejecting them completely and permanently from the game world.115

In this way, I find an interesting connection to the original meaning of the term avatar: this incarnation is perpetually reincarnated, and thus mirrors the immortality of the god (or, in this case, the player) who inhabits it. Bob Rehak suggests that tensions between being and not-being are pleasurable and central to video game history; in other words,

“Players derive pleasure from avatarial instability,” but how can an avatar’s death be experienced as pleasurable?116 Wark suggests that “To be a gamer is to come to understanding through quantifiable failure,” but that failure has to be tempered in some way in order for the player to continue on.117 As Karin Wenz writes, games allow for “…the observation of one’s own death, even though it is just one’s own avatar dying. As the player is still able to resurrect and continue playing, death is connected to control and becomes an

114 Michael Tomsen, “Dealing with Death in Videogames.” IGN, April 5, 2010; William Ayers, “Musical Depictions of Failure in Coherent and Incoherent Worlds” Paper presented at the North American Conference on Video Game Music, Davidson, North Carolina, January 2016; Ayers writes that “Stories do not generally depict primary character death as a viable narrative option; main characters of novels and films do not die and respawn three pages back to attempt the various plot points again. Many video games do not address this conflict, allowing for “incoherent worlds” in which a character miraculously reappears after an unfortunate demise without narrative explanation.” 115 In modern games, the game over seems to carry even less consequence: in Breath of the Wild, for example, the game auto-saves so frequently that game overs rarely result in the loss of much ground. This could be due to the expansive, open-world design. Temporary setbacks are still useful as negative motivation for players (I vividly remember how Bayek’s deaths in Assassin’s Creed: Origins instilled in me a desire to improve my own gameplay), but losing hours or days of progress through such a massive terrain could be too daunting, and cause the player to stop playing entirely. 116 Bob Rehak, “Playing at Being: Psychoanalysis and the Avatar,” in The Video Game Theory Reader, ed. Mark J.P. Wolf and Bernard Perron (New York: Routledge, 2003), 123. 117 Wark, Gamer Theory, 035; see also Jesper Juul, The Art of Failure: An Essay on the Pain of Playing Video Games (Cambridge and London: MIT Press, 2013), 7; “…the feeling of escaping failure (often by improving our skills) is central to the enjoyment of games.”

40 insubstantial obstacle.”118 Any pleasure derived from failure and death is external to the game system, deriving from the player’s awareness that she possesses possess a form of immortality and can conquer death by devoting herself to mastering the game.

Health is also an interesting point of rupture between the real and virtual words. In the real world, health is a valued and desired state of being in the world, but it is also ill- defined.119 Johnathan Metzl and Anna Kirkland describe health as a concentration of stigmatizing, colonizing, normativizing, medicalizing, and consumerist rhetorics, a construction that upholds certain political, social, medical, economic, and discriminatory ideologies. These ideologies serve social processes of human disqualification; definitions of health continue to narrow while categories of disease and functional impairment continue to expand. Treating health as a shifting target benefits both medical practitioners and the industries that support them (such as pharmaceutical companies and manufacturers of biotechnology and diagnostic technology). It also creates profit for companies who sell lifestyles (or health insurance, or foods, or devices) that promise to improve health. These institutions offer (illusory) methods of resisting or denying natural human processes of bodily change, both fostering anxieties about the unstable body and promising to assuage those fears through capitalist consumption. As Metzl and Kirkland say, these forces exert influence and “conspire to define health as a moral obligation, a commodity, and a mark of

118 Wenz, “Death,” 314. 119 Jonathan Metzl and Anna Kirkland, Against Health: How Health Became the New Morality (New York: NYU Press, 2010), 2; “…‘health’ is a term replete with value judgments, hierarchies, and blind assumptions that speak as much about power and privilege as they do about well-being. Health is a desired state, but it is also a prescribed state and an ideological position.”

41 status and self-worth.”120 Health is complex and difficult to define and fully embody, as its boundaries shift constantly.

However, in video games, health is relatively simple and quantifiable. As Alexander

Galloway writes, “Arcade games are often designed around the concept of lives, while console games are designed around health…Console and computer games, by contrast, offer a more fluid continuum of gameplay based on replenishment and exhaustion of a qualitative resource.”121 Health is depicted with containers (such as hearts that disappear in The Legend of

Zelda, or long bars as in Mega Man and many fighting games), or numbers (in many RPGs).

Players’ engagement with these worlds in their homes was more intimate than in the coin- operated arcade, and involved a greater investment of time, and so game designers had to find ways to justify the expense of the console and the game cartridges. Thus, they began to extend the life of these characters. Galloway writes: “A single Mario life may be augmented and crippled several times before being killed outright, thereby exhibiting a primitive version of what would later be known as health.”122

Games allow players a safe, vicarious encounter with superhuman abilities, but also with disabling conditions and even death. Bodily impairment, death, lives, failure, and game overs are ultimately rendered inconsequential by the system, obstacles to overcome. Bodily

120 Metz and Kirkland, Against Health, 6; Tsiris, Giorgos. "Voices from the 'ghetto': Music therapy perspectives on disability and music (A response to Joseph Straus's book Extraordinary Measures: Disability in Music),” international Journal of Community Music 6, no. 3 (2013), 336; although health is treated as a state of being, Tsiris proposes a more interesting model of health that treats it, like disability, as a process: “…health (as an integral part of one’s identity) is not viewed as a separate static entity, but as a dynamic, living process that is performed through the way that people act and relate to each other and to the environment around them.” 121 Alexander R. Galloway, Gaming: Essays on Algorithmic Culture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006), 34. 122 Galloway, Essays on Algorithmic Culture, 34.

42 perfection and the avoidance of injury and death is attainable, merely a matter of learning the system, of becoming fluid with the controls, of persistence and nontrivial or ergodic effort.123

Success (defined as bodily perfection, mastery of the mechanics and the ability to progress fluidly and unimpeded) depends on total incorporation into the avatar.

Incorporation

Most game researchers refer to player involvement using a metaphor of immersion within the diegesis, as if the player were semi-submerged, surrounding herself with the game rather than water.124 However, this metaphor is not universal; Gordon Calleja has argued for the replacement of the metaphor of immersion with one of incorporation, citing that the latter speaks more to the general process of becoming fluent with the game. Conscious attention becomes internalized knowledge after a certain amount of play: “This process of internalization also implies an intensification in focus where players cease to view the virtual environment as separate from their immediate surroundings and start interacting with it in an instinctive way. This state of deep involvement results in a shortening or disappearance of distance between player and game involvement.”125 Calleja ultimately defines incorporation as “the subjective experience of inhabiting a virtual environment facilitated by the potential to act meaningfully within it while being present to others.”126 Overwhelmingly, the game studies and video game music literatures rely on the immersive metaphor, or on using various terms interchangeably. This collapsing of terms is in contrast to the notions of

123 Espen Aarseth, Cybertext: Perspectives on Ergodic Literature (Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997). 124 We will explore this metaphor (and others used to describe interactivity) in greater detail in Chapter 3. 125 Gordon Calleja, “Digital Games and Escapism,” Games and Culture 5, no. 4 (2010), 254-257. 126 Gordon Calleja, “Digital Games Involvement: A Conceptual Model,” Games and Culture 2, no. 3 (2007), 254.

43 presence or transportation into a game narrative, which have more specific technical definitions.127 Incorporation invokes both presence and the process; it suggests both a site in which the bodies of the player and avatar intertwine, and the stages of becoming that avatar involving simultaneous disembodiment and embodiment.

Despite the widespread use of immersion in the literature, this dissertation will favor

Calleja’s incorporation metaphor for two reasons: (1) it is more specific in describing the relationship of the player to the game; and (2) the word incorporation derives from the past participle stem of the Latin incorporare, to “unite in one body;” this linguistic connection to the notion of embodiment is well-suited to the discussion of abilities and disabilities situated in the bodies of the avatars and players. I will still refer to elements of the game itself as

“immersive,” but will favor the incorporation metaphor whenever discussing the interaction of the player and game bodies.

Binary Bodies, Music, and Disability

What role should music play in the project of understanding disability in a video game? Studying bodily representations in the arts can help us articulate unconscious assumptions, confront them, and replace them with more inclusive models. Such study has the ability to change us, to help us see the spectrum of lived experience in all its complexity and diversity. Disability can be a signifier, a narrative, a mode of being, and its translation

127 Miguel Mera, "Towards 3-D Sound: Spatial Presence and the Space Vacuum," in The Palgrave Handbook of Sound Design and Music in Screen Media: Integrated Soundtracks, ed. Liz Greene and Danijela Kulezic-Wilson (London: Palgrave Macmillan Ltd., 2016), 93; “The term immersion has become a catch-all phrase to describe user experience, particularly in the Humanities…Immersion is achieved by replacing as many real-world sensations as possible with the sensations of a virtual environment…If immersion is the technologically-driven, objective aspect, presence is the perceptual outcome of that immersion. It is the psychological perception of ‘being in’ the virtual environment in which one is immersed; the impression that a mediated experience is ‘real.’ ”

44 into the realm of the symbolic—into the ineffable realm of music and sound, as created and as performed—can reveal powerful things about our social discourse. A scholar need not specifically study musicians who identify as disabled, since music and art constantly represent both normative and non-normative bodies and minds in the abstract, as well. As Blake

Howe, Stephanie Jensen-Moulton, Neil Lerner and Joseph Strauss write:

Although music is a famously nonrepresentational art form, scholars have shown that musical works represent disability in various ways. Through harmonic imbalance, melodic disfluency, or formal deformations, musical texts may be said to embody various disabled states…Complementary texts, such as song lyrics, symphonic programs, opera librettos, and film, can further specify the presence of a disability within a musical work.128

My texts are video games, and the presence of disability is often directly attested by both the audiovisual representation and the gameplay. The representation of disability in game sound often arises from assumptions and stereotypes about others. However, as Marianne Kielian-

Gilbert puts it:

Dis/ability renders music incomplete, in flux and with potential, socially and materially contingent, mixing aesthetic and social sensibilities sparking encounters, and desiring and metamorphically transforming subjectivities. Music is a particular medium and experience capable of realizing social and relational potential or movement between multiple conditions and identities. Music renders dis/ability emergent and expressive.129

Games make these relational potentials concrete and clear, and music is a large part of that project.

128 Blake Howe, Stephanie Jensen-Moulton, Neil Lerner, and Joseph Straus, “Introduction: Disability Studies in Music, Music in Disability Studies,” in The Oxford Handbook of Music and Disability Studies, ed. Blake Howe, Stephanie Jensen-Moulton, Neil Lerner, and Joseph Straus (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016), 4-5. 129 Marianne Kielian-Gilbert, “Beyond Abnormality—Dis/Ability and Music’s Metamorphic Subjectivities,” in Sounding Off: Theorizing Disability in Music, ed. Neil Lerner and Joseph N. Straus (New York: Routledge, 2006), 221.

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Rosemarie Garland-Thompson suggests five overarching questions that exist in the study of music and disability, exploring representation (in sonic signifiers, structures, and themes), the ways that individual disabilities can influence the composition or performance of music, or broader disability narratives in and around music.130 Some signifiers are clearer than others; for example, alla zoppa, syncopated, and dotted rhythms can represent limping.131 Signifiers are often created internally within particular musical works, juxtaposed against an internal musical normality or coherence. Particularly evocative or effective signifiers inspire similar depictions in future works, even across media. This kind of intertextuality can lead to the sedimentation of negative disablist tropes; for example, Kendra

Preston Leonard has shown how sonic signifiers of gothic horror bound themselves to visible human disability onscreen, creating a connection between the grotesque and supernatural evil.132 Representation of disability in music seeks to pathologize and render identifiable even those disabilities which are invisible. Representation thus takes on an unfortunate didactic role: replicating and reifying stereotypes, suggesting responses of ridicule or rejection.

As Joseph Straus’s work has shown, analytical language about music both represents and constructs disability, and analysis itself “involves the inspection of lots of pieces and

130 Garland-Thompson, “Introduction,” xiii. 131 Kendra Preston Leonard, “From ‘Angel of Music’ to ‘that Monster’: Music for the Human Uncanny in Phantom of the Opera (1925-1929).” Studies in Gothic Fiction 3, no. 1 (2014), 17; Joseph N. Straus, “Normalizing the Abnormal,” 134. 132 Preston Leonard, “Music for the Human Uncanny,” 22; “…for many audiences and creative agents of the early twentieth century, disability—and particularly the visible disability or disfigurement—was tantamount to monstrosity in a very basic way…The long-term effects of these scoring practices led to the development of standardized sounds and musical materials signifying as unnatural both the supernatural and the non- normative.”

46 their categorization based on shared attributes, implicitly a process of statistical norming.”133

When musical form is treated as a container of content, it evokes an embodied image schema, and implies a metaphorical connection to the human body—as such, language around music often uses invokes bodily integrity or deformity whether or not music directly depicts disability.134 When form is treated as a normative practice, then abnormalities suggest how music participates in broader discourses of normality and deviation.135 Disability in music relies on processes of musical expectation; in order to deviate, music must establish a norm. Deviations from norms in music are often accommodated or triumphantly overcome in the course of the musical narrative or dramatic structure that restores a state of balance, normality, or health.136 However, Straus also suggests that unlike other processes that articulate normality, musical analysis also celebrates successful deviation as original, novel, or interesting.137

As Straus writes, “The concept of the [musical body as] organic is in obvious and explicit contrast to the inorganic, that is, the mechanic. To say something is organic is to say that its parts are not mechanically assembled but grow together from a shared seed or root.”138 Straus pivots from this demarcation to the notion that conceiving of music as a body is a thread running through centuries of analysis and discourse, and that have formed

133 Straus, “Normalizing the Abnormal” 134. 134 Straus, “Normalizing the Abnormal,” 130. 135 Neil Lerner and Joseph N. Straus, “Introduction: Theorizing Disability in Music,” in Sounding Off: Theorizing Disability in Music, ed. Neil Lerner and Joseph N. Straus (New York and London: Routledge, 2006), 5. 136 Straus, “Normalizing the Abnormal,” 149; see also Joseph N. Straus, Extraordinary Measures: Disability in Music (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011); Straus discusses these narratives (of overcoming, accommodating, and losing and restoring balance) in chapters 2-4 137 Straus, “Normalizing the Abnormal,” 129. 138 Straus, Extraordinary Measures, 103.

47 the basis of music theory as a discipline. Indeed, my analyses rely on constructions of normal functioning, of treating music as a kind of body that helps listeners to formulate expectations and definitions of normalcy and deviation. However, I would like to pause and reflect on this notion of dichotomy between organic and inorganic, between nature and technology, as

I set out to examine the intersection of game sound and disability. As Jennifer Iverson writes, there has long been a tension between acoustic and electronic musics, between that which sounds from the gestures and breath of the body and that which enacts code or realizes instructions; she suggests that “electronic music often activates a sense of the Other, since electronic sound has aspects that may not seem intuitive, ‘natural,’ gestural, or embodied.”139 And yet, as we will see in the next two chapters, the potency of game sound depends on integrating this Other into our embodied experience, in transforming it into the natural and intuitive. Sound addresses us and communicates with us, invokes or mimics gestures and embodied experience, and invites us into the avatar through play with sensation and perception.

In this dissertation, I argue that avatars and player bodies inflect one another— imbue the other with meaning in a space that is neither fully animate not fully animatronic— and that music serves as a site of projection and a conduit between bodies in play. This intense relationship also suggests the power of game sounds to shape us and our ideas through the transmission of disablist discourse. As Janet Murray asserts, “Digital narratives offer us the opportunity to enact stories rather than to merely witness them. Enacted events have a transformative power that exceeds both narrated and conventionally dramatized

139 Iverson, “Mechanized Bodies,” 157-158.

48 events because we assimilate them as personal experiences.”140 In order to support that thesis, however, I must first explore how game sound arises and how it functions, and how it invades and operates upon the body of the player. Before I consider specific forms of representing disability in video game soundscapes, I must attempt to define the liminal space between these bodies, and the notion of incorporation as both site and as process.

Organization of the Dissertation

This dissertation will perform close readings of game soundscapes in order to present convincing examples of convention and stereotype. This endeavor operates on a conjecture that game composers draw on well-established (if sometimes unconscious or tacit) cultural codes for disability; codes given, reified, and rearticulated intertextually in opera, film, television, YouTube videos, and popular music. The first three chapters explore a broad range of topics that will inform the more pointed analysis in the case studies that follow; from an outline of the field of disability studies to history and representation to the mechanics of sound synthesis, functions of game sound, and cognitive and physiological effects of sound on players. This first chapter will begin with disability theory: exploring definitions and historical models of disability within the field, evaluating modern approaches to the study of human variation, and examining the intersections of musicology and music theory with disability studies. In this chapter, I aim to construct a sense of the two bodies in play: the human player and the virtual avatar—the player’s representation in the video game

140 Janet Murray, Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1997), 171;

49 world and whose pixels, vectors, and synthesized sounds convey information about gameplay mechanics and narrative.141

Chapters 2 and 3 will expand upon these notions of bodies by examining the broader systems of signification and player involvement. Games often use sounds in ways that other media do not, and so analysis of game soundscapes must account for these medium-specific uses of sound. To this end, the second chapter categorizes game sounds according to their primary functions, ranging from explicit communication of game states to the evocation of emotional affects. This functional taxonomy hints at the space between the player and avatar where incorporation occurs, with sound serving as both site and catalyst. Function quickly proceeds to impact, and so the third chapter explores the cognitive and physiological dimensions of game sound, the influence of sounds and music on the player that foster avatar identification and embodiment as well as incorporation into the game diegesis.142

Sounds stimulate the sympathetic nervous system, manipulate player emotions, and condition their behaviors and responses to game stimuli, and I will argue that these aural stimuli constitute a great deal of the immersive potential of the game. The first three chapters demonstrate the ways in which game sound is a uniquely invasive, intensely intimate, and immediate influence on the player, and they will both delineate and collapse the

141 Bruno Latour, “How to Talk About the Body? The Normative Dimensions of Science Studies” Body and Society 10, nos. 2-3 (2004), 205-230; Latour has described bodies as process (rather than reified objects), an idea that underpins my own work on the confluence of game and player bodies. Latour suggests examining the effect or impact of a body (and reactions to that impact), how a body is affected (or inflected), capacities, affordances, limitations, and practices surrounding it. 142 Diegesis is a narrative construct often used in film and game studies, representing the interior view of a fictional world. Anything that the characters in the game can see, hear, and experience is considered diegetic. I will discuss diegesis again in Chapter 2.

50 boundaries between bodies to demonstrate how sound bridges the gap between player and avatar.

The next two chapters serve as case studies for the representation of injury, disease, and mental illness in video games. Injury and disease often lead to acquired, temporary impairments rather than permanent renegotiation of the relationship to one’s body or an adoption of a disabled identity. The sounds representing injury in games typically invoke abstract representations of impact, of pain, and of vocal excess. The rarer presentations of disease in games suggest sounding that which is internal and soundless—symptoms such as fever, chills, or disorientation. These temporary forms of disability—assuredly curable or preventable in most games—speak broadly to other discourses on violence, gender, and bodily vulnerability. The next chapter is an extended case study of the use of mental illness in media as a stock motivation for acts of villainy. I will focus on Kefka, the central antagonist of Final Fantasy VI, demonstrating how his leitmotifs support his characterization as insane. In outlining the musical qualities that reinforce in-game assertions about the character’s mental imbalance, I will also consider the effects of this kind of representation on the maintenance of stigmatizing attitudes toward mental illness in the real world, and how the game demands the player’s tacit yet complicit acceptance of these tropes in the act of play. The epilogue returns to the implications of representation, considering how video games and their sounds might create a vivid and more inclusive experience.

I focus mostly on video games from the 1980s and 1990s and do so for several reasons. The first is an issue of personal exposure: I was already familiar with games from this era, as I grew up playing them and have a broader knowledge base for this repertoire

51 than for more modern consoles (where I am constrained by time and finances and must make more deliberate choices about my play). However, these early games are not mere relics of gaming history: they are still pervasive, potent, and compelling.143 Because early game developers had to negotiate certain technical limitations of space, everything had to be concise and striking. The need for sound to communicate information to the player led to portrayals of ability and disability that are instantly recognizable even in the stripped-down timbre of early game audio. This emphasis on immediacy and efficacy is still vital to the industry, even in the era of massive open-world games and increasingly-realistic graphics and sound: some of the most beautiful modern games fall flat compared against their two- dimensional ancestors, filling their worlds with empty quests that require more time investment than skill. This suggests that the power of games—their ability to incorporate the player—has little to do with the outward appearance or sound and more to do with effective and coherent deployment of the various elements that make up the gameplay experience.

Early games created the conventions that remain influential in modern game design, and these games are now household names, beloved icons that remain popular decades after release. These games have been enshrined as classics, but there is also continuity to the present day: titles from the 1980s and 1990s are still available for download on the Wii

Virtual Console and the Switch, and the most recent Mario game (Super Mario Odyssey;

Nintendo, 2017) incorporates sections of gameplay in the classic platforming style, cleverly mapping two-dimensional play onto the modern three-dimensional spaces (see Figure 1.5).

143 Raiford Guins, Game After: A Cultural Study of Video Game Afterlife (Cambridge, MA and London: The MIT Press, 2014), 7; “It designates a formative situation affecting how we know, understand, and experience video games when their attributed values and meanings are neither limited to the actual play of a game nor mark an obvious terminus in a life history.”

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Finally, my interest in cartridge-based games stems from the overarching theme of limitation in my work—the minimalist textures and technological constraints of the sound synthesis resonate with my interest in social limitations and disability.

Figure 1.5. 2-D play on 3-D spaces, Super Mario Odyssey (Nintendo, 2017)

The variety of disabled experiences can dilute the political presence of disability studies, complicating activism and work for social change. As Tom Shakespeare has noted, there is no way to remove all barriers to participation in society, because the needs of different groups conflict; for example, wheelchair users prefer ramps and sloped curb cuts, whereas the blind might advocate for steps and defined curbs.144 Despite this complexity, disability activism has focused intently on a social model of disability and on the common

144 Tom Shakespeare, “The Social Model of Disability,” in The Disability Studies Reader, ed. Lennard J. Davis (New York and London: Routledge, 2002), 270.

53 forms of systemic oppression. Although individual bodies or impairments may differ, depiction and treatment often take similar, recognizable forms, and so they serve as a clear example of the social process of disablement. This is why it is vital to unpack representation in popular culture. Increasing the number of nuanced portrayals of non-normative identities allows them to become less stigmatized, marginalized and Othered by society over time. My interest is in developing a critical understanding of how these tropes have proliferated in video game soundscapes. Exploring our reductive past—outlining problematic over- simplification in our conventional approaches—has the potential to open minds to allow new voices to enter the medium and is a first step to enacting true change.

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Chapter 2. Towards an Aesthetics of Video Game Sound: Taxonomies of Form and Function

I once tried to play StarTropics (Nintendo, 1990) with the sound turned off. The game is an action-adventure video game for the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) following the exploits of Mike Jones, a teenage boy rescuing his scientist uncle from evil aliens by traversing the tropics with his trusty yo-yo (a deadly weapon in the hands of an ace pitcher like Mike). My thought was that if I played quietly, my transgression of secretly playing after bedtime would go unnoticed and I could continue to play to my heart’s content. It did not work. My mother soon discovered me still awake and sent me, defeated, off to sleep. I did not enjoy this miniature rebellion. With the television silenced, I found that not only was the game less fun, but it was downright difficult to play. StarTropics is tricky enough as it is, but without the feedback of the sound effects and the energetic background music, it was next to impossible to progress in the game.

Video game sound is vital to player involvement. As Kristine Jørgensen writes, “One of the reasons why the players experienced a loss of control and a sense of helplessness when the sound was removed was that one of the two access points between the game and the player had disappeared.”1 Just about any gamer can recount a story similar to my

1 Kristine Jørgensen, “Left in the Dark: Playing Computer Games with the Sound Turned Off,” in From Pac- Man to Pop Music: Interactive Audio in Games and New Media, ed. Karen Collins (Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing, 2008), 167; she continues: “This has specific consequences for the players’ ability to orient themselves in the game environment. Compared to visual perception, auditory perception has the fortunate advantage that it does not require a listener to be oriented in a specific direction. This means that sound is

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StarTropics angst as evidence of the often-unacknowledged vitality of these aural elements to the experience of play. Traditional methods of transcription and analysis are useful in discussing the formal properties of these sounds: they help to understand structural elements such as harmony, melodic contour, or rhythm. However, music is only one of several elements creating the affective and functional power of the soundscape, necessitating a more inclusive approach.

A ludomusicologist must account for sounds that fall outside of the intentionally musical—i.e., video game sound effects, sampled speech, or Foley—as well as the role of silences in a framework that privileges the heard over the unheard.2 In considering the soundscape holistically, I examine any and all sounds—or absence of sounds—that constitute a particular spatial and diegetic environment, serve as important aids to incorporation, induce emotional responses that can enhance the ludic experience, or otherwise impact the phenomenological experience of engagement with this specific medium.3 Thus, it is necessary to devise a fitting functional taxonomy for video game sounds, one that does not privilege a particular category of aural output but instead serves as

useful in situations where the visual system is not available, for instance to provide information about events located out of line of sight, or when the visual system is busy with other tasks.” 2 Roger Moseley coined the term “ludomusicology” to denote the study of music in play, and the term was widely adopted by scholars of game sound. At the inaugural North American Conference on Video Game Music in Youngstown in 2014, however, Karen Collins referred to the term as pretentious, an attempt to make one’s work sound more impressive through the use of a fancy neologism. I have no strong feelings about the use of the term in place of something like “video game music studies” when describing one’s specialty; the main advantage of the term is that it is one word instead of three or four. I therefore use labels such as ludomusicology and game sound studies throughout my work to add a bit of variety to my language and demonstrate my lack of strong convictions about the term at this stage in my career. 3 While the word “ludic” tends to qualify nouns that are of or relating to play, or implying a playfulness in approach, in my work the adjective will be used to situate the noun within the context of video games specifically. Thus, I often refer to particular “ludic experiences” that gamers will have or discuss elements of the “ludic soundscape.”

56 a multi-faceted analytical approach, a working language of gameplay soundscape.4 This chapter moves from the player body to that of the system—the video game body, beyond the avatar. The chapter will serve to develop a working taxonomy of video game sounds accounting for a variety of functions on a spectrum ranging from silence to signal to atmospheric Foley to mood-inducement to fully autonomous musical tracks, to serve as my analytical toolkit.

Such scattered interest, however, can ultimately lead to lack of analytical focus.

Recording several playthroughs and comparing every element of the soundscape may explain what the player hears when but does not account for how the sound functions or why it is so compelling. There is a medium-specific alchemy between the auditory and visual input and the player interaction. The immediacy and intimate invasiveness of sound and silence are powerful in the ludic experience, and the numerous functions of sound only serve to expand the potential impact of the aural elements on the player; fostering deeper incorporation in and connection to the game. An aesthetics of game sound must not cast aside the computerized timbre of blips and bloops, the uneasy silences, or the looped repetition of 8- and 16-bit game sounds as inherently unmusical.5 Instead, it must interrogate the ways in

4 David Neumeyer, “Studying Music and Screen Media,” in The Routledge Companion to Music and Visual Culture, ed. Tim Shephard and Anne Leonard (New York: Routledge, 2014), 72; Neumeyer speaks to the difficulties in analyzing the elements of the cinematic soundscape in isolation: “…none of the elements of the sound track— not dialogue, not sound effects, especially not music—can be adequately addressed in isolation…Music studies scholars are particularly prone to separating music out as a unique agent, but an analysis that singles out music and examines its functional relations to narrative independently will always be incomplete, rather like building an interpretation by pulling out a single verse from a poem.” 5 Karen Collins, Game Sound: An Introduction to the History, Theory, and Practice of Video Game Music and Sound Design (Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 2007), 13; According to Karen Collins, “A bit, derived from binary digit, is the smallest unit of information in computer language, a one (1) or zero (0) (also sometimes referred to as ‘on or off,’ or ‘white or black.’ In referring to processors, the number of bits indicates how much data a computer’s main processor can manipulate simultaneously. For instance, an 8-bit computer can process 8 bits

57 which these sounds are just as potent as the most lushly-orchestrated, emotionally- compelling musical track. Instead, my analytical aesthetic will seek to reconcile music to a broader system of game sounds, and in that way, to understand the impact in every gesture translated from the controller to the onscreen avatar, every communicative act from the source code to the body of the player, and every sound event in these rich and vibrant interactive soundscapes.

Transcription and Notation: The Visual Representation of Game Sound

Before considering the role of the soundscape, it is essential to introduce strategies for transcribing, notating, and representing early game sound visually. All of the transcriptions in this dissertation are my own: few published scores exist for the music and sounds encoded into the sound chips for the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) and

Super Nintendo Entertainment System (SNES). Most extant scores represent performance editions created decades later for concerts such as “Video Games Live,” rather than definitive versions of what was encoded into the original game.6 While a great deal of fan transcriptions and arrangements exist, these scores may collapse or omit voices, and thus are too inexact for the purposes of analysis.7 As Tim Summers notes in Understanding Video Game

Music,

of data at the same time.” However, the terms 8- and 16- bit can also serve as shorthand for the 1980s and early 90s, suggesting games for particular consoles such as the NES, Atari 2600, and the Sega Genesis. 6 For more on the phenomenon of video game music concerts, see William Gibbons, “Chapter 11: Classifying Game Music,” in Unlimited Replays: Video Games and Classical Music (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2018), 157-171. 7 Matthew Thompson, “’There’s no doubt you’ll be popular after performing these in front of your friends!’: The Pedagogy and Performance of Piano Transcriptions of Video Game Music.” Paper presented at the North American Conference on Video Game Music, Ann Arbor, Michigan, January 2018. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J1RFqg8rtRU; Matthew Thompson discussed (and performed for us) a number of both officially licensed and unofficial arrangements of video game music for piano, including a fascinating example of a beginner piano version of “Peaceful Days” from Chrono Trigger, which suggested

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A range of game music has been commercially published, arranged for amateur performance, while video game fans routinely spend considerable time and effort transcribing the game’s music. These latter sources must be treated very carefully: both are usually second-degree derivatives from the soundtrack records of the game music, rather than from the primary source of the game, and both may deviate from the music heard in the game without any indication.8

The purpose of a transcription shapes its form. Therefore, it is necessary to create personal transcriptions in order to ensure that the notation can capture, as accurately as possible, the elements necessary to the analysis I wish to perform (more on this in Chapter 4, when I encounter some of the limits of transcription firsthand). In order to understand the notational conventions I have chosen for my musical examples, I shall briefly discuss the technology behind early sound chips.

The NES was released in the United States in 1985.9 The sound chip for the system was a programmable sound generator (PSG), which generates sound from computer assembly language through oscillators. Oscillators create electric signals which then take the shape of particular waveforms (e.g., sawtooth waves, triangle waves, square waves, and white noise). The choice of waveform dictates the resultant sound. A sawtooth wave often emulates stringed instruments such as violin or electric guitar, as it has a harsh or rough undertone that adds complexity to the sound; its name derives from its visualization as sharp and jagged, a steep rise with a vertical drop-off (or, one sloped side). A triangle wave (which has two sloped sides of equal rise and fall, creating a shape similar to a zig-zag pattern) has no harsh undertone. Triangle waves were often used for basslines because they sounded

pedagogical use by listing a specific equivalence to Ferdinand Beyer’s 75th etude; Beyer’s method books were evidently popular in Japan and Korea. 8 Tim Summers, Understanding Video Game Music. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2016, 49. 9 The release dates for these systems are documented in many places, including Collins’s Game Sound. See also David Sheff, Game Over: How Nintendo Conquered the World. New York: Random House, 1993.

59 good even at low frequencies, but they also worked well in the higher register to emulate a flute. Square waves fall between a sawtooth wave and a triangle wave in terms of sound

(somewhat complex and harsh, but smoother than a sawtooth wave), and are so named for the shape of the wave, which resembles the battlements of a castle’s parapet. Square waves typically represent woodwind instruments at higher pitches, such as clarinet or oboe. White noise is the result of combining all available frequencies, which sounds like unpitched static.

In order to create different effects, programmers often joined several oscillators into bundles of cooperative oscillators known as generators (though the sound designer could also opt to use the pure tone produced by a single oscillator, if desired). For most instrumental sounds, a tone generator supplied the desired waveform, while an envelope generator controlled the properties of that sound’s attack, sustain, and decay. PSG sound chips often used a process called subtractive synthesis, which filtered the waveform coming out of the oscillator or generator to subtract specific frequencies and shape the resultant sound.10

The NES used a proprietary five-channel PSG sound chip created by composer

Yukio Kaneoka. The first two were pulse-wave channels with a range of about eight octaves, often used for sawtooth and square waveforms, with four options to change the duty cycle and thus alter the timbre of the waveform. The pulse channels were often used for melody and harmony, as these channels were also capable of imitating vibrato, tremolo, portamento,

10 There are several articles, chapters, and technical documents available freely online that describe these processes in greater detail. For one example, see chapters 2 and 3 of Karen Collins’s Game Sound.

60 and echo effects.11 Next was a triangle wave channel set an octave below the pulse channels.

This channel generated triangle waves often used for bass (or the occasional flute, as mentioned above), because it had fewer pitch options than the pulse channels and no ability to manipulate the sound’s amplitude. The fourth was a noise channel to generate white noise, often used for percussion or sound effects.12 The fifth was a less-frequently-used sampler called the differential pulse code modulation (DPCM) channel, which could employ either pulse code modulation (a process often used to capture speech) or direct memory access (a limited form of sampling relegated largely to short clips used for sound effects).13

Collins notes that while the melody-harmony-bass-percussion texture was common, some games employed the pulse and triangle channels for homophony and counterpoint, as well.14

Although the PSG had five available channels, much of the music was functionally a three- or four-voiced texture of melody and accompaniment with or without percussion.

The Super Nintendo Entertainment System (SNES, released in 1991 in North

America) expanded its sound chip (the Sony SPC-700) from five to eight channels, each of

11 True vibrato would involve two channels, combining two waveforms at slightly different frequencies; therefore, vibrato in a single voice involved varying the volume and/or pitch of the wave with a low frequency oscillator. Imitating echo or reverb involved the use of the volume envelopes—having a quick decay but a slow fade. 12 For example, a composer could emulate a snare drum with a loud attack that fades away gradually; a quieter attack with a gradual fade would emulate an open hi-hat, and white noise at a softer volume that fades quickly would replicate the sound of a closed hi-hat. 13 Collins, Game Sound, 25; PCM samples convert analog sounds into digital sounds by sampling an analog waveform and storing the sample as data for playback; the issue with this method is that the samples were typically quite large. Thus, as Karen Collins points out on page 14, “…most PCM samples in early games were limited to those sounds with a short envelope, such as percussion.” The PCM samples were also often quite distorted, having an audible hiss or lacking clarity. 14 Collins, Game Sound, 26; “The fifth channel (the DMC) was rarely used for music, but was instead used for sound effects in games, although there are a few examples of samples taking on the role of bass…With the possibility of sampled sound, sound effects for the Nintendo system were far in advance of other 8-bit machines, and even included the occasional fuzzy vocal sample, as in Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out!”

61 which used four or six different oscillators to create waveforms and produce more complex instrumental timbres. One of the more versatile components of the SNES sound module was its 16-bit Sony digital signal processor (DSP), which allowed programmers to alter the frequency and amplitude of all channels and apply effects such as panning and reverb.15

Most importantly, the sound module allowed for MIDI conversion (and had a preset stock of instrument samples), making the chip much easier to use: programmers no longer had to translate musical ideas into assembly language in order to encode executable sound files into the processor. The expanded channels and capabilities granted composers access to a broader array of instrumental timbres and musical textures, moving beyond the melody and accompaniment style favored in the 8-bit era to more orchestral scoring.

All of the NES music transcribed for this dissertation will label the instruments according to which of the PSG sound chip channels are in use (see Example 2.1).16 The

SNES channels are known as SPC channels, after the specialized SPC-700 chip used in the sound module. The channels are numbered sequentially, because all of the channels had the same capabilities. On the SNES, channels often switched between different instrumental timbres, and so it is also useful to indicate the shifting musical roles of individual SPC

15 Collins, Game Sound, 46; “Unlike previous synthesis models used in computer sound, wavetable synthesis used preset digital samples of instruments, usually combined with basic waveforms of analog synths. It was, therefore, much more ‘realistic’ sounding than FM synthesis, and with the addition of software to convert MIDI data into files executable by the sound processor, it was much more user-friendly.” 16 Title taken from an NSF rip of the game’s musical source files by user kingshriek on Zophar’s Domain: https://www.zophar.net/music/nintendo-nes-nsf/robin-hood-prince-of-thieves.

62 channels; those labels will appear above their respective musical line in the transcription (see

Example 2.2).17

Example 2.1. Paul Webb, Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves (Sculptured Software, 1991), “Duel 2,” mm. 17-20.

17 Title taken from Final Fantasy: Dear Friends, selected tracks from Final Fantasy V released in 1993. On Final Fantasy V Original Sound Version, an official soundtrack album released in Japan by Square in 1992, the original title is “古き土の眠り (Furuki Tsuchi no Nemuri)" which translates literally to “The Sleep of Olden Earth.”

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Example 2.2. Nobuo Uematsu, Final Fantasy V (Square, 1992), “Intention of the Earth,” mm. 4-8.

The goal of these instrumental labels is more descriptive than prescriptive, meant only to track changing timbres in the transcription by using an instantly-intelligible, approximate musical correlate. Many SNES instruments are difficult to definitively name; though the timbres were far more realistic than their 8-bit predecessors, they are still often abstract musical representations of real-world analogues. For example, the string samples are often ambiguous; a violin-esque sound may fall below a G3 (the lowest note available on the violin without employing scordatura), but it may not register to the listener as a viola or cello.

Individual track titles may not be available, due to the lack of a published score or official sound track (OST) licensed by the publisher of the original game. Unless the track title is a descriptive attribution of my own, I will always indicate where the track title originated for

64 musical examples, whether it is from an original source (an official soundtrack) or fan labor

(in the form of the labels on ripped NSF or SPC files or YouTube video titles).

Technology and the Ludomusicological Aesthetic

Paul Théberge notes in “The New ‘Sound’ of Music: Technology and Changing

Concepts of Music” that there has long been a tension in Western musical aesthetics between formal structures (often visually fixed in a musical score) and their expression in sound via performance or recorded playback—a division that is inherent in the representation of music through notation. Music is often taken to exist as an ideal beyond the reach of an inherently-incomplete notation, separate from any possible manifestation in sound. However, such rigid dichotomies (composition vs. performance, instrumental sound vs. notated musical language, noise vs. ‘pure’ sound, and reproduced sound vs. live performance) are becoming increasingly difficult to sustain: as more songs are created via studio magic, sound becomes completely entwined with technology, and electronic instruments can serve to renegotiate the relationship between human gesture and resultant sound.18 Reproduction becomes central to musical practice; musical vocabularies have begun to incorporate “noise,” and sampling technology has “opened up” the musical work, as elements of diverse musical performances are concatenated into a new whole.19 Increasingly, music is not what can be performed, but what can be thought of and expressed aurally through technological means.

18 And indeed, just as Théberge seeks to deconstruct this dichotomy, disability studies and other identity-related fields seek to tear down or complicate other rigid binaries (abled/disabled, male/female, heterosexual/homosexual, etc.) to present a more nuanced spectrum of human experience. 19 Paul Théberge, Any Sound You Can Imagine: Making Music/Consuming Technology (Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press, 1997).

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Murphie and Potts expand upon this new aesthetic, demonstrating that eclecticism and multiplicity reign in place of any dominant or ‘original’ style. Appropriation and sampling become acceptable forms of musical poiesis.20 Carrying this argument to its logical—though extremist—end, originality is no longer possible: the only option is a kind of musical amalgamation and/or a kind of musical metatheater, uniting disparate elements into a new whole that causes a rethinking of former relationships and referential meaning.

Marshall McLuhan predicted that technology was becoming more and more cybernetic in the modern age, the ultimate development of its largely prosthetic functions as extensions of the human body.21 The more the artist interacts with modern technology, the more their thinking becomes imbricated with data modules and operational approaches to the creation of art. The “artist,” under this postmodern aesthetic, becomes like a computer: "artists" become processors of information, manipulators of material. After all, MIDI (musical instrument digital interface) is not a technology that captures the nuance of gesture upon a keyboard; the recorded data merely translates the analog playing into binary code, digital packets of information that accurately capture the note played, the length of the note, and any effects applied by the synthesizer.

What, then, are the elements of a purely digital aesthetic, beyond the incorporation of technologies that sublimate the human agent? According to Murphie and Potts, there are five main components of a digital musical aesthetics: (1) numerical representation (sound

20 Andrew Murphie and John Potts, “Digital Aesthetics: Cultural Effects of New Media Technologies,” in Culture and Technology, ed. Andrew Murphie and John Potts (Houndmills, England: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 67; “As Benjamin had predicted, the ‘aura’ of the original had given way to a culture of copying, and a ‘hands- on’ approach. Musical works were composed of appropriated fragments, recontextualized into a ‘tissue of quotations,’ to use Roland Barthes’s phrase.” 21 Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (New York: McGraw Hill, 1965), 3.

66 information encoded in data streams made up of binary code); (2) modularity; (3) automation (partial removal of human intentionality from the creative process); (4) variability

(new media are never finished, and are potentially subject to infinite variations, becoming mutable or liquid); and (5) cultural transcoding (the cultural layer of principles of narrative and pictorial representation are deeply intertwined with the computer layer’s coding principles, packets, file sizes/types, and forms of compression, and these two layers influence each other).22

The digital medium of the video game exemplifies each element of Murphie and

Potts’ aesthetic. Particularly in the 8-bit era of arcade games and the first home consoles, engineers encoded all sound in binary code; the sound data is stored numerically in the circuitry.23 The modularity of game sound is apparent not only in the looped repetition, but in how game cues are triggered by play. The abrupt transitions between various sounds only enhance the sense of modularity in the soundscape. Automation is evident in how the sound chip in the computer accesses and reassembles particular sounds for “live” performance during play. While the player is a co-author of the ludic experience as a whole (and thus a performer of sorts), the task of realizing the sound stored as data falls to the programmable sound chip.

22 Murphie and Potts, “Digital Aesthetics,” 89. 23 Bobby Schweizer, “Platforms,” in The Routledge Companion to Video Game Studies, ed. Mark J.P. Wolf and Bernard Perron (New York and London: Routledge Taylor & Francis Group, 2014), 41. Platforms are “standardized sets of things enabling games…the whole ecosystem in which [a game] artifact exists.” So while the term console might refer to a specific piece of hardware—a Super Nintendo vs. an Atari 2600 vs. a Playstation 2—a platform encompasses all of the elements that comprise that console. In different contexts, the term might refer to computer microprocessors (chips in the various consoles that serve as the computational foundation of the system), graphics processors, storage media (cartridges, CD-ROMs), sound processors (such as the PSG chip on an NES), controllers/interface, game engines (graphics engines, physics engines), middleware (software written to handle game functions inside of games).

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Due to the unpredictable nature of the player, the soundscape is quite variable; the player will trigger the sound events at different times and in a different order each time they play. Further, some sounds may never be heard if the player chooses not to explore a particular area or--through a learned mastery of the controller interface--avoids the sounds representing injuries or death for the avatar. Cultural transcoding, as per Murphie and Potts, refers to extra-ludic systems of signification, narrative convention, or representational schemes in the broader socio-cultural milieu. These systems are reproduced within—and exert influence upon—the form and content of each particular video game. The expression of these cultural conventions in the ludic context is defined by the interdependency of the cultural principles and the compression, encoding, file types, file size, and computer coding principles of the technological medium chosen.

Because of the interdependency of aural and visual elements, some of the best (or most effective) video game music is often “bad music” by external standards. As Royal

Brown remarks of film music, “Where good ‘classical’ music demanded variety or at the very least variation to keep listeners in their chairs, the good film score could often allow for substantial repetition of the same or very similar material…”24 Video games seem to have an even greater allowance for repetition; looping is a central aesthetic in early gaming due to limitations of space, but the loops themselves seem to reinforce the cyclical nature of many game actions, focus player attention, and lead to flow or incorporation.25

24 Royal S. Brown, “Film Music: The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly,” Cinéaste, 21, no. 1/2 (1995), 63. 25 Karen Collins, “In the Loop: Creativity and Constraint in 8-bit Video Game Audio,” Twentieth-Century Music, 4.2 (2007), 209-227; flow a popular psychological phenomenon, cited often in research in ludology, immersion, and human-computer interaction; Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience (New York: Harper & Row, 1990).

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Yet, despite these elements that contribute to a distinctly modern digital poiesis, video game music still operates on largely the same principles of functional harmony, rhythm, phrase structure, and orchestration as much of the music that has come before—in other words, while the syntax is new, the lexical elements are largely familiar. The Nintendo

Entertainment System (NES, an 8-bit home console released in 1985 in the United States) has four sound channels designed to handle melody and harmony (pulse channels 1 and 2), bass lines providing harmonic structure (triangle channel), and percussion (noise channel). In addition, video game cues contain common phrase structures (often symmetrical and balanced in patterns of two- and four-measure periodic structures), musical ornamentation and effects (bends, slides, tremolo, trills, and even slap-back echoes reminiscent of the 1950s

Sun Studios sound), counterpoint, patterns of tension and release via chordal progression and cadences, and the presence of extramusical signifying structures such as formal types

(such as waltzes and rondos) and topoi, all elements that one finds in non-game music.

Existing Taxonomies

Annabel Cohen identified eight functions of music in film that apply equally well to video games and other multimedia contexts.26 They are: (1) masking extraneous noise (such as the sound of a fan cooling off the console as it runs), (2) providing continuity between shots (most common in montage and certain video game cut scenes), (3) directing attention to important features of the screen through structural or associationist congruence, (4) inducing emotions, particularly in opening credits where no image is present, (5)

26 Annabel J. Cohen, “Music as a source of emotion in film,” in Handbook of Music and Emotion: Theory, Research, Applications, ed. Patrik N. Juslin and John A. Sloboda (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010).

69 communicating meaning and furthering narrative, especially in ambiguous situations, (6) signifying characters or events through leitmotif and the association in the spectator’s memory

(after the leitmotif continuously appears with the particular character or event, it will afterwards serve as a symbol and be able to recall its referent even in their absence onscreen), (7) heightening absorption, raising arousal levels, increasing attention to the film, and (8) adding to the aesthetic effect of the film.

As we will explore in Chapter 3, sounds work together to direct player attention to prominent features on the screen, often leading to the induction of particular emotions that will prime the player to act in a particular manner, and the repetition and looping contributes to player incorporation (satisfying Cohen’s third, fourth, and seventh functions). The sound effect is an inherently communicative game action, satisfying Cohen’s fifth function. In long form role-playing games where character development is more important to the narrative convention, game composers frequently employ ludic leitmotif (Cohen’s sixth function), signposts that identify particular characters and can serve to represent those characters even in their absence from the on-screen visuals.

One influential categorization of sounds in video games comes from Karen Collins’s formative Game Sound. Her classification arises from evaluating the sound’s relationship to both the diegesis and to the player actions, identifying the degree of interactivity present in the soundscape. I summarize her classification below:

• Nondynamic Non-diegetic: occurs most frequently in introductory cut-scenes (also called

cinematics), where the player cannot interrupt the track from playing in its entirety

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unless they turn off the game.27 These tracks are generally linear, and thus can

present complete musical ideas without concern for player actions.

• Dynamic Non-diegetic: responds to gameplay but exists outside of the diegesis. There

are two kinds of dynamic non-diegetic audio:

o Adaptive Non-diegetic: occurs “…in reaction to gameplay, but which are

unaffected by the player’s direct movements, and are outside the diegesis.”28

She gives an example of a “dawn” theme from The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of

Time (Nintendo, 1998) that is triggered by a timer set in the game engine—

the only way to hear the track again is to wait another “day” (in game time).

o Interactive Non-diegetic: sounds that can respond to and communicate with the

player directly. Collins provides a second example from Ocarina of Time:

“…the music changes in reaction to the player approaching an enemy. If the

player backs off, the music returns to the original cue. If the player manages

to find the trigger point in the game, it is possible to hear both cues at the

27 Collins, Game Sound, 5; Collins defines a cut-scene or cinematic as “…linear animated clips inside the game in which the player has no control or participation.” Soundingames.com, which is a resource for sound designers in the industry, defines a cut-scene as “cinematic parts of the game inserted between moments of gameplay. They usually serve the narrative, and have a strong impact on the emotional script.” http://www.soundingames.com/index.php?title=Cut-scenes ; see also Rune Klevjer, “Cut-Scenes,” in The Routledge Companion to Video Game Studies, ed. Mark J.P. Wolf and Bernard Perron (New York and London: Routledge Taylor & Francis Group, 2014), 302; Klevjer describes Pac-Man (Namco, 1980) as the first to incorporate cut-scenes, defining them literally as “…brief non-playable intermissions that ‘cut’ away from the action to present a kind of staged ‘scene’ depicting Pac-Man and his monsters chasing each other around.” Klevjer also describes cut-scenes as rewards for the player (because they often appear after a sequence of challenging gameplay), and as a narrative and structural device (framing player actions but also providing context for game events and further the plot). Galloway, Essays in Algorithmic Culture, 11; Galloway describes cut-scenes as “time-based, linear animation,” writing “There is a certain amount of repurposing and remediation going on here, brought on by a nostalgia for previous media and a fear of the pure uniqueness of video gaming.” 28 Collins, Game Sound, 126.

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same time in the middle of a cross-fade. The player, then, controls the event

cue, and can repeatedly trigger the cue, by, in this case, running back and

forth over the trigger area.”29

• Nondynamic Diegetic: “In nondynamic diegetic audio, the sound event occurs in the

character’s space, but the character has no direct participation with it.”30 These

sounds occur in cut-scenes but could also occur if the avatar encounters a radio

playing in the background of a particular area, for example.

• Dynamic Diegetic: Music that occurs within the character’s sphere of perception and

that they interact with or cause. There are also two types of dynamic diegetic audio:

o Adaptive Diegetic: Adaptive diegetic audio can describe environmental sounds.

Unlike the dawn theme in Ocarina of Time, which is adaptive but non-diegetic,

these sounds might map onto “day” or “night” states in the game and

represent things that the avatar could ostensibly hear, such as crickets

chirping intermittently at nighttime, or bird song during the day.

o Interactive Diegetic: “On the other hand, interactive diegetic sounds occur in the

character’s space, and the player’s character can directly interact with

them.”31 Most sound effects fall into this category, triggered by player actions

(e.g., the swish of a sword, the sound of a character’s footsteps).

• Kinetic Gestural Interaction: “…in which the player (as well as the character, typically)

bodily participates with the sound on screen…I refer to those times when a player

29 Collins, Game Sound, 126. 30 Collins, Game Sound, 126. 31 Collins, Game Sound, 126.

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may physically, gesturally mimic the action of a character, dancer, musician, etc. in

order to trigger the sound event, most commonly seen in rhythm action games.”32

Games such as Guitar Hero (Red Octane, 2005) have a peripheral, additional

controller component shaped like a guitar. The Wiimote controller (for the Nintendo

Wii) also engenders gestural interaction—for example, the player must imitate

swinging a sword with the Wiimote in order to elicit the same motion in the game

world in The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess (Nintendo, 2006).

This taxonomy is ludic in nature—centered on how the sounds trigger in play through various rulesets and game mechanics. My taxonomy builds on this notion and attempts to bridge ludic considerations with narrative function and reception. Rather than looking merely at how the player can or cannot effect change in the soundscape, I ask: how do these sounds influence the player? How do sounds cue, communicate with, and otherwise implicate the player’s body—both in the game through the avatar, and in the real world?

This chapter will continue by sorting these sounds; Chapter 3 will go on to explore specific cognitive and physiological effects of game sounds on the player.

While Karen Collins’s taxonomy emphasizes sounds as responding to player actions and game events, Zach Whalen’s influential early article suggests how the sound can enhance a player’s sense of the game environment or draw the player forward through the rhythms and sequences of play: “While music may not always employ the narrativized safety state/danger state binary, there is probably an element of motivation in nearly every type of

32 Collins, Game Sound, 127.

73 game. At least, the function of positively-reinforcing game interaction toward the achievement of a game’s goal state is a common practice.”33

In considering the piece as a component of a game soundtrack, it might also be useful to employ Rod Munday’s three-tiered analysis of the functions of the game music in light of the environmental, immersive, and diegetic elements of gameplay.34 The environmental category looks to how music supports the perception of the game world. This aspect of game sound creates an aural sense of space, supplementing and enriching visual information about the game environment. However, it can also impart new or conflicting meanings to the images presented, as when sinister music appears in an otherwise cheerful or sunny locale. Immersion considers how music supports the player’s involvement in the game; it is defined by Munday as “…either the heightened sense of a particular aspect of a person’s immediate surroundings, or the sensation of being transported into a mediated alternate reality…For immersion to occur, the activity or stimulus has to be sufficiently engaging to block out the normal sense impressions of one’s surroundings.”35 Finally, diegesis seeks to understand how music supports a game’s narrative.

Diegesis is a Greek term meaning “narration.” The term derives from classical drama, where it was contrasted with mimesis or “imitation.” Diegesis and mimesis represent modes of storytelling in staged plays (narrating or telling vs. showing through action), but scholars of film, unconcerned with the original theatrical distinction, began to use the term

33 Zach Whalen, “Play Along: An Approach to Video Game Music” Game Studies: The International Journal of Computer Game Research, 4.1 (2004). 34 Rod Munday, “Music in Video Games,” in Music, Sound and Multimedia: From the Live to the Virtual, ed. Jamie Sexton (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007). 35 Munday, “Music in Video Games,” 56.

74 diegesis to refer to the internal narrative space of a film—the world created by the plot and the characters. A diegetic sound is thus one that, ostensibly, the characters in the film can hear or experience. A character listening to a song on the radio represents diegetic music; the sound of a car backfiring, startling the main character, is also diegetic. Video games also contain diegetic sound, particularly in the form of spoken dialogue and sound effects, and so ludomusicologists have adopted the term as well.

However, films and video games rarely rely solely on diegetic sound to create emotional affect. Scholars refer in this case to non-diegetic, extra-diegetic, or trans-diegetic sounds. Sounds that fall outside of the characters’ perception represent the non-diegetic or extra-diegetic, as in many film scores operating underneath or adjacent to the onscreen action.36 However, video games often complicate the boundary between the diegesis and the player’s world, because of how the player uses the information carried in extra-diegetic sounds to influence their choices within the game; in a sense, the avatar reacts to elements that they cannot perceive.37 Kristine Jørgensen discusses trans-diegetic sounds as not only common, but also vital to the understanding of spatial relationships in games:

36 See David Bordwell, Narration in the Fiction Film (London, New York: Routledge, 1986); David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson, Film Art. An Introduction (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1997); and Edward Branigan, Narrative Comprehension and Film (London, New York: Routledge, 1992). Branigan describes eight levels of narration as a continuum spanning from the fictionally external notion of the text to the fictional character’s internal thoughts—this can be applied to film sound by thinking about the source from which a sound is thought to originate. 37 Kristine Jørgensen, “On Transdiegetic Sounds in Computer Games,” Northern Lights: Film and Media Studies Yearbook 5, no. 1 (2007), 107; “In a sense, this fictional character can evaluate and act on information that it should not be able to hear.” Jørgensen points out that these sounds are often a part of the game’s interface, enabling the game system to become more “transparent” to the player. Collins echoes this assertion on page 125 of Game Sound, when she writes “The notion of diegesis, borrowed from film and drama studies, is perhaps ill-suited to games. Nevertheless, it provides a useful notion with which we can discuss the different degrees of interaction between player/viewer and the on-screen content, and highlight some of the distinctions between the linear qualities of film audio and the nonlinear qualities of games.”

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While some sounds seem to belong naturally to the game world, other sounds seem to comment on the game world from an external perspective. Other sounds seem to have no relation to the game world but are still part of the game as product…In games then, not only diegetic sounds, but also sounds that have sources external to the fictional world may have a direct effect on what happens in the game. A good example is the extradiegetic background music that informs the player of upcoming dangers. However, the fact that extradiegetic sound has the power to influence diegetic action in computer games makes it impossible to directly apply film theory’s division between such spaces.38

As Karen Collins notes, “…the degree of dynamic activity in a game is sometimes fluid, posing further difficulty in the classification of the sounds.”39 William Gibbons has argued that this diegetic ambiguity is a convention borne of the technological constraints of early game audio, a holdover from the era when musical tones and sound effects were generated from the same sources in the game’s PSG chip.40 Video games rely on non-diegetic, extra- diegetic, and trans-diegetic sounds in particular because of the interactivity of the medium.

Interactivity and game sound will be discussed in greater detail in Chapter 3.

This construct of diegetic vs. non-diegetic or trans-diegetic sound can clarify how sounds and images intertwine, support one another, or produce tension and conflict in juxtaposition. But this is not to suggest that games are alone in exploring the divisions and limits of these constructed boundaries: film music scholars have drawn increased scrutiny to the fluidity of the audience’s perception of diegesis in recent years.41 This dichotomy is not

38 Jørgensen, “On Transdiegetic Sounds,” 106. 39 Collins, Game Sound, 125. 40 William Gibbons, “The Sounds in the Machine: Hirokazu Tanaka’s Cybernetic Soundscape for Metroid,” in The Palgrave Handbook of Sound Design and Music in Screen Media: Integrated Soundtracks, ed. Liz Greene and Danijela Kulezic-Wilson (London: Palgrave Macmillan Ltd., 2016), 348. 41 See for example, Robynn Stilwell, “The Fantastical Gap between Diegetic and Nondiegetic,” in Beyond the Soundtrack: Representing Music in Cinema, ed. Daniel Goldmark and Lawrence Kramer (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2007); Ben Winters, "The Non-Diegetic Fallacy: Film, Music, and Narrative Space,” Music & Letters 91, no. 2 (2010), 224-244; Martine Huvenne, "Intertwining Music and Sound in Film,” in The Palgrave Handbook of Sound Design and Music in Screen Media: Integrated Soundtracks, ed. Liz Greene and Danijela Kulezic-

76 absolute; there are ambiguous cases and the boundaries can be rather fluid. Occasionally, sound begins in the diegesis but then becomes larger, wafting out into a seemingly timeless non-diegetic space. Alternately, the game may lead players to believe that a sound source is non-diegetic underscoring, only to have expectations thwarted when the camera pans to a nearby radio. Occasionally, the non-diegetic sound drops out entirely, leaving the audience to wonder why they have lost access to the sound of the world onscreen.

As Collins has shown, many elements of the game soundscape do not function as music in the diegesis, instead conveying non-musical information such as avatar motion, status, and symbolic representations of opportunities, achievements, and mistakes. It is easy enough to speak to the elements of game sound which are considered musical in a traditional sense, but one must also explore structural silences, sound effects, Foley, these elements of the soundscape that are not fully “musical” in their deployment. For organizational purposes, I present my taxonomy as a spectrum, a series of related elements generated by the same phenomenon (light in the case of a rainbow, sound waves in the case of the of game music and effects).42

Wilson (London: Palgrave Macmillan Ltd., 2016); Jeff Smith, “Bridging the Gap: Reconsidering the Border between Diegetic and Nondiegetic Music,” Music and the Moving Image 2, no. 1 (2009), 1-25; David Neumeyer, “Diegetic/Nondiegetic: A Theoretical Model,” Music and the Moving Image, 2, no. 1 (2009), 26-39; Liz Greene, “From Noise: Blurring the Boundaries of the Soundtrack,” in The Palgrave Handbook of Sound Design and Music in Screen Media: Integrated Soundtracks, ed. Liz Greene and Danijela Kulezic-Wilson (London: Palgrave Macmillan Ltd., 2016). 42 Walter Murch, "Dense Clarity--Clear Density,” The Transom Review, 5, no. 1 (2005), 10; In the final stage of writing, I stumbled upon an essay by Walter Murch in which he describes his personal taxonomy of film sound, and he uses a spectrum as well. Red is music (what he calls directly experienced or embodied sound); orange is “musical” sound effects (atmospheric sounds, room tones); yellow is sound effects that can be both encoded or embodied; blue and green are “linguistic” effects such as footsteps and door knocks; and violet is speech (a vehicle to carry meaning governed by grammar rules, which he calls encoded sound).

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Infrared: Silence

Silence is an art of context. Though not commonly considered a positive, grammatically-functional aspect of music, silence can signify when it is deployed in a soundtrack: contrasting with moments of sound or punctuating abrupt cut offs, bringing both the sound and its absence to a moment of powerful salience. Silence is easy for us to overlook, whether we listen as humans or as scholars of sound. Silence is the antithesis of life for beings in motion, possessing bodies whose heartbeats create a subtle metronome behind all that we perceive.43

Silence can represent safety or calamity. Ludomusicologists tend to seek meaning in the intentional placement of sound as it occurs in games; the swish of Link’s sword from players’ button presses in The Legend of Zelda (Nintendo, 1986), or the contours of Terra

Branford’s leitmotif in Final Fantasy VI (Square, 1994). And yet, the prevalence of the word soundscape in the literature is rather telling; proclivities for musical sounds can so easily obscure the hidden discourses of silence.44 This section will examine the impact of four distinct kinds of silence on video game soundscapes: non-diegetic silence, diegetic musical silence, psychological silence, and what I will simply call “the unheard.” Silence can toy with a player’s emotions, make her uncomfortable, fearful, tense, peaceful, focused, frustrated, or excluded.

43 Murch, “Dense Clarity,” 4; “In radio, accordingly, a gap longer than the distance between a few heartbeats is taboo.” 44 Silence signifies in relation to the sound—it is not a pure construct because it requires definition against its Other to gain salience.

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True silence is impossible to achieve in any medium; instead, it is about the perceived absence of sounds relative to what has come before or after it.45 Non-diegetic silence, to borrow Claudia Gorman’s term, is a truly silent state, where all music, spoken dialogue, and atmospheric Foley disappear from the soundscape for the audience.46 This implies that the film or game has somehow cut off the player or viewer from the sound, not necessarily that the sound ceases to exist. In The Matrix (Wachowski Brothers, 1999), silence is used consciously in the musical cues as an audiovisual accent, engaging “musically with the film’s rhythmic kinetic and affective elements, which enhances the dramatic and expressive potential of musically conceived scenes.”47 Non-diegetic silence is profoundly disturbing; lack of ambient sound tends to signify to the viewer/auditor that the soundscape is either a depiction of death or non-existence; the environment appears inanimate. Consequently, this form is rare in games beyond transitional moments between screens, perhaps because it is so jarring to the player. In real life, one never encounters such stark silence, and so it feels wrong: the player is likely to infer that the TV speaker is blown out or that the game is glitching.48 Non-diegetic silence carries a dangerous potential to take a player out of the

45 Murch, “Dense Clarity,” 31; “You have to invoke the possibility of the sound…you have to imagine the hundred musicians on stage in order for their silence to mean anything. You have to work with the psychic pressure exerted by the instruments or sounds that are not playing.” See also Greene, “From Noise,” 27; “In a recent (2015) study, scientists in Hong Kong outlined that they are close to achieving silence but to date this has not yet been realized.” 46 Claudia Gorbman, Unheard Melodies: Narrative Film Music (Bloomington & Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1987), 18. 47 Danijela Kulezic-Wilson, “The Music of Film Silence,” Music and the Moving Image 2, no. 3 (2009), 4; Kulezic- Wilson on the audiovisual accent: “Accents are by definition focal points of a rhythmic microstructure, and the Wachowskis apply them throughout The Matrix as the main weapon for executing musically conceived action scenes.” 48 A glitch is a sudden malfunction of hardware or software, usually temporary. Often, glitches are frustrating for players, as they can lead to a forced reset of the console resulting in lost progress. However, glitches can have lasting consequences on a game, not all of which are negative. As children my older brother and I experienced a bizarre glitch in Final Fantasy VI (Square, 1994) which gave us ridiculous quantities of nearly

79 game, wrecking the sense of incorporation that the game works so hard to evoke. It is so incongruous with the convention of having incessant wall-to-wall sound in games that it often appears to be a result of malfunctioning hardware rather than an intentional affective device.49 However, if sound designers were to use it for extended periods, this form of silence holds a great deal of semantic power precisely because it is so uncommon: it can remind players of inanimate states, of death, isolation, and catastrophe. It can be used as an instantly-recognizable cue that something is terribly wrong. The symbolic device is quite powerful, the equivalent of a grand pause, taking on a powerful affective dimension that sound alone cannot capture. As Walter Murch writes,

The ultimate metaphoric sound is silence. If you can get the film to a place with no sound where there should be sound, the audience will crowd that silence with sounds and feelings of their own making, and they will, individually, answer the question of, ‘Why is it quiet?’ If the slope to silence is at the right angle, you will get the audience to a strange and wonderful place where the film becomes their own creation in a way that is deeper than any other.50

The film or game composer who adopts silence in tandem with sound opens up an entire realm of expressive potential with their play of opposites.

One place where we might reasonably expect to hear non-diegetic silence is in representing outer space: since sound waves must travel through matter, sound cannot travel

every item in the game—for example, 99 of the game’s most powerful (and usually unique) sword. Speedrunners (who aim to complete games as quickly as possible and verify these records with specialized game-capture and timing technology) often memorize and deliberately exploit programming glitches in order to improve their time by fractions of a second. 49 Rob Bridgett, “Dynamic Range: Subtlety and Silence in Video Game Sound,” in From Pac-Man to Pop Music: Interactive Audio in Games and New Media, ed. Karen Collins (Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing, 2008), 127; Bridgett suggests that not only is there a lack of silence in video games, but they have also tended to be dense, over-compressed, cluttered with different kinds of sounds, and lacking in overall dynamic range: “…the demands that every sound in the game needs to be audible to the player at particular moments during game- play; dialogue, music and sound effects all compete with one another on a seemingly equal footing.” 50 Murch, “Dense Clarity,” 32.

80 in the vacuum. Yet, as Miguel Mera writes, “The lack of sound, though scientifically accurate, stands in opposition both to the multimodal nature of human existence and the multimodal nature of the cinema as we know them…We are so attuned to the synchrony of sound and image in our world that in this filmic context a lack can only be read as a lack.”51

The fact that creators ignore physical reality in favor of underscoring or other abstract representations of silence (or “re-inflating” the vacuum to produce sound, as Mera describes it) demonstrates the intensity of human discomfort with the construct: “The vacuum, therefore, presents a fruitful example of the conflict between scientific rationality and immersive impact, a scale that slides between knowing and feeling...The cinematic space vacuum frequently presents a clash between what audiences know about reality and what they must feel in order to believe the representation as reality”52

What is particularly common is what Gorbman calls diegetic musical silence, in which the dialogue or music fall away and ambient or environmental noises become more prevalent; perhaps the hollow whistling of a cold winter wind, or the weighty echo of a character’s footsteps in an empty hall: “In this sort of scene, which conventionally demands background music, diegetic sound with no music can function effectively to make the diegetic space more immediate, more palpable, in the absence of that Muzak-like overlay so often thrust on the spectator’s consciousness (It also emphasizes that the characters are not speaking, where there is no music to mitigate this verbal silence).”53 One example occurs at the end of Hitchcock’s The Birds (1963): in place of non-diegetic silence, the director asked

51 Mera, “Spatial Presence and the Space Vacuum,” 97. 52 Mera, “Spatial Presence and the Space Vacuum,” 91-95. 53 Gorbman, Unheard Melodies, 14.

81 for an almost imperceptibly low, electronic, monotonous hum, seeking a sound that would be artificial and unsettling, but subtle enough in the film track to almost escape notice.54

One striking example in games comes from Super Mario Bros. 2 (Nintendo, 1988); after defeating the miniboss at the end of each world, the avatar is frozen on the screen

(whether on the ground or in midair) and the player hears a swift three-measure victory theme (see Example 2.3).55 The musical cue ends abruptly, leaving behind a hollow silence that makes the space feel uncomfortably empty (though admittedly, hardly menacing since the player has already neutralized the threat). At most, it feels like dead space, causing just enough discomfort to urge the player to continue on through the illuminated door to the next level.

Example 2.3. Koji Kondo, Super Mario Bros. 2 (Nintendo, 1988), “World Clear.”

54 Kulezic-Wilson, “The Music of Film Silence,” 4. 55 A miniboss is a minor or incidental antagonist that is usually distinct from other monsters or enemies in a particular level or area, that the player faces at the end of a particular portion of gameplay (e.g., a level, a world made up of several levels, a particular narrative arc of gameplay). Track title is my own; there is no officially- licensed soundtrack of Super Mario Bros. 2; there was a soundtrack CD bundled with the Super Mario All-Stars Limited Edition in 2010 that served as a retrospective tribute in honor of the 25th anniversary of the original game, but it only featured one track from Super Mario Bros. 2, the Overworld theme. The short victory fanfare uses only three of the five channels of the PSG sound chip.

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The only sounds that the player can trigger after this celebratory theme are those of

Mario, Luigi, Princess Peach, or Toad’s jumps, the echoes of which seem more prominent in the empty space.56 This sudden silence is puzzling: why freeze the avatar in midair? Why not just cut to the next level as the theme ends? In other words, why make the player walk those few lonely steps to the door? Because of this, the scene feels incomplete or cut off prematurely, but perhaps this disjointed effect is intentional: the final cut-scene of the game is revealed to be Mario’s dream, and one could argue that dreams are full of irrational silences. Regardless of whether this cognitive dissonance is universal for all players, the placement of this silence allows the player to explore the seeming weight and heft of the avatar’s jumps, unencumbered by music. Diegetic musical silences can create ambiance and give a sense of depth and space by helping the player to focus on “natural” sounds left in the diegesis. For example, the sound of tree leaves swaying in the breeze would add realism to a forest scene, even if the graphics were somewhat sub-par. But programmers and sound designers can also use diegetic musical silences to unsettle, to make the player acutely aware that something is wrong.

Super Metroid (Nintendo, 1994) presents some of the most striking examples of diegetic musical silence in the entire 16-bit repertory. A sci-fi action/adventure game released for the SNES, Super Metroid follows the mission of Samus Aran, a female bounty hunter taking on an entire planet of hostile aliens by herself. The entire score by Kenji

Yamamoto and Minako Hamano could be said to create a singular effect of unsettling the

56 In Super Mario Bros. 2, the player can choose one of these four characters as their avatar, and the four have different abilities; for example, Luigi has a much longer jump than the others, and Princess Peach has the ability to float for a short time.

83 player, alienating them from their surroundings, and manipulating their levels of tension and anxiety. The brilliance of this soundtrack lies in how it engages silences to create suspense, and how diegetic elements such as heavy rain, the hum of technology, or warning sirens and alarms sustain these tense moods and occasionally incite panic in the player.

At the end of the previous game in the series (Metroid II: Return of Samus; Nintendo,

1991), Samus delivers a Metroid larva to scientists at the Ceres research station for study.

Metroids begin life as a transparent, gelatinous creature with fangs (not unlike a jellyfish without its tentacles), and feed on the life energy of other organisms. Super Metroid picks up where the previous game left off; the title screen shows the Metroid larva in captivity. Super

Metroid incorporates a double introduction, a ludomusical convention that spans several genres and serves to set up the narrative space of the game; there is one musical track for the title screen, and a second for an opening cut-scene or cinematic.57 The title track, “Opening:

Destroyed Academy Research Station,” is meant to create an uneasy sensation in the player

(see Example 2.4).58 There is a slow, repetitive note played over and over again on a slightly out-of-phase piano, with an eerie violin melody lending an icy timbre with its overlapping dissonance and rapid decay of sound. Behind the foreground of the creepy string theme, an intermittent electronic blip provides pointellistic commentary. The sparse texture serves to

57 Double introduction is not a term taken from the scholarly literature; it is simply my own descriptive term for a convention that I have observed in many games. 58 This track is titled “Science Academy Research Station” on the Super Metroid Symphony Project album by The Synthetic Orchestra. Uploads of the original soundtrack to YouTube label the track as either "Title Theme,” or the “Opening: Destroyed Academy Research Station.” The upload on Zophar’s Domain (ripped by Datschge, YK, and nensondubois, and tagged by Datschge, Carnby, and YK) calls it “Opening ~ Destruction of the Space Colony.” https://www.zophar.net/music/nintendo-snes-spc/super-metroid; I will defer to the Zophar’s Domain titles, because the Symphony Project Album presents arrangements rather than the original music.

84 underscore the player’s solitary quest. The sound of Samus’s breathing apparatus in her space suit (which has a distinctly Darth Vader-like sound) over a low drone in the bass is the most salient feature in the B section, seeming to represent her isolation and the silent vacuum of space.

Example 2.4. Kenji Yamamoto and Minako Hamano, Super Metroid (Nintendo, 1994), “Opening: Destroyed Academy Research Station,” mm. 1-8.

In the following introductory cut-scene, the plotlines of the previous games are briefly recapped to “Theme of Super Metroid.” Super Metroid represents an installment in a franchise, and so the second half of the doubled introduction serves to connect this game with what came before and also inform the player of what they have missed if this game represents their introduction to the series. An active but muted bass line and otherworldly soprano chorus add to the tension of the opening scene, echoing the violin line from the first track and setting the player up for the mood of the entire game (see Example 2.5). At the end of the cut scene, silence is used as a grand pause, a structural punctuation mark that transitions the player from the history lesson to the present game action.

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Example 2.5. Kenji Yamamoto and Minako Hamano, Super Metroid (Nintendo, 1994), “Theme of Super Metroid,” mm. 1-6.

After intercepting a distress call, Samus arrives at the Ceres space colony to find the station in disarray; poorly lit and seemingly deserted, with a faint technological hum. After moving through the environment, Samus discovers all of the scientists dead and the

Metroid’s glass chamber broken, their experiments ransacked. The soundscape consists of a disturbing diegetic musical silence, consisting entirely of the environmental sounds (such as the machinery) and any sound effects triggered by the player moving Samus through the research station (running, jumping, landing, firing her weapons).

In the next room, the player’s simmering tension boils over to full panic: the soundtrack inserts a hair-raising moment of non-diegetic silence for a moment as Samus examines the Metroid hatchling, a pause that is even more unsettling than the humming machinery that represents the aftermath of the slaughter. This moment triggers an encounter

86 with Ridley, the first miniboss battle of the game. Ridley is a large alien many times the size of Samus, attacking with a swipe of his claws and fireballs that he spews from his mouth.

Samus is scripted to lose this battle, allowing Ridley to escape with the Metroid. However, he triggers the station’s self-destruct sequence on his way, leaving Samus only a minute to escape before the station blows up. The cue “Big Boss Confrontation” has an asymmetrical meter which could be transcribed as 10/8 (divided 3-3-2-2); the track is rhythmically active, meant to manipulate the player’s stress levels and heart rate as they rush to escape the space station (see a reduction of the track in Example 2.6).59 After the vaguely unsettling effect of the opening tracks, this track seems meant to incite her to panic, adding a musical adrenaline rush that either raises her excitement and enjoyment of the game, or flusters her and leads to mistakes, increasing the level of challenge in the game task.

Example 2.6. Kenji Yamamoto and Minako Hamano, Super Metroid (Nintendo, 1994), “Big Boss Confrontation,” reduction, mm. 1-2.

59 The eight SPC channels of the SNES sound chip have been collapsed for the sake of illustration; however, it should be noted that there are several distinct timbres present in SPC 3, 4, 6, 7, and 8 that distinguish them from one another, even in the event of doubling; for example, SPC 3 and SPC 8 both carry the phrase C-C-D- flat-B-flat line, but SPC 3 uses a horn effect and SPC 8 sounds like electric bass. SPC 1 and SPC 2 have the same musical material in the first two measures, but the channels pan across each other to create an unsettling sense of motion that pulls against the harmonic fixation on C. The title of the cue is taken from fan labeling of the SPC files from the website Zophar’s Domain (by users Datschge, YK, and nensondubois). The site houses fan-made “rips” of the musical source code of the game in the original file format. http://www.zophar.net/music/nintendo-snes-spc/super-metroid

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If the player succeeds, Samus escapes in her spaceship, determined to get the

Metroid back from the evil aliens. She follows Ridley’s ship to the Planet Zebes, where she is greeted by a dense rainstorm; the diegetic sounds of the rain and distant thunder intermingle with a faint, atmospheric melody comprising soft, low voices and a low, slow-moving cello bass line (see Example 2.7). After the tension and rhythmic drive of the previous cue, this track is surprisingly quiet and amorphous, with an ominous hue that serves only to create suspense and place the player’s anxiety on an agonizing slow burn as Samus searches for any sign of life. The surface of the planet is deserted, in a manner recalling the uncomfortable silence of the Ceres space station.

Example 2.7. Kenji Yamamoto and Minako Hamano, Super Metroid (Nintendo, 1994), “Planet Zebes—Arrival on Crateria,” mm. 1-16.

Thus, two prominent tracks in the opening sequence of the game build atmosphere and anxiety with diegetic musical silences; the player knows there must be aliens lurking, and the initial absence is more intimidating than if Samus had to merely fight her way through a vast horde. However, the musical accompaniment to these sequences demonstrate surprising

88 restraint—Yamamoto and Hamano could easily have built a dense, rhythmically-active soundscape, taking full advantage of each of the eight available sound channels. Yet,

Examples 2.4, 2.5, and 2.7 are chillingly sparse—channels enter intermittently, double other channels to create depth of timbre, decay quickly when held, or present short, staccato notes highlighting the empty space between the articulations. On the NES, composers tended to favor textural density and rhythmic complexity over sustain and silence (see Example 2.8), and the increased capacity of the SNES sound chip allowed for lush symphonic scoring (see

Example 2.9).60

Example 2.8. Yoshio Hirai, StarTropics (Nintendo, 1990), “Cave,” mm. 7-9.

60 For the StarTropics track, the title is from Zophar’s Domain. Yoko Shimomura, “Beware the Forest’s Mushrooms,” track 128 of disc 1 on Super Mario RPG Original Sound Version, March 8th, 1996, CD; These examples are chosen merely as illustrative generic examples among hundreds. For example, the music from the first six Mega Man games (Capcom, 1987; 1988; 1990; 1991; 1992; 1993) would have served equally well to represent the eventful soundscapes of the NES era. Additionally, the scores for games such as Chrono Trigger (Square, 1995) or Breath of Fire (Square Soft, 1994) also present similarly-sweeping orchestral scoring. However, the presence of more channels does not automatically correspond to the adoption of cinematic or orchestral scoring; the expansion merely provides for the possibility of this approach. Genres such as the fantasy role- playing game (RPG) tended to favor this style, whereas fighting games or racing games used the additional channels for scores influenced by progressive rock or other genres of popular music.

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Example 2.9. Yoko Shimomura, Super Mario RPG (Nintendo, 1996), “Beware the Forest Mushrooms,” mm. 4-8.

The entire opening sequence for Super Metroid sets up a monochromatic affect: a narrow range of anxious emotions ranging from unsettling skepticism to desperation and fear.

Accompanying it is a powerful score that plays with silence to powerfully manipulate the player’s emotional experience of the game narrative.

There is one further place to mention where sound designers in film and video games often employ the startling contrast of cacophony with this form of silence: the representation of trauma and (momentary or permanent) hearing loss, particularly in scenes depicting war. The nature of the remaining sound can vary, but it often includes high- pitched ringing reminiscent of tinnitus or heavily muffled sounds of battle. The trauma is thus tied to a particular character’s subjective experience; the audience is drawn into a particular point-of-audition (POA), and the vulnerability of this moment helps them to empathize with the character or identify with the emotions related to extreme violence and

90 physical threats to the body.61 As Tony Grajeda writes, “By considering those moments when subjectivity through sound is experienced as a privileged position, one geared not towards clarity and intelligibility but rather confusion and pain—in short, as a form of rupture—I want to argue that listening to violence on screen may be heard most clearly, ironically enough, precisely at the moment when hearing itself is endangered—both within the frame for characters suffering from their loss of hearing and beyond to an audience asked to experience that very same (temporary) loss.” 62 These silencing effects themselves mediate a player or auditor’s sense of subjectivity, and the moments of rupture are some of the most important and salient in the play experience if the sound designer chooses to utilize them.63 Whatever the intended effect, silence is one of the most important arbiters of meaning in the video game soundscape. Thus, it would be folly to discount the role of silence in the game soundtrack, and so it sits at the base of the spectrum of sound:

“unheard” and yet present and powerful.

Red: Psychological Silence and the Unheard

Diegetic musical silences can have a powerful impact, but surely these are not the only types of suggested silence a player might encounter. What I will refer to as psychological silence is a bit more abstract: a symbolic silence created by ambient music and habituation to the musical stimuli.64 Stasis lulls the player into contemplative inwardness;

61 Tony Grajeda, "Listening to Violence: Point-of-Audition Sound, Aural Interpellation, and the Rupture of Hearing,” in The Palgrave Handbook of Sound Design and Music in Screen Media: Integrated Soundtracks, ed. Liz Greene and Danijela Kulezic-Wilson (London: Palgrave Macmillan Ltd., 2016). 62 Grajeda, “Listening to Violence,” 171. 63 Grajeda, “Listening to Violence,” 171. 64 David Huron, “A Psychological Approach to Musical Form: The Habituation-Fluency Theory of Repetition,” Current Musicology 96 (2013), 7-35; As Huron defines it on page 9, “Formally, habituation is defined as a decrease in responsiveness resulting from the repeated presentation of an eliciting stimulus…Habituation

91 minimalist textures create discursive spaces for the player to insert herself into emotionally- complex and highly-psychological narratives. Stasis is a kind of temporal silence; its comforting regularity quickly falling below conscious awareness. The human brain appreciates repetition: it allows the brain the satisfaction of recognition, of assessing the environment and correctly parsing the auditory stream. However, as much as the brain loves stimuli that facilitate perceptual and processing fluency, players eventually habituate to—or cease to notice—overly repetitive sounds in their auditory environment.65 This is likely an adaptive mechanism, and one that is especially useful in gameplay: the instinct to detect subtle changes in one’s surroundings, to filter out sounds that are no longer perceived as a potential threat and continue listening for anything unfamiliar in the soundscape. As David

Huron writes, “On the one hand, repetition induces habituation in which familiar stimuli lead to a reduction in responsiveness. On the other hand, processing fluency induces positive feelings toward familiar stimuli….by attending to the details of both processes, it is possible to organize patterns of repetition so as to maximize the processing fluency while circumventing the problems due to habituation.”66

Players will habituate more quickly to frequent, persistent, predictably regular, soft, or slow textures in music, those that lull the player and lower their phasic arousal levels, slow the heartbeat, relax the muscles, and focus the mind on the various gameplay tasks. There are two ways for the player to regain awareness of the music and sound after habituating to

should not be confused with sensory fatigue or sensory adaptation. It is not that certain neurons in the cochlea, for example, reduce their rate of firing because of repeated stimulation. Habituation is an attentional process; it is the brain simply ignoring particular sensory inputs.” 65 Huron, “Habituation-Fluency Theory,” 16; fluency relates to familiarity and ease with which the listener can apprehend the stimulus. 66 Huron, “Habituation-Fluency Theory,” 8.

92 it. The first is to come back to a game after a period of time away from it; this re- sensitization to sound stimulus is called spontaneous recovery.67 Increasing familiarity with the sound stimulus due to spending a lot of time playing the game can shorten the cycle of habituation and spontaneous recovery so that players can re-habituate to the stimulus more quickly; a phenomenon known as the potentiation of habituation.68 The second way of recovering sensitivity is to experience a novel sound stimulus (such as a sudden sound effect indicating a change in the gameplay state); whether or not this startles the player, it is likely to bring the entire soundscape back into salience while the player attends to the source and meaning of the sound. This is known as dishabituation, and the introduction of the novel sound “will tend to cause the listener to re-orient to the stimulus stream.”69

In searching for games whose sound design relies on habituation and stasis—this kind of temporal silencing of the soundscape—I often found this texture in indie games with experimental narratives exploring complex emotional and psychological terrain, such as Every

Day the Same Dream (Molleindustria and Paolo Pedercini, 2009) and The Company of Myself (Eli

Piilonen, 2009). In these cases, the music seemed to aid the player in identifying with the narrative, in becoming vulnerable and open to contemplating the significance and meaning of the words and events. The effect of these implied silences of stasis is far more profound when playing the game firsthand, and difficult to merely describe, but a few illustrative examples will provide proof of this conventional approach to soundscape composition.

67 Huron, “Habituation-Fluency Theory,” 10; Donald J. Harris, “Habituatory Response Decrement in the Intact Organism,” Psychological Bulletin 40, no. 6 (1943), 385-422. 68 Huron, “Habituation-Fluency Theory,” 10. 69 Huron, “Habituation-Fluency Theory,” 10. See also Ivan P. Pavlov, Conditioned Reflexes: An Investigation of the Physiological Activity of the Cerebral Cortex, trans. Gleb. V. Anrep (London: Oxford University Press, 1927).

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I Can Hold My Breath Forever (Jake Elliott, 2011) is a short browser-based platformer in which the player must navigate underwater caverns searching for letters from a dear friend.70 The player has to move quickly; they only have ten seconds’ worth of air to swim from air pocket to air pocket. When the player passes out or, presumably drowns, they return to the last letter they reached, which urges the player to complete the game instead of giving up in frustration.71 This simple game mechanic and its lulling, minimalist musical accompaniment focuses the player’s attention on the words of the letters, which move from chipper and endearing to intimate and moving as the character progresses.

The music for I Can Hold My Breath Forever has a fairly quick tempo (of about 120 beats per minute), but the overall track has a soft timbre; the rhythmic attacks are articulate but smooth (more rounded than sharp or jarring). This sense of softness, coupled with the speed and perpetual motion, subtly motivate and focus the player. The relatively high speed helps to reinforce the gameplay mechanism of the countdown clock; the player cannot linger in the water, and the music transmits this urgency and seems to be designed to keep the

70 Players can access the game at the following URL: https://www.kongregate.com/games/racter/i-can-hold- my-breath-forever 71 David Melhàrt, “Towards a Comprehensive Model of Mediating Frustration in Videogames,” Game Studies: The International Journal of Computer Game Research 18, no. 1 (2018); Melhàrt’s model draws of Self-Determination Theory and the Hierarchical Model of Motivation, as well as Flow theory as an attentional framework. Melhàrt describes how segmentation of the game can have an important effect on frustration—if the player makes incremental progress, then a difficult moment is less likely to lead to frustration or abandonment. However, a series of frustrating moments will cast the entire game as frustrating. Furthermore, players may make choices to persevere for other reasons: “The analysis found that the interviewees played for challenge (which would lead to flow) or relaxation…players start intrinsically motivated, both contextually and situationally. They decide to go into frustrating situations only after their initial intrinsic motivation is situationally reinforced.” For more on segmentation and level design, see José Zagal, Clara Fernández-Vara, and Michael Mateas, “Rounds, Levels and Waves: The Early Evolution of Gameplay Segmentation.” Games and Culture, 2.3 (April 2008), 175-198; Martin Picard, “Levels,” in The Routledge Companion to Video Game Studies, ed. Mark J.P. Wolf and Bernard Perron (New York and London: Routledge Taylor & Francis Group, 2014). For more on challenge and frustration, see Robert Furze, “Challenge,” in The Routledge Companion to Video Game Studies, ed. Mark J.P. Wolf and Bernard Perron (New York and London: Routledge Taylor & Francis Group, 2014).

94 player from lingering too long in any given safe space, echoing Whalen. Kristine Jørgensen echoes this notion of player motivation when she writes “As any game audio designer or composer can tell, computer game audio is not merely ornamental and mood-enhancing. It also works…as support for gameplay in a collaborative and competitive context while remaining true to the perceived reality of the game world.”72 The softness and the steadiness of the rhythm beckon players to explore the inner world of the letters themselves. The letters are small rewards for finding the way, giving pieces of the story even if their meaning is somewhat vague. Every player will likely impose a personal interpretation on the letters, reflecting on how their own relationships change over the course of time. However, after several minutes of play, the player is likely to forget the soundtrack is even there in the progression from cavern to cavern. This point represents habituation to the musical stimuli, but that does not mean that the sound ceases to be effective as a motivational amplifier suggesting the appropriate exploratory attitude and reinforcing the sense of time within the game.73 Indeed, it seems to be this very mechanism—the constant, unchanging rhythm and sense of stasis implied by the musical texture, that gives the player a certain kind of permission to internalize and personalize the narrative.

Loved (Alexander Ocias, 2010) is described not as a game, but as a short story, hinting at the creator’s interest in the central narrative.74 A simple platformer in stark black and white, the game features a small creature and a disembodied voice that floats over the

72 Kristine Jørgensen, “Audio and Gameplay: An Analysis of PvP Battlegrounds in World of Warcraft,” Game Studies: The International Journal of Computer Game Research 8, no. 2 (2008). 73 For more on Tomkins’s affect theory, see Silvan S. Tomkins, Affect Imagery, Consciousness, Volumes 1-4 (New York: Springer, 1962; 1963; 1991; 1992). 74 Players can access the game at the following URL: https://ocias.com/loved.php

95 landscape in text, commanding the creature to obey its commands. The commands seem benign at first, but they quickly hint at an underlying cruelty as the voice asks the creature to injure itself, take riskier paths, and so forth. The narrative thus hinges on the choice to either remain faithful or to disobey these orders. The soundscape consists of an ambient choral sample, revolving around an incessant drone on C4, punctuated with distressing sound effects—a sharp, resonant chime representing checkpoints, and a piercing, shattering noise when the player falls onto barbs. The interpretations are likely to be highly personal, but I read it as a startling rumination on abusive relationships.75 No matter whether the player obeys the commands or chooses the defiant path, the voice remains verbally abusive, calling the player ugly and unlovable. As these examples demonstrate, silence can move beyond death and fear, to a place of inwardness and complexity. It can suggest ambiguity, peace, unrest, and conflicting emotional states.

The unheard represents a broad range of potential silences in games. The first type of unheard sound needs little explanation. Some of these silences represent choices by the player not to hear what the game sound has to say: a massively-multiplayer online role- playing (MMORPG) fan who mutes the sound due to listening fatigue, the silenced smartphone of the candy-crushing casual gamer on a subway commute. Mobile game developers seem to recognize this tendency; consequently, many mobile games rely on the kinds of ambient motivational textures discussed above. However, Jørgensen’s work echoes my assertion from the beginning of the chapter, that removing sound is detrimental to player

75 Several comments on this YouTube playthrough of the game suggest that others share my interpretation; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4mS6FQs_F4U

96 performance. Intentionally silencing the game has implications for communication and incorporation in the game world:

Although both responses and alerts often can be detected visually as movements, text or as highlighted interface elements, these may be difficult to grasp when the eyes are busy with other tasks. On the other hand, the mood, sense of presence and the feeling of a lifelike world disappeared, and the games revealed themselves as nothing but animated graphics on a screen. In this sense, the games suffered both as user-oriented game systems and as virtual worlds when sound was not present, which means that both the progression through the game and the sense of presence in the game environment were affected.76

In the case the MMORPG fan who turns off the sound, familiarity—and the resultant facility or fluidity with the game system engendered by dozens or hundreds of hours of play—may counteract some of the detrimental effects of silencing the soundscape, but the player will still experience a loss of a crucial point of contact with the game world.

Some sounds are relegated to a silence of the circuits, never heard because the player does not (or cannot) trigger them in the course of play. A player who loves to explore a vast world map in an RPG may come across music and sounds that more goal-oriented players miss. For example, it is entirely possible in Final Fantasy VI (1994) to beat the game without ever uncovering the characters Gogo and Umaro, leaving their quirky leitmotifs unheard.

Some examples of inaccessible tracks include “Singing Mountain” and “Battle 2” from

Chrono Trigger (Square, 1995; see Example 2.10).77 These tracks were abandoned for the final version of the game but remained in the source code.78 Many of these kinds of tracks were later discovered by dedicated fans in the emulation community as they performed digital

76 Jørgensen, “Left in the Dark” 175. 77 Track titles taken from Zophar’s Domain. 78 Mystical Ninja (Konami, 1992) also removed a track from the 1991 Japanese version before the U.S. release due to a censored cut-scene.

97 archaeology; uncovering abandoned sound files, developer cheat modes used during testing, hidden rooms, and other material that remained locked in the final game cartridge.79

Example 2.10. Yasunori Mitsuda, Chrono Trigger (Square, 1995), “Singing Mountain,” mm. 1- 6.

While some tracks remained entirely buried, laying latent in the code for future digital excavation, others were only partially hidden: many cues for scenes of set duration are cut off in mid-loop, without coming to the logical cadence point. Dozens of games contain unused sound effects and music, but a great many more games released in the cartridge era contain at least one track that is truncated or partially inaccessible in play. One example of

79 Emulation is when a computer system imitates or attempts another system. In the case of gaming, this usually refers to extracting or “ripping” source code from a cartridge or game disc, and then running specialized software that allows modern computers to execute that source code in order to play the game without the original consoles or hardware. Access to source code allows fans access to the raw materials of the game, leading to “hacked” and “remixed” versions of the original games, and even marriage proposals. YouTube user Phil Spiess proposed to his girlfriend in 2008 by creating a new level in Chrono Trigger, remixing music and graphics from the original: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7_HMLvLB7b0

98 this kind of truncation lies in Mega Man 3 (Capcom, 1990); a couple of the tracks are incomplete for the player, because the game cuts to something else before the entire loop completes.80 Examples of this include Dr. Wily’s map intro screen and the ending theme, the

Proto Man Whistle concert (see Example 2.11; the asterisk in m. 4 represents the point at which the game cuts the track).81 There is no way to hear the entire track when playing the original NES game, so the full track could only be heard by extracting the NSF sound files from the original source code. These truncated tracks could suggest space limitations in the final product; why else would the programmers choose to cut these tracks in such strange places, tracks that were clearly composed for a set duration for the scene? Wily’s castle theme is only eighteen seconds long (fourteen measures); at some point, designers may have decided the track felt too long for the player to wait on this screen, but the cut is abrupt and jarring because it occurs in the middle of a measure.

80 The convention is to use Arabic numerals to refer to Mega Man games released for the NES, and roman numerals to refer to the Game Boy handheld releases. 81 Harumi Fujita (credited in the game as “Mrs. Tarumi”) composed two tracks on the original soundtrack before taking maternity leave: “Gemini Man,” and the end credits or “Staff Roll.” Yasuaki Fujita (credited in the game as “Bunbun”) composed the remainder of the music for the game. Though the two composers share a last name, they are not related. http://www.vgmpf.com/Wiki/index.php?title=Mega_Man_III_(NES); track titles taken from the NSF rip on Zophar’s Domain.

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Example 2.11. Yasuaki Fujita, Mega Man 3 (Capcom, 1990), “Dr. Wily’s Map.”

In contemplating the unheard, there is one more important category to consider in the advent of modern gaming: that which is inaudible due to hearing impairment. In the 8- and 16-bit eras, games were largely accessible to the deaf population: due to the space limitations of cartridge-based games, samples of spoken dialogue were rare, and so the script appeared as text on the screen. Though the player might miss out on some of the aesthetic effects of the music or the feedback of a sound effect when the avatar takes a hit, the game

100 was still playable, and enjoyable. Modern games increasingly rely on cinematic cut-scenes and voice acting over text cues, and, in the first-person shooter, it is vital to the player to instantly localize a potential threat by identifying a sound’s source. Creating a proprioceptive sense of the avatar’s location relative to other players is essential to successful play, and this is accomplished largely through sound. Because of these shifts in game technology and the demand for more cinematic and fully immersive experiences, many (if not most) of the bestselling, most high-profile, big-budget “AAA titles” in modern gaming are utterly unplayable by the deaf community.82

Thus, this final kind of silence refers not only to the unheard sound of the game but also to the silence of the developers, who often fail to incorporate closed-captioning, iconographic representation of sound-effects, accessibility modifications, or simply interfaces compatible with existing assistive technologies that the user may already have installed on their computer. And this is to say nothing of accessibility modifications for users with visual or cognitive disabilities, or those with restricted mobility, though there are some interesting recent developments in the industry, such as Microsoft’s new fully-customizable adaptive controller.83 Accessibility has been a concern for over a decade in the scholarly community as well as in International Game Developer Association’s (IGDA’s) Game Accessibility

Special Interest Group, but the proposed solutions must be inexpensive and easy to implement on a tight schedule in order for the major developers to adopt these

82 AAA is an informal (but widespread) classification referring to the larger game publishers, or games with initial budgets in tens of millions; analogous to blockbuster film studios. 83 For more on the controller, see https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/p/xbox-adaptive- controller/8nsdbhz1n3d8

101 modifications.84 Karen Collins and Peter Taillon piloted a study in 2012 for “SoundSign,” a

“prototype symbolic representation of sound effects for multimedia using an icon and compass and indicating direction, sound cue and proximity.”85 The system sought not only to make the game functionally accessible, but enjoyable as well. However, as Collins told me at a conference in Youngstown, the concept did not take off: companies did not choose to pursue SoundSign, and games are all the poorer for it. All players benefit from the development of new accessibility modifications. After all, SMS text messaging represents a technology that is particularly suited to facilitate communication for the deaf community, and now the system is ubiquitous: a standard and desirable feature for the hearing impaired and the hearing population alike.

Unheard sounds represent unrealized potential in the game, and thus an incomplete

(and potentially unsatisfying) experience. Whereas non-diegetic silences can represent death and isolation, structural silences can create ambiance or manipulate tension, and psychological silences can engender inwardness and contemplation, the unheard represents an incomplete experience. The unheard can lead to maddening curiosity, frustration, futility, and to exclusion. Silence seems, at first blush, one-dimensional. A lack, an absence, a thing defined by its negation in sound. And yet, silence operates on many levels. Silence has an affective power, an emotional timbre all its own. It carries the potential to evoke some of the

84 IGDA has hosted two Game Accessibility conferences coinciding with the Game Developer’s Conference (GDC) in San Francisco, and has partnered with Microsoft to institute a college scholarship to offset tuition and encourage students with disabilities to enter the field as developers. IGDA faces the industry and has worked tirelessly to advocate for the implementation of accessibility functionality on consoles and adaptations within games. 85 Karen Collins and Peter J. Taillon, “Visualized Sound Effect Icons for Improved Multimedia Accessibility: A Pilot Study,” Entertainment Computing, 3, no. 1 (2012), 11.

102 deepest human emotions, to regulate players’ moods, to create barriers. Silence can be cold and dark, mysterious and calm, it can be warm and coursing with latent energy and tension.

It can make players feel as much as any exquisitely-executed note.

Orange: Sound Effects

Sound effects are usually short clips lasting one second or less. They serve a signaling function to the player and are typically triggered by direct operator actions on the console controller. Sound effects can be utilized for several purposes in the game context: confirming the spatiality of the playing field, aiding in avatar identification (and thus improving incorporation), serving as multi-modal sensory feedback, and modifying player behavior.86 An example of a sound effect serving as multimodal sensory feedback confirming the player’s action would be the sound of the ball bouncing off the paddle in

Pong (Atari, 1972). The head engineer for the project, Al Alcorn, did not originally conceive the game with sound; it was Atari founder Nolan Bushnell that requested Alcorn add sound effects of a roaring crowd when the player scored a point, and a booing crowd when the computer scored a point against the player. Alcorn allegedly had limited space and was unsure how to create the requested effects with the game’s digital circuits. So, instead of creating entirely new sounds, he amplified the signal from the sync generator, creating an effect in which a hit registers as a staccato tone (a B3); a point scored displaces that tone by an octave (a longer B2).87 The resultant tones became the iconic sounds of the ball

86 Axel Stockburger, “The Game Environment from an Auditive Perspective,” in Level Up: Proceedings from DiGRA (2003), 5. Available online at www.audiogames.net/pics/upload/gameenvironment.htm. 87 Steven L. Kent, The Ultimate History of Video Games: The Story Behind the Craze That Touched Our Lives and Changed the World (Roseville, California: Prima Publishing, 2001), 41; Steven L. Kent captures Alcorn’s retelling of the well-known story: “Nolan wanted the roar of a crowd of thousands—the approving roar of cheering people when you made a point. Ted Dabney told me to make a boo and a hiss when you lost a point, because

103 ricocheting off the paddle, a literal amplification of the game’s own circuitry to create sound effects that confirm the spatiality of the 2-D game screen. As Roger Moseley writes, “The very title of Atari’s tennis simulator Pong in 1972, however, signaled the supplanting of the audible relay clicks of Tennis for Two [an earlier game with a similar design] by onomatopoeic sine-wave bloops and bleeps. Hardware designed for video display was repurposed to create auditory feedback that represented the binary logic of hitting, bounding, and missing through distinctions of frequency.”88 With such simplistic graphics, the sound helps turn a simple white line into an object, a paddle that makes a distinctive sound when it comes into contact with the little white square representing the Ping-Pong ball.89

Sound effects often simultaneously craft a virtual sense of the space and provide multi-modal sensory feedback to confirm player action in this way. In Super Mario Bros.

(Nintendo, 1985), when the player presses the A button, Mario’s jump is accompanied by an upwards glissando figure (see Figure 2.1). The register of Mario’s jump also relates to the avatar’s size; Mario starts small, but when he consumes a power-up mushroom, he doubles in size and the jump sound is exactly an octave lower, creating a natural relationship between size and pitch that exists in the real world (in the animal kingdom, larger size typically

for every winner there’s a loser. I said, ‘Screw it, I don’t know how to make any one of those sounds. I don’t have enough parts anyhow.’ Since I had the wire wrapped on the scope, I poked around the sync generator to find an appropriate frequency or a tone. So those sounds were done in half a day. They were the sounds that were already in the machine.” 88 Roger Moseley, “Music Visual Culture, and Digital Games,” in The Routledge Companion to Music and Visual Culture, ed. Tim Shaphard and Anne Leonard (New York: Routledge, 2014), 379. 89 Moseley, “Music Visual Culture, and Digital Games,” 382; “Far from being archaic, the ‘primitivism’ of Pong was thoroughly modern insofar as it evoked iconic works by painters such as Piet Mondrian, Kasimir Malevich, Mark Rothko, and Barnett Newman, not to mention the technological innovations of video artists such as Nam June Paik and Steina and Woody Vasulka. Likewise, while the monophonic sonic profile of early digital games might evoke comparisons with the dawn of notated Western music, it was more closely entwined with the contemporaneous development of synthesizers and the MIDI protocol.”

104 correlates with lower pitch). This sound is a virtual representation of the action; obviously no such sound occurs in real life when one jumps.90 However, human activity is inherently multi-modal. Jumping involves feeling your muscles tense and relax, feeling as well as hearing the moment you land on the ground or pavement, and seeing a change in the first- person perspective in your field of vision. In the game world, such auditory confirmation is necessary because conveying the information only visually would be less immersive and unlike a real-world experience of that same activity. The jump noise confirms Mario as an avatar, just as the sound in Pong transforms the white line into a paddle with weight and consequence. The noise helps to create a believable representation of the player in the diegesis—an agent acting directly upon the game world through this pixelated, cartoonish, mustachioed figure.91 Sound effects are vital in constituting and conveying the body of the avatar and fostering the connection between the bodies of the player and the game.

90 Kondo, Koji, and Shigeru Miyamoto. “To Save Memory,” interview by Satoru Iwata. http://www.nintendo.co.uk/Iwata-Asks/Super-Mario-Bros-25th-Anniversary/Vol-5-Original-Super-Mario- Developers/5-To-Save-Memory/5-To-Save-Memory-212974.html; in this interview, Shigeru Miyamoto and Koji Kondo talked about the creation of what they described as the “♪pyoing” sound for Mario’s jump. Kondo remarked, “When I was first asked to make a jumping sound, I remember saying, ‘Jumping doesn’t make a sound!’ ” 91 Whalen, “Play Along;” “Mario's leap has a pleasant sound (i.e., it does not use minor or diminished intervals), not only because we are supposed to identify favourably with Mario, but also because a typical game player will likely hear the same sound repeated hundreds of times in a dedicated period of gameplay. The mickey mousing effect is also intended to emphasize the physicality of Mario and his kinesthetic involvement with his environment.”

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Figure 2.1. Mario’s two sizes, Super Mario Bros. (Nintendo, 1985)

Further, sound effects typically exist out of phase and outside of the diatonic key of the background musical track, so as to better serve their function as signals to the player.

Because the sound effects are meant to communicate information, they must be recognizable so as not to fade into the texture of the background track and be misconstrued as part of the musical texture. For example, the sound of Mario earning a coin consists of a leap of a perfect fourth, but it does not invoke a harmonic relationship so much as the motion of the coin jumping out of the box when Mario hits it. Further, the sound is triggered by the player hitting a coin block and is so quick as to sound out of phase with the tempo of the background track, no matter when it is triggered. Another example is from

Legend of Zelda (Nintendo, 1986). When the protagonist, Link, is down to a single heart, the sound of his depleted life force is represented by a repetitive, bleeping D6. This effect is not triggered directly by the action of pressing the button, but by Link suffering too much damage at the hands of his enemies. Thus, the D6 continues mercilessly, seemingly placed in front of the game music in the texture until Link is either killed or finds a spare heart to

106 restore his energy. The throbbing effect repeats at a tempo that is intentionally incongruous with the background track, so as not to be absorbed into that texture and ignored. Because the sound effect is signaling Link’s near-death state, the player is meant to act on this signal; either by treading more lightly to avoid a fatal blow, or by seeking out a source to replenish

Link’s health. Again, these signals tend to be multi-modal in the real world; since the player will not experience the sensation of being struck by in-game enemies, the sound serves as a representation of sustained, acute damage requiring immediate attention. The bleeping noise in Zelda is aurally analogous to a throbbing pain, and the register is grating to the player, who will likely seek hearts at the onset of this signal in order to make the noise cease.

Of course, while the sound can aid the player by inducing a focused concentration to improve game performance, it can also add difficulty: game levels in Super Mario Bros. are timed, and running out the clock kills the character instantly.92 At the 100-second mark, the game level music doubles in tempo. This quickening is likely to raise the player’s heart rate and cause a release of adrenaline and/or cortisol raising the stress level of the player.93

92 Bernard Perron, “Conventions,” in The Routledge Companion to Video Game Studies, ed. Mark J.P. Wolf and Bernard Perron (New York and London: Routledge Taylor & Francis Group, 2014), 78; as Perron suggests, a convention is learned inductively through experience. Conventions can either give the game support or information to play the game more easily, or hinder the gamer’s progression. A good game should aim to balance the two forms to create a satisfying experience of familiarity, flow, and challenge. In the case of Super Mario Bros., the timed level represents both forms of convention. The time limit provides information and structure to the experience. The time limit also introduces a fundamental challenge for the player and limits exploration (the player will be less likely to linger trying to explore every single block or pipe; instead trying different combinations each time they play a level). 93 Several studies have explored the connection between player’s heart rates and blood pressure and activity levels in the video game; these will be discussed in greater detail in Chapter 3. See, for example, Raymond Usher, “How Does In-Game Audio Affect Players?” Gamasutra, April 18, 2012. http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/168731/how_does_ingame_audio_affect_.php; Richard J. Tafalla, “Gender Differences in Cardiovascular Reactivity and Game Performance Related to Sensory Modality in Violent Video Game Play,” Journal of Applied Social Pssychology 37, no. 9 (2007), 2008-2023; Sandy Wolfson and Gill Case, “The Effects of Sound and Colour on Responses to a Computer Game,” interacting with Computers, 13 (2000), 183-192; additionally, Whalen describes this theme in “Play Along” this way: “This cue acts as a

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Depending on their level of investment in the game outcome and the intensity of their hormonal response to the signal, this sonic stimulation could lead to rushing or making careless mistakes. Thus, the auditory signal actually increases the difficulty of the level, leading to a more powerful sense of accomplishment when the level is navigated successfully.

The sensory feedback of the sound effect is quite powerful; in early games, sight and sound were the primary sources of sensory output from game to player. Touch played a limited role in the 8- and 16-bit eras; the player interacted with the game controller, but otherwise received no feedback from the game through touch. Systems from the late 1990s and beyond incorporate a rumble pack—a vibrating element in the controller itself that is activated whenever the player is hit or otherwise compromised in the game—but early games lacked this mode of sensory output. Thus, most game-state signals in the 1970s, 80s, and early 90s tended to utilize the auditory domain. While some games featured visual signals in addition to the auditory signal (such as a flash of red in a first-person shooter when the player takes a hit), surely few game developers would choose to rely solely on visuals to convey essential information to the player.

Sound is inherently invasive; one can close their eyes or turn away from the screen, but sound is difficult to completely block out without muting the system completely, and thus it represents an immediate and important channel for conveying information about the progression of the game. Thus, sound is one of the most important feedback mechanisms in gaming, one of the most immersive elements of ludic experience.

motivational device, and it breaks the lull of immersion…The music is, therefore, shifting into a mode of engaging a player’s response by calling her to a faster or more skillful interaction with the game.”

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Yellow & Green: Musical Signals and Atmospheric Stasis

Quasi-musical signaling tracks make up the middle of the sound spectrum, spanning the expanse between aesthetics and communication, and suggesting moments where a sound performs both functions simultaneously.94 These cues are longer in duration and more involved or complex than a sound effect, often occupying multiple channels of the NES sound generator instead of one. The primary purpose of these tracks is the communication of more generic game-state information relating to mood and atmosphere, as opposed to the momentary trigger of a sound effect requiring an immediate response. These tracks tend to be made up of simple, repetitive rhythmic or melodic gestures, but are not developed beyond a measure or two of musical material; they do not follow traditional rules of phrase structure, tension/release, or progression/cadence.

One finds an example of this seemingly ambiguous category in Déjà Vu (Kemco,

1990). A film-noir style detective story, the game centers around Ace Harding, who wakes up in a bar bathroom with no memory. The game consists of scanning the environment from a first-person perspective, searching for clues to Ace’s identity; along the way he discovers that several mobsters are attempting to frame him for an elaborate murder, and so the game then

94 Murch, “Dense Clarity,” 10; In Murch’s taxonomy, sound effects are also at the middle of the spectrum, and can slip between communicative and expressive functions: “And sound effects can mercurially slip away from their home base of yellow towards either edge, tinting themselves warmer and more ‘musical’, or cooler and more ‘linguistic’ in the process. Sometimes a sound effect can be almost pure music. It doesn’t declare itself openly as music because it is not melodic, but it can have a musical effect on you anyway…And sometimes a sound effect can deliver discrete packets of meaning that are almost like words. A door-knock, for instance, might be a ‘blue’ micro-language that says: ‘Someone’s here!’ And certain kinds of footsteps say simply: ‘Step! Step! Step!’ ” Martin Stig Anderson, "Electroacoustic Sound and Audiovisual Structure in Film,” eContact! 9.3— Matering en électroacoustique: un état des lieux (2007); Anderson discusses a similar slippage in the sound effects for Forbidden Planet (1956): “Here all sounds, except the most basic Foley sounds such as foot steps, share the same ‘electronic’ origin, timbre and identity. Nonetheless, we perceive some sounds as sound effects while others as musical, and often, being the most interesting case, we experience them as having both functions simultaneously.”

109 consists of gathering evidence to prove his innocence and put away the real murderers.

Several clips in this game serve quasi-musical signaling functions, providing a striking contrast to the blues-tinged cues that occur elsewhere in the soundscape. One such cue from

Hiroyuki Masuno’s score, entitled “Danger,” is simply a one second clip of an arpeggio rising and falling over and over again (see Example 2.12). The one-second duration is similar to a sound effect, yet the looping repetition subtly changes the function of the track: instead of representing a single action or event, the track becomes a representation of a particular mental state for the avatar.

Example 2.12. Hiroyuki Masuno, Déjà Vu (Kemco, 1990), “Danger.”

“Danger” has a thin, bleeping timbre indicating a worsening of the protagonist’s memory loss. In the course of the game, the player must find, prepare, and inject himself with the proper antidote to a memory loss drug. This track plays as a warning to the player that his condition is worsening; it appears more frequently the closer the player is to dying from the slow poisoning of his system (see Figure 2.2). Like the sound of the depleted heart containers in Legend of Zelda, this track is meant to propel the player to act in a certain way to avoid death, but unlike the sound of Link’s injury, the track does not continue indefinitely in front of the musical accompaniment until the antidote is injected; “Danger” represents a chronic rather than acute condition, even if its severity increases over time.

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Figure 2.2. Ace’s condition worsens, Déjà Vu (Kemco, 1990)

A second example of this middle-of-the-spectrum sound, shifting further towards music, occurs in Mega Man 2 (Capcom, 1988) in the final stages of the game. Mega Man is an action-adventure franchise of games starring a humanoid robot with an arm cannon that shoots round laser-like pellets at his foes. Mega Man’s creator, Dr. Light, sends him to stop the evil scientist Dr. Wily from taking over the world with his army of robot masters. Mega

Man runs, jumps, and fights his way through a series of levels, defeating each robot master in turn and gaining special weapons upgrades along the way to Wily’s castle. With the player’s assistance, Mega Man will defeat all the evil robots and put a stop to the mad scientist’s diabolical plans. The cue for “Wily Stage 3-5” serves as the background track to several levels within the castle proper, but it is less musical than motivational in its affect. The track consists of a hypnotic progression rising through the chromatic scale, repeating in half-step increments every four measures. Nothing “happens” musically to progress out of this

111 endless sequencing; at first the track seems to be building tension without providing a satisfying release, but listened to it outside of the game context, the sequencing seems excessive and even boring. The loop ends after the twelfth iteration of the sequence, with a simple glissando down to the initial E♭ to start the maddeningly repetitive track over again

(see Example 2.13).95

Example 2.13. Takashi Tateishi, Mega Man 2 (Capcom, 1988), “Wily Stage 3-5,” mm. 1-16.

Despite the cue’s redundancy, it is actually remarkably effective in incorporating the player. The final Dr. Wily levels require a great deal of player reflex response and problem- solving skills to navigate to the final boss, and the trancelike hypnosis induced by the track’s failure to resolve serves as a powerful motivational amplifier, propelling the player through

95 Takashi Tateishi was credited as Ogeretsu Kun in the original game; Capcom employees often used pseudonyms in game credits in the 1980s.

112 with its steady tempo and predictable, incrementally rising gesture. In this way, the game music’s incessant modulations constantly prime the player’s attention and focus without distracting them from their tasks. “Wily Stages 3-5,” though utterly grating outside of Mega

Man 2, is actually one of the most effective tracks in the entire game.96

Blue and Indigo: Music for Mood and Atmosphere, and Ludic Foley

Sound effects are the most “functional” parts of the soundscape, followed by

Musical signaling tracks. But how do video games use sound to create mood and offer denotative meaning, signification that is indexical or iconic in nature? The background music for a level tends to be somewhat autonomous from the game state, looping behind player action, never directly synchronized—like film cues are—to particular moments of play.

Background cues continue on, uninterrupted by local-level activity such as taking a hit. Yet, despite the temporal autonomy, an effective cue is often tied, in some way, to the visual design elements and progression of the game narrative.

A great example of background tracks conceived as counterpoint to the level can be found in Koji Kondo’s score for Super Mario Bros. (Nintendo, 1985).97 The background tracks are complete in themselves—well-crafted, catchy music even outside the game

96 The track reminds me of a Shepard Scale, an aural illusion of a sine-wave tone that sounds as though it is continuously rising or falling in pitch, but which ultimately seems to get neither higher nor lower. Roger N. Shepard, “Circularity in Judgments of Relative Pitch.” Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 36 (1964), 2346- 2353; however, in the case of Mega Man 2, “Dr. Wily 3-5” loops after twelve iterations. But the rising continues longer than the listener might expect, giving at least a temporary impression that the track is endless. 97 Miyamoto and Kondo, “To Save Memory,” in Iwata’s interview, Miyamoto remarked how they decided to bring Kondo in very early to begin writing the music for Super Mario Bros., because they were worried about the CPU keeping up with all of the onscreen tasks while also performing the sound synthesis required for the music and effects.

113 world—and yet Kondo carefully considered the visual environment of the particular level and echoes this in interesting ways in the musical textures (see Figure 2.3).

Figure 2.3. Underground level, Super Mario Bros. (Nintendo, 1985)

The second level of the game takes place deep underground. The level has a dark, cavernous feel with lots of room to jump; the palette is mostly blue and black. Kondo echoes this sense of depth and space by writing music in a low register, with a melodic figure based on outlined octaves, implying the cavernous space of the underworld (see Example 2.14).98

98 Neil Lerner, “Mario’s Dynamic Leaps: Musical Innovations (and the Specter of Early Cinema) in Donkey Kong and Super Mario Bros.,” in Music in Video Games: Studying Play, edited by K.J. Donnelly, William Gibbons, and Neil Lerner, 18; Lerner writes that the underground theme is “very much in the tradition of a misterioso from early cinema, such as Zamecnik’s ‘Misterioso’ (from Sam Fox Photoplay Edition, volume 1, 1919) or the ‘Pizzicato’ (from Gregg A. Frelinger’s Motion Picture Piano Music, 1909).” Whalen, “Play Along” describes the shift to G minor, the use of chromaticism, and the lack of a clear tonal center as giving the Underworld theme “a hollow, eerie feel.” Andrew Schartmann, Koji Kondo’s Super Mario Bros. Soundtrack (New York: Bloomsbury. 2015), 66; Echoing Whalen, Schartmann describes the sparse texture in low octaves as giving the music “a stark and hollow character appropriate to the level.” Schartmann’s musical transcription places the Pulse 2 melody on the top line to clarify the melody-accompaniment structure and discuss voice leading; I leave mine in this somewhat inverted order to highlight the placement of the melody in Pulse 2. Sound effects would override and interrupt the Pulse 1 channel in Super Mario Bros., and so Kondo strove to keep the melody and bassline intact, opting to lose part of the harmony instead.

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More striking than the stark texture and lack of tuneful melody is the use of silence within the track itself—the empty beats between gestures as well as the measure of rest before the loop—and how it suggests depth of space.99

Example 2.14. Koji Kondo, Super Mario Bros. (Nintendo, 1985), “Underground.”

In the underwater levels of the game, Kondo employs a waltz topos, the ¾ meter creating a musical sense of buoyancy that reflects the motion of Mario bobbing about in the water as he swims (see Example 2.15).100

99 Schartmann, Super Mario Bros., 68; Schartmann describes it as “silence-as-echoes.” 100 Lerner, “Mario’s Dynamic Leaps,” 15; Lerner compares the waltz to “the early twentieth-century harmonic and melodic language of Tin Pan Alley songs, or waltzes composed to accompany film scenes such as J.S. Zamecnik’s ‘Garden Love Scene’ (from Sam Fox Moving Picture Music, volume 3, 1914)…” Schartmann’s discussion of the Underwater theme seeks to place it in a historical tradition, showing Kondo’s similarities to music by Strauss and Scott Joplin (among others) in terms of form and phrase structure. My interest is more in how the rising arpeggiated bassline implies treading water—a buoyant, bobbing, rising figure set against the more placid, step-wise harmony in the pulse channels.

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Example 2.15. Koji Kondo, Super Mario Bros., (Nintendo, 1985), “Underwater.”

Finally, in the castle levels, Mario is given extraordinarily little room to move; the character’s signature move is a high jump, but the castle levels have a low ceiling that limits Mario’s room to jump (see Figure 2.4).101

101 Lerner, “Mario’s Dynamic Leaps,” 18; “The music found in the castles (“Koopa Stage”) hearkens back to the character of agitatos or furiosos such as Langey’s ‘Furioso No. 3 (1918) or Zamecnik’s ‘Furioso’ (from Sam Fox Photoplay Edition, volume 1, 1919).”

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Figure 2.4. Castle level, Super Mario Bros. (Nintendo, 1985)

This lack of mobility is meant to make the player uncomfortable as they dodge obstacles and work cautiously through the level. The music serves not only to heighten the suspense, but also to echo this confinement: the melodic space is confined and intensely chromatic, suggesting Mario’s claustrophobic surroundings (see Example. 2.16). Despite the tracks’ considerable appeal and musical autonomy, Kondo’s music also demonstrates sensitivity to the motion of the player’s (and Mario’s) bodies and an interest in reinforcing the image using representational schemes in the musical construction that seem to complement the game graphics.

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Example 2.16. Koji Kondo, Super Mario Bros. (Nintendo, 1985), “Castle.”

The next stage in the taxonomy moves from signal to atmosphere and generic mood induction. Foley is the reproduction of human-generated sounds in the postproduction process for radio, films, television, video games, or other media.102 Named after Jack Foley, a legendary sound effects artist from early cinema, the process of creating Foley involves

102 James Wierzbicki, “Sound Effects/Sound Affects: ‘Meaningful’ Noise in Cinema,” in The Palgrave Handbook of Sound Design and Music in Screen Media: Integrated Soundtracks, ed. Liz Greene and Danijela Kulezic-Wilson, (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), 154; “Cinematic sound is constructed, but this is not to say that the sound one encounters in film is entirely artificial.”

118 elaborate sound stages and talented performers to recreate even the most quotidian sounds of walking and rustling clothing to add depth and realism to the auditory track.103 In the case of cinema, filming outdoors rarely results in "clean" audio tracks, even with a great production mixer on-set; dialogue may be obscured by noises in the ambient environment

(such as planes flying overhead). Actors’ dialogue is typically recorded with a boom microphone; the boom operator attempts to suspend the mike as close as possible to the actors’ mouths without appearing in the frame.104 However, there are many sounds that can intrude on the sound recording and render the audio useless in postproduction, and so dialogue and sounds must be rerecorded and synchronized with the desired image.105

However, the postproduction process of creating the audio track is not merely about replicating naturalistic sounds of the environment, replacing dialogue with ADR (automatic dialogue replacement), resynchronizing image and sound, or digital editing.106 Some

103 David Yewdall, Practical Art of Motion Picture Sound (Waltham, MA: Focal Press, 2012), 456; Yewdall demonstrates how both the creation of the Foley sound and its editing can shape the experience of the audience. 104 Elisabeth Weis, “Sync Tanks: The Art and Technique of Postproduction Sound,” Cinéaste, vol. 21 no. 1/2 (1995), 56. 105 Recording the initial dialogue as cleanly as possible is a vital step, as it provides a template for re-dubbing in postproduction. The production mixer will also record ambient sounds from the set, referred to as recording the “room tone.” This recording of background ambience serves as an important raw material in postproduction; the room tone is typically mixed into the audio track underneath the dialogue in order to create a more convincing, natural depth in the soundscape. The production mixer will also record some sound effects on-site, depending on how much interaction the sound people have had with the director; the more sounds captured during initial filming, the less the sound engineers have to invent and fill in later, saving time and money for the production. 106 Automatic dialogue replacement is a process where the original actor listens to loops of the line from the original production track and re-performs each line in order to match wording and lip movements. ADR is a tedious and involved process, reserved mostly for sections of the audio track where the dialogue is too masked by environmental sounds to remain usable to the audio engineers. Some newer digital technologies allow for actors’ spoken syllables to be taken out of context and remixed into the original audio track. This second technology is similar to the SIRI technology for the iPhone, which can create any words necessary by recombining elements from a bank of recorded syllables, though some feel this style of ADR is rather stilted, leading to a stiff, unnatural resultant dialogue track.

119 sounds—such as those for ancient, alien, or other inaccessible or impossible sources—are complete fictions, evocative inventions of the sound engineers, drawing on real-world correlates but blending and manipulating aspects of the sound to intensify its impact on the listener. The sound engineers often have to recreate many sounds that would be present in the diegesis in a more controlled setting, allowing for abstraction and artistry to create fictional—but intensely convincing—effects and Foley.

The Foley studio consists of a series of large pits filled with varied materials such as compacted dirt, concrete, boardwalk planks, and shallow pools of water. These pits must be carefully designed for the express purpose of recording Foley, in order to provide the most realistic sounds in the rerecording process: for example, the concrete pit must connect to solid earth, because otherwise it will sound hollow; the microphone will “hear” differently than the ear, and the effect will not be as convincing.107 Foley artists “walk” the movie in these specialized studios, recreating all the footfalls and sounds other than the actors’ dialogue. Many Foley artists are former dancers with a keen sense of rhythm and tempo, and so they are better able to synchronize precisely to the image as they walk the movie.108 Some

Foley artists are known for their ability to create convincing characterization through sound: performing distinctive styles and speeds of footfall to add in an interpretive element and enhance the audio track. David Yewdall, a veteran Hollywood sound engineer, describes

107 Yewdall, Practical Art, 432. 108 Yewdall, Practical Art, 432.

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Foley artist John Post as a master of characterization, able to completely change the emotion of a scene through his footfalls.109

Most sound effects are stacked, creating greater depth and volume than would be present in the actual sound. For example, a classic Hollywood superhero punch consists of four sounds that are layered to provide that gut-wrenching crack upon impact: the slapping sound of skin-to-skin contact from an actual punch is mixed with a low, resonant thump on the chest, the sound of a pipe or switch being swung fast in the air to provide a convincing sense of motion for the swing of the fist through the air, and finally, the sound of walnuts being cracked to provide the crunch convincing us of real damage.110 These four elements are mixed into a coherent whole to create a stronger sense of depth and give the illusion of motion, but no punch in the real world could ever match this sound. As Yewdall explains:

I can play you a recording of a rifle butt impacting a man’s chin. It is an absolutely authentic recording, yet it sounds flat and lifeless. On the other hand, I can edit three carefully chosen sound cues together in parallel and play them as one, and I promise that you will cringe and double over in empathetic pain. Therein lies the essential difference between realism, which is an actual recording of an event, and a sound designer’s version of the same event, a combination brew that evokes emotion and pathos.111

What is fascinating about this punch is how natural it sounds in the cinematic context. In a sense, the entertainment sound seems more ‘real’ than the actual recording of the sound it is supposed to represent. As James Wierzbicki notes, “…it is not always a case of the audiences

109 Yewdall, Practical Art, 454; “Many Foley artists made footfalls on the right surface and in sync with the action onscreen, but Johnny took the creation to a whole new level…the footstep had character, texture, and often gave an entire spin on the story…Before Johnny performed the footsteps, the actress simply crossed the room. During the Foley session, however, Johnny built in a hesitation by the actress…and then continued her footsteps with a light delicacy that bespoke insecurity. This not only completely changed the onscreen perception of the actress’s thoughts and feelings, but also greatly improved the tension of the moment.” 110 As demonstrated by Adam Savage and Jamie Hyneman, “Blow Your Own Sail,” Mythbusters, May 11, 2011. 111 Yewdall, Practical Art, 9.

121 merely deigning to treat sonic fiction as though it were sonic fact: empirical research has shown that persons exposed to non-cinematic film clips sometimes take studio-produced sound effects to be more ‘real’—more convincingly communicative of whatever objects or actions appear in the clips’ visual imagery—than the real thing.”112 This fact could be a matter of convention; watching movies trains the audience to accept such fictions as hyper- real depictions of sound. Perhaps these conventions arose due to the sheer scope of the silver screen: the screen is so large that the sound effects have to sound scaled-up to match.

However, this process is not merely about scaling up the sounds to add to the cinematic sense of grandeur; the fact is that using only naturally-recorded sounds would not provide a good backdrop to the cinematic image.

Beyond providing convincing recreations of walking, Foley also contributes a great deal of truly fictional sounds used for sci-fi and fantasy films where the diegesis takes place in a realm of the fantastical. A classic example is from sound artist Gary Rydstrom, who made the “sliming” noise in Ghostbusters by spraying compressed air into Silly Putty.113

Because these sounds have no natural basis, the Foley artists are free to explore creative acoustical possibilities free of any constraints to match the sound to a real-world analog.

Foley and sound effects are an art of abstraction; trying to get to the essential quality of the sound often means using something completely different to achieve affective impact.

A few more examples illustrate the fictions often taken for granted in the cinematic context. The sound of walking in grass or the rustle of leaves or bushes is often simulated by

112 Wierzbicki, “Sound Effects/Sound Affects,” 155. 113 Weis, “Sync Tanks,” 59.

122 unwinding 100’ of ¼” recording tape in the Foley studio’s dirt pit and walking on it.

Cornstarch is used to replicate the crunch of walking through snow; it sounds more like compacting snow than the real thing, which would slowly melt and lose its crystalline snap upon impact in the warmth of the indoor studio.114 Not all of these fictional creations are merely about increasing the realism, however; some elements of Foley sound are meant to be evocative, conveying a subtle statement about the nature of the sound itself. For example, the sound of the typewriter in All the President’s Men was meant to represent the power of words in the exposition of the Watergate scandal, and so the typewriter’s clacking keys were combined in postproduction with gunfire, to add punch and power to the keystrokes.115

Not all sounds are created completely in the Foley studio, however. Sound effects are often a combination of Foley with samples of real-world sounds from vast libraries of recorded real-world sounds, which are then digitally manipulated and layered into convincing wholes for the final track. Thus, the distinction between Foley and sound effects is somewhat arbitrary, leading many to collapse the two into one category of film sound. The true distinction aligns with the question of whether the sounds include more human action

(Foley) or real-world recordings (or evocations) of objects and atmospheric ambience (sound effects). In the case of early video games, most sounds were created rather than recorded or sampled, and should fall more under the realm of sound effects than true Foley.116 However,

114 Yewdall, Practical Art, 442. 115 Weis, “Sync Tanks,” 59. 116 Of course, there are a few exceptions to this general rule. Two examples of more human-based Foley sounds can be found in the Super Nintendo game Final Fantasy VI (Square, 1994). “Devil’s Lab” from Final Fantasy VI plays in a factory, and so the musical track incorporates the metallic sound of hammers striking anvils as a percussive element in the musical track to echo its environment. “Colliery Narshe,” also from Final Fantasy VI is played as the background loop for a town located in the frozen tundra. The musical track incorporates the sound of exhaling, the aural equivalent of being able to see one’s breath condensing on the

123 despite this notion that all sounds are fictions, many of them resemble real-world sounds.

Kristine Jørgensen describes two kinds of sound signals in video games that relate to these classifications: “In audiovisual environments such as games and films, many sounds correspond to real world sounds. Such sound signals are what auditory display studies calls auditory icons (Walker & Kramer, 2004). In fantasy or science fiction settings with magic or futuristic equipment, however, this kind of replication is not always possible. In such cases it is common to use what auditory display studies calls earcons (Walker & Kramer, 2004); artificial noises, sound bursts or musical phrases.”117 According to Jørgensen’s definitions, what I call sound effects would map onto auditory icons, whereas most video game Foley would be an example of an earcon. There are, however, hybrid sounds: “An example is a mage casting a fire spell: the sound starts with the crackling sound of fire, and ends in a whoosh that moves from a high-pitch tone to a lower…Using sound signals that have a connection to real world environments while being stylized to fit the game situation creates the unique opportunity to make auditory usability signals seem natural to the gameworld.”118

For the purposes of video game analysis, it is also helpful to distinguish between sound effects triggered by changes in the game state or by button presses of the player (which typically serve communicative functions), and those sounds which exist independently of the other audio tracks adding specific qualities or moods to the environment (serving more aesthetic or environmental functions), as Collins might. This second classification is what I

frigid air. Yet, it should be noted that these examples of Foley as “human” action are much rarer than the more atmospheric variety representing wind or rain; these two are the only examples of this kind of Foley in Nobuo Uematsu’s score for Final Fantasy VI, a score consisting of seventy-four separate musical tracks. 117 Jørgensen, “Audio and Gameplay.” 118 Jørgensen, “Audio and Gameplay.”

124 will refer to as Foley in the video game context. This category is also similar to Michel

Chion’s notion of ambient or territory sound: “…sound that envelops a scene and inhabits its space, without raising the question of the identification or visual embodiment of its source: birds, singing, church bells ringing. We might also call them territory sounds, because they serve to identify a particular locale through their pervasive and continuous presence.”119

Although some first-person shooters incorporate the classic Foley sounds of walking, most of the Foley present in the game soundscape tends toward more atmospheric elements—such as wind blowing or the sound of pouring rain—to provide subtlety and depth to the game world. These Foley effects are typically mixed behind the musical cues and sound effects as a backdrop to the more salient aural elements. Most early games use

Foley rather sparingly, due to the lack of channel space to accommodate fully independent

Foley, sound effect, and musical tracks. For example, on the Nintendo Entertainment

System, sound effects often impede on one of the five audio channels, briefly interrupting the melody or harmony in order to signal the player. Sound effects are clearly privileged in the soundscape for their communicative function—conveying critical information and serving as multi-modal feedback to the player.

On the Super Nintendo, the number of audio channels nearly doubled from five to eight, allowing more room for Foley to sit behind the musical score. However, most examples of Foley remained in the atmospheric vein, representing bitter, biting gusts of wind

(such as in “Ruined World” from Chrono Trigger; Square, 1995; and “The Dark World” from

Final Fantasy VI; Square, 1994), the sound of running water (“Underground Sewer” also

119 Michel Chion, Audio-Vision: Sound on Screen (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994).

125 from Chrono Trigger), pouring rain (“Slam Shuffle from Final Fantasy VI), or the sound of a moving train on the tracks (“Mystery Train” from Final Fantasy VI). As games became increasingly more cinematic and realistic in conception, Foley rose in importance. First- person shooters (FPSs) today often employ a great deal of Foley, from walking sounds to the sounds of cocking a pistol or reloading various guns to realistic cries of pain when the player is hit. Despite the paucity of certain kinds of human-derived Foley in early games, the atmospheric tracks often work together with sound effects and music to serve a number of crucial functions in the game context ranging from the direction of player attention to manipulation of the player’s emotions, phasic arousal, and incorporation into the game diegesis.

Violet: Music and Emotional Affect

At last, in the taxonomy of function, we reach music serving narrative or aesthetic purposes. Tracks that aid in incorporation without succumbing to stark, mind-numbing repetition that the gameplay might require (to help focus the player, for example, as in “Wily

Stage 3-5”). This category necessarily brings with it notions of subjective value by suggesting a track that stands on its own even outside the game context as complete and well- constructed, while still evoking a particular emotional or affective response from the player.

Many examples exist, but one that is particularly striking comes from Mega Man 3 (Capcom,

1990). Throughout the game, the player keeps encountering a mysterious character called

Break Man, whose arm cannon shoots similar charges at Mega Man. The player never manages to completely dispatch Break Man; he always warps away before Mega Man can deliver the fatal shot. The purpose of these encounters seems to be to test the player’s

126 reflexes, training them to dodge attacks more effectively. Yet, the character is not one of Dr.

Wily’s robots, and he has no level of his own but instead intrudes upon the levels of other robot masters. Break Man always signals his arrival by a distinctive, bluesy whistle (see

Example 2.17).

Example 2.17. Yasuaki Fujita, Mega Man 3 (Capcom, 1990), “Break Man’s Whistle.”

At the end of the game, after Mega Man has destroyed the last of Wily’s evil bosses, the roof of the castle begins to collapse, and Mega Man is knocked unconscious. The player sees Break Man descend and rescue Mega Man from the rubble. When Mega Man regains consciousness, Dr. Light wonders aloud who brought Mega Man back to the safety of his lab, and the player hears Break Man’s distinctive whistle. The final cut scene shows a catalog of all of the robots Dr. Light has invented, as Mega Man runs through a green field. After the litany of robots and their functions, the placard at the bottom displays the final robot in the list, revealing the true identity of Break Man: No. 000 Proto Man: New Robot Prototype,

Brother of Mega Man (see Figure 2.5).

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Figure 2.5. Final cut-scene, Mega Man 3 (Capcom, 1990)

This revelation that Mega Man has a brother is accompanied by an extension of Break

Man/Proto Man’s whistle into a fully-fledged musical theme, as Mega Man looks up into the sky seeing a vision of his estranged brother. The cut scene concludes the game with a cliffhanger, leaving a space for future games in the franchise to explore this relationship further.

The Mega Man series consists of action-adventure, side-scrolling platform games, suggesting that the plot lines are not as cinematic, and the characters are less developed than in narrative-rich role-playing games. Yet, this ending has surprising emotional resonance supported by the musical track. The revelation that Break Man is actually Proto Man makes his appearances throughout the game less sinister, recasting Proto Man’s appearances as a protective brother helping his sibling to become strong enough to face evil. The extension of the whistle adds blue note pitch bends, a tinge of chromaticism that seems to intensify the affect; Mega Man does not know how to find his brother to thank him for saving his life, and this revelation that the robot he has been fighting is actually an ally is confusing and bittersweet (see Example 2.18).120

120 The blue note has a more obvious significance when looking at the original Japanese releases of the game. Mega Man was originally named ロックマン (Rokkuman or “Rock Man”) and his brother was ブルース (Burūsu or “Blues,”); the music of the games focuses heavily on these two musical genres. However, these musical names did not seem to have influenced the character designs: Mega Man is a blue robot, whereas Proto Man is red.

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Example 2.18. Yasuaki Fujita, Mega Man 3 (Capcom, 1990), “Whistle Concert,” mm. 1-3.

The whistle, originally a signal to prepare for a short battle, becomes a wistful theme accompanied softly with an acoustic guitar-like timbre, giving the cue a gentle simplicity that allows the G-minor melody to serve as the centerpiece to Mega Man’s solitary trek into a more natural setting (an interesting change of scenery, as the robot masters’ levels in the game are all heavily industrial and electronic in both sound and appearance). The opening gesture of the track’s B section has the same melodic contour as the whistle itself, and frequent flatted blue notes (see Example 2.19) The tempo is slow and contemplative, and the phrase structure consists of pleasing and symmetrical four bar phrases in antecedent- consequent units. The music is unique in the soundtrack, beautiful to listen to, decontextualizing a representation of impending battle into something more pensive. The music serves as an emotional ellipsis, connecting the game to an idea that will be worked out in future installations and in the anime series based on the games (see Example 2.19).

Example 2.19. Yasuaki Fujita, Mega Man 3 (Capcom, 1990), “Whistle Concert,” mm. 25-33.

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One more use of music can conceivably fall under this violet classification, and it is predicated on reception rather than on the structural elements of the sound: musical reuse of classical music where the player does not recognize the work’s existence outside of the game context. In this instance, the gamer does not recognize the piece and merely takes it as generic video game scoring, and so their response to the track is less predictable and its function a little less clear. However, it is likely that the player will conceive of the music as original to the game and treat it similarly to any other game music that they encounter, judging its effectiveness in terms of conveying the narrative or the rhythms of play. For example, Tetris (Nintendo, 1989) included an arrangement of the Menuet from Bach’s

French Suite no. 3 in B minor, BWV 814, marked only as “Tetris C” in the game’s music options menu.121 As I wrote in my article on the music of Tetris,

Renaming the tracks with letters strips all three songs of their individual identities outside of the game…If Tanaka had wanted an instantly-recognizable Bach work, he would have chosen something like the Toccata and Fugue in D minor, BWV 565. Instead, he chose the middle movement from the third French suite: this Menuet is not particularly well known—at least, it lacks the status of a cultural icon—but it fits in well with the other selections by virtue of its rhythmic momentum, minor key, and a compact form that was conducive to looping. The music seems cohesive beyond

121 Here, I am referring to the version of Tetris released for the handheld Game Boy, not the version released for the NES (which came out in 1987). The player can choose between three pieces of background music in this menu. Tetris A is an encoding of the 19th century Russian folk song “Korobeiniki,” Tetris B was an original composition by composer Hirokazu “Hip” Tanaka, and all three share an emphasis on rhythmic activity and the use of the minor mode.

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the visual contextual clues because of the uniformity of the synthesized sound through the PSG chips; any disparities of musical style that are apparent to a musicologist are largely collapsed for the player into the overarching 8-bit aesthetic.122

In fact, it may only be years later that a gamer discovers the “prehistory” of a track, a moment of replay that alters the player’s personal experience of the work. As Gibbons writes in his introduction to Unlimited Replays, “Players relive the game, but with their frame of reference and mode of understanding it irrevocably altered—and hopefully enriched—by what they had already accomplished…To extend the analogy, over significant periods of time, and through a variety of methods, music accumulates multiple layers of meaning.123

While the sound designers may have specifically intended this kind of re-use as a musical allusion to the work’s use in another medium (or to preexisting cultural associations with the work or with classical music itself), a lack of recognition on the part of the player can completely destroy any attempts to use music as an extra-musical signifier.

Ultra-Violet: Complete Autonomy

One final function warrants a cursory discussion: purely autonomous musical tracks, which have nothing to do with the visual representation scheme or the narrative convention, and which are fully musical, often translations of preexisting pieces of Western art music.

When music is completely autonomous from the game image, it can seem incongruous and absurd, and so it is rarely a goal for game developers to create this kind of ludomusical dissonance with the image, environment, or narrative. Several early games made use of

122 Dana Plank-Blasko, “ ‘From Russia with Fun!’: Tetris, Korobeiniki, and the Ludic Soviet.” The Soundtrack, 8, no. 1-2 (2015), 16. 123 William Gibbons, Unlimited Replays: Video Games and Classical Music (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018), 1-2.

131 public-domain classical music for their background scores, saving the expense of hiring a game composer. The programmer could take a simple piano arrangement of a well-known work and directly program the notes into the system using assembly language. As a result, famous works such as Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D minor, BWV 565 appear in games whose settings seem wildly incongruous with the Baroque.124 However, this method of transliterating notes from a score (or trans-bit-erating, to use Julianne Grasso’s term) can result in quite unusual translations of the familiar (see Example 2.20).125

124 See my forthcoming article on the use of BWV 565 in 8-bit games; Dana Plank, “From the Concert Hall to the Console: The 8-bit Translation of BWV 565,” BACH: Journal of the Riemenschneider Bach Institute, (forthcoming, 2019). The article explores the work’s appearance in Captain Comic (1989), set on an alien planet with a space-bounty hunter; Battle of Olympus (1990), set in Ancient Greece and based loosely on the story of Orpheus and Eurydice; and Castlevania (Konami, 1986), an adventure game steeped in supernatural forces of evil and gothic architecture. The uses of the track varied widely, from serving as a royalty-free background, seemingly disconnected from the game environment, to signifying a “gothic” aesthetic and association with classic horror films. See also William Gibbons, “Blip, Bloop, Bach? Some Uses of Classical Music on the Nintendo Entertainment System,” Music and the Moving Image 2, no. 1 (2009), 40-52; and his recent book, William Gibbons, Unlimited Replays: Video Games and Classical Music (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018), which provides examples of incongruity as well as exploring the use of classical music in games to signify geography (as in fighting games like Punch-Out!) or era (as in the Civilization games). 125 Track title is, of course, drawn from the Bach source, but is my own designation; on Zophar’s Domain, the tracks are numbered instead of named.

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Example 2.20. Judye Pistole, Captain Comic (Color Dreams, 1989), “Toccata and Fugue,” mm. 1-15.

Yet, even when the 8-bit encoding is a fairly faithful recreation of the original piece, it is interesting to note that this total musical autonomy can actually be detrimental to the game soundtrack as a functional aspect conducive to play, causing confusion and potentially preventing the player from immersing fully in the game. Recognition of a famous classical work in a game set in Ancient Greece or on an alien planet may lead some gamers to wonder why this choice was made and whether it has significance. As William Gibbons writes in the introduction to Unlimited Replays,

What on earth was this music doing in a video game? What did Bach, this particular piece, or classical music in general, have to do with Greek gods and heroes? I was sure this music meant something—maybe even something profound—but I just couldn’t put my finger on exactly what it was…I’ve come to believe that Bach’s Toccata and Fugue seemed so inscrutable to my younger self in that game because my frame of reference told me the music was in the wrong place.126

126 Gibbons, Unlimited Replays, 3-4.

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The incongruence wrecks the possibility of complete incorporation; it can dishabituate a player and completely remove them from the game.

Taste the Rainbow: A Functional Taxonomy

So many sounds come together to make up the ludic soundscape: silences, sound effects, musical signals, Foley, mood-inducing atmospheric tracks meant to motivate the player or echo elements of visuals or narrative, background music, and completely autonomous musical tracks. Ludomusicological analysis must not fall victim to an approach that eschews the myriad aural elements that contribute to the player experience, focusing only on the most “musical” or “orchestral” or “cinematic” of cues. This is not to say that analysis privileging music is inherently problematic: it is often illuminating. However, a broader approach to the soundscape better captures the clout and consequences of the sound for players. This approach is vital in my project of exploring the complexities of representing disability and impairment in the chapters to follow.

The tacit critique of such a tactic is the suggestion that if music is serving a particular purpose, it must be lesser than the nobler, unsullied works that seek to exist merely as l’art pour l’art. Attempts to remove game music from its original context—to fix the music in rigid scores without critique or analysis of the differences between notation and encoding, or to perform it with a symphony orchestra—are apologist at best, seeking to answer to this critique by removing game music’s function and proving its worth as autonomous music.127

127 Gibbons, Unlimited Replays; here I admittedly chose not to engage the broader question of “classifying game music” in depth, as Gibbons does in his eleventh chapter. It is a deep and tangential rabbit-hole, and one that seems outside of the scope of this chapter. I have attended these concerts and support the work of sites such as OverClocked ReMix, which often re-records classic game tracks with modern instruments and talented performers, but I am personally partial to the originally-encoded material over any other version. Concerts such

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Walter Benjamin claims, “…The highest reality in art is an isolated, complete work.”128 Yet autonomy is nearly impossible to achieve; even autonomous works have a self-serving function in their very functionlessness. Carl Dahlhaus suggests that an obsession with musical innovation nurtured this ideal of the autonomous work: “The contrast between autonomous and functional music is an illusory one in the opinion of those who are in favour of politically committed art; for them even music which considers itself to be autonomous in fact performs a function. They believe it is not a question of distinguishing between functional and autonomous music, but between music that admits its function— and that means its partiality—and music that conceals it.”129 True autonomy is a philosophical ideal that is perhaps impossible to completely attain.130 I believe, as Nicholas

Cook has written, that “Pure music, it seems, is an aesthetician’s (and music theorist’s) fiction; the real thing unites itself promiscuously with any other media that are available.”131

Though I certainly enjoy attending symphonic concerts of game music to hear new arrangements, I do not clamor for this kind of autonomy as the end goal of game sound scholarship. As such, I do not attempt to argue that game music is somehow “good enough” to serve as a topic of study: I find its worth and broad influence to be self-evident, its impact indelible, no matter its status with regard to autonomy or function. Music (or sound) serving narrative or visual functions will automatically fail in the eyes of these critics because they do

as Video Games Live, Distant Words, or Symphony of the Goddesses are fraught because they suggest the clash of competing systems of musical value and taste—critics bemoan what they see as pandering to a popular audience, whereas game music fans celebrate perceived inclusion into the classical canon. 128 Carl Dahlhaus, Schoenberg and the New Music: Essays (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 18. 129 Dahlhaus, Schoenberg, 29. 130 Adam Krims, “Introduction: Postmodern Musical Poetics and the Problem of ‘Close Reading,’” in Music/Ideology: Resisting the Aesthetic (Canada: G+B Arts International, 1997), 6. 131 Cook, Analysing Musical Multimedia, 92.

135 not evaluate the work on its own terms—terms that must include context. In order to examine the music of video games, I believe it is necessary to consider not only formal properties, but also function and interaction with the image and the rest of the sonic elements; in order to establish what exactly sound brings to the ludic experience.

However, in applying these traditional analytical techniques, one must be careful not to apply antiquated aesthetic standards to the work through transcriptions and close reading.

Adorno’s “On the Problem of Music Analysis” points to frequent interrelationship of close reading and aesthetic judgment, reminding the reader of the inherent dangers of any analytical undertaking: “In order to read notation at all, so that music results from it, an interpretive act is always necessary—that is to say, an analytical act, which asks what it is that the notation really signifies. Already in such elementary processes as these, analysis is always essentially present.”132 Adorno warns against simply focusing on formalist elements in close reading and analysis, referring to analysis rightfully as a process of “translation, criticism, and commentary.”133 One must not simply make transcriptions and make determinations about structure and meaning in isolation, because “…the close reading of music brings with it the specter of the closed reading,” potentially obscuring the most compelling aspects of the video game soundscape.134 I take these statements to heart in my own work and seek to keep my readings open to other interpretive possibilities. I will highlight some of the issues of transcription—as well as my own editorial choices and their rationale—in Chapter 4 when I look at the depiction of injury and illness in the soundscape.

132 Adorno quoted in Adam Krims, “Postmodern Musical Poetics,” 3. 133 Krims, “Postmodern Musical Poetics,” 3. 134 Krims, “Postmodern Musical Poetics,” 4.

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So, then what is a video game soundscape, and how can the myriad kinds and functions of sound-events be classified? Marinos Koutsomichalis gives an excellent definition of soundscape that seems well-suited for video game analysis, in considering disparate aural elements holistically: “Soundscapes manifest themselves in terms of numerous heterogeneous sonic events that occur in both the spatial and temporal domains.”135 While 8- and 16-bit games do not spatially locate sounds, they do confirm a sense of spatiality in the game world.136 Early games aurally represent activity and confirm the actions engendered by the press of a button on the controller. As for classification, a spectrum of function—ranging from signaling sound effects to tracks setting a general mood or ambiance all the way to full cut-scene cue music that is meant to be attentively listened to in order to help advance narrative or characterization—is a useful taxonomy from which to begin an analysis of the varying uses of game sound.

It is difficult to accept that transcription, harmonic analysis, and explorations of structural unity or melodic symmetry are insufficient tools to capture music’s power in the context of a video game. Yet, the shift to an audiovisual aesthetic is by no means a loss of these traditional tools. It is, instead, a sophisticated multi-modal approach to a medium replete with such interdependency between music, image, and affect. Indeed, just because traditional modes of analysis cannot capture the entirety of the video game soundscape does not render them obsolete. Game music is often a new-media translation of traditional formal

135 Marinos Koutsomichalis, “On Soundscapes, Phonography, and Environmental Sound Art,” Journal of Sonic Studies, 4, no. 1 (2013). 136 Later first-person shooters attempt to mimic a spatial sense of sound-source, leading to sophisticated auditory scene analysis in the 3D game setting.

137 structures and representational schemes, drawing on cultural tropes and devices familiar from film scores and art music, as well as deeply-embedded notions of orchestration and order. Finding such powerful and pervasive links to Western cultural musical codes points to a continuation of many of these embedded aesthetics and shows games as part of a living tradition, demonstrating many spheres of influence from which to draw useful corollaries and enhance games as part of a broader cultural experience in the modern world.

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Chapter 3. Affecting Effects: A Cognitive-Emotional Approach to Sound in Video Games

It was June of 1990; I was four years old, waiting with my mom in our car, which was parked on a searing hot blacktop of a mall parking lot. My brother, who was nine, was inside with my father picking out his birthday present. When they finally returned, my brother was carrying a huge box, arms outstretched to keep the awkward parcel in his arms.

The box was gray and black and red, and I saw a flash of the words Nintendo Entertainment

System. Without this day, impatient and blazing hot in my memory, I might never have known Mario and Link and Kid Icarus and Mega Man, and my life would have been much poorer for it. The family returned home, my brother eagerly helping my father connect the console to the television with a series of cords. We brought home two games that day: the first was the promotional 3-in-1 game that came with the system: Super Mario Bros./Duck

Hunt/Track Meet (Nintendo, 1985), complete with the bright orange blaster gun known as the NES Zapper, and the pressure-sensitive Power Pad to run on to compete in the track meet.1 The second game was The Legend of Zelda (Nintendo, 1986).

The Legend of Zelda was one of the first action-adventure fantasy games. The player’s avatar is an elven hero named Link: clothed in green, equipped with a wooden cudgel and small shield, on a quest through rough terrain and treacherous dungeons to save the mythical

1 Track Meet was, perhaps, the grandfather of Dance Dance Revolution (Konami, 1999); the player stood on the power pad and used their feet to activate the controls. Relatively few games were developed incorporating the NES Zapper and Power Pad, but they were important promotional tools in the mid-to late-1980s.

139 kingdom of Hyrule and rescue Princess Zelda from the clutches of the evil Ganon. Legend of

Zelda allows for a degree of non-linear play, creating multiple possibilities for replay and added challenge to keep the player interested long after they have beaten the game the first time. It is almost impossible to imagine this rich, diverse game world without its characteristic—and quite musical—sound effects. What would Link’s quest be if not for the swoosh of his sword (see Example 3.1)? How would the player experience the same level of satisfaction in restoring their health by picking up a heart container or lining their coffers with currency without that full, round plucking sound as they apprehend the heart, or the tinny cha-ching of picking up a gemlike rupee (see Example 3.2)?2

Example 3.1. Koji Kondo, The Legend of Zelda (Nintendo, 1986), hit sound effects.

Example 3.2. Koji Kondo, The Legend of Zelda (Nintendo, 1986), small treasure sound effect.

2 These sound effects are so quick that their melodic material is unlikely to be parsed as a melody by the player; I had to slow down the original effect a great deal in order to uncover the pitch content.

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Without Foley and sound effects, video games would lose a great deal of their vitality and power. Without the occasional punctuation of ostensibly-diegetic sounds, the player would not feel as deeply engrossed in the game and could grow irritated with the musical tracks, which are looped throughout the duration of a particular zone. Without sound effects to flesh out the world of the game, or Foley to create a sense of the ambient environment, the aural dimension could fall flat, lacking novel stimuli to keep the player motivated and invested in the outcome of play. The game would lose one of its most vital affective dimensions, and the emotional, narrative, and immersive impact of these games would be far less powerful. But what is the nature of this effect on the player? Despite the functional differences discussed in Chapter 2 between categories of game sound, in this chapter I will suggest some of the commonalities of affect across functional boundaries. In doing so, I will briefly leave behind discussions of disability, focusing instead of the interaction of sound and the bodies in play.

Aural stimuli tap into similar and related mechanisms to elicit emotional, psychological, and physiological responses from players, whether that response is ultimately meant to support narrative, influence gameplay decisions, foster player agency, or facilitate incorporation into the game body. This discussion draws on empirical literature from music cognition and psychology, indicating the potent effects of sound. Video games add one more dimension to this conversation: interactivity, or the immersion of the player. In this chapter,

I argue that sound is one of the most important modalities through which the game involves its players and incorporates them into a complexly-embodied hybrid of the material and

141 virtual. The soundscape is a site of incorporation, a dynamic and vital bridge between the bodies in play.

Game Sound, Arousal, and Communication

Music and game sound serve as a source of intense and immediate communication with the player by engaging our physiological and psychological systems of arousal and attention. Physiological arousal, as defined in the psychological literature, is the body’s degree of metabolic readiness for action. Our bodies do not remain fully alert at all times; a state of perpetual readiness to respond to the environment would be particularly taxing on physical resources, a costly expenditure of energy.3 The body undergoes many changes in arousal levels throughout the day, both on the order of minutes or hours (called tonic arousal, as in the diurnal cycle of sleep and wakefulness) and on the order of seconds or minutes (called phasic arousal, as triggered by various stimuli in the environment).4 Phasic arousal relates to the appearance of salient stimuli in the auditory environment. For example, the sound of a slamming door will drastically raise phasic arousal for a brief moment, until the cortex assesses the sound and determines that it is not an impending threat. There are many studies that explore the connection of music and sound to phasic arousal, focusing on elements such as dynamics and tempo.5

3 David Huron, “Arousal,” An Ear for Music; Huron states that music engages four of our “readiness” mechanisms: arousal, attention, habituation, and expectation. He also demonstrates how costly constant arousal would be: “if a person were in a constant state of high arousal, they would need to consume 6 to 10 times their normal caloric intake.” 4 Huron, “Arousal.” Stimulants (e.g. caffeine in coffee or tea) or depressants (such as alcohol) affect tonic arousal. Richard E. Thayer, The Origins of Everyday Moods (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 16; tonic arousal is also influenced by personality (introverts reach their daily point of greatest arousal/energy, known as acrophase, earlier in the day than extroverts). 5 Francesca R. Dillman Carpentier and Robert F. Potter. “Effects of Music on Physiological Arousal: Explorations into Tempo and Genre.” Media Psychology 10, no. 3 (2007), 339-363; Carpentier and Potter found that increases in tempo led to greater sympathetic arousal, measured using skin conductance; Gabriela Husain,

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A new sound in a game soundscape is a stimulus that increases phasic arousal, causing the temporary activation of the sympathetic nervous system (SNS). SNS activation leads to a number of physiological changes that prime the body for a flight or fight response until the sense of danger is assessed by the cortex as being either hazardous or innocuous. In the game context, most apparent threats should be taken as ultimately innocuous, since the player is in no immediate danger of actual bodily harm. Game scholars will refer to this evaluation in terms of Johann Huizinga’s concept of the “magic circle” from Homo Ludens.6

In gaming, the magic circle is an invisible boundary between the fantastical elements of play and reality. As Aki Järvinen states: “The magic circle produces a shift in the thematic field of the experience, which simultaneously both magnifies the emotional intensity, yet also provides a safety net with the pretend aspect of player behavior it elicits and its relation to the sense of reality variable.”7 This separation of fantasy from reality is part of what allows the affective domain of games to be so powerful for the player.

William Forde Thompson, and E. Glenn Schellenberg, “Effects of Musical Tempo and Mode on Arousal, Mood, and Spatial Abilities,” Music Perception 20, no. 2 (2002), 151-171; Husain et al. found that tempo effected arousal levels; see also Alf Gabrielsson, “Emotions in Strong Experiences with Music,” in Music and emotion: Theory and Research, ed. Patrik N. Juslin & John A. Sloboda (New York: Oxford University Press; 2001); Carol L. Krumhansl, “An exploratory study of musical emotions and psychophysiology,” Canadian Journal of Experimental Psychology 51 (1997), 336–352; Isabelle Peretz, “Listen to the Brain: A Biological Perspective on Musical Emotions,” in Music and Emotion: Theory and Research, ed. Patrik N. Juslin and John A. Sloboda (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001); Louis A. Schmidt and Laurel J. Trainor, “Frontal brain electrical activity (EEG) distinguishes valence and intensity of musical emotions,” Cognition and Emotion 15 (2001), 487–500; John A. Sloboda and Patrik N. Juslin, “Psychological Perspectives on Music and Emotion,” in Music and Emotion: Theory and Research, ed. Patrik N. Juslin and John A. Sloboda (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001); Julian F. Thayer, and Robert W. Levenson, “Effects of music on psychophysiological responses to a stressful film,” Psychomusicology 3 (1983), 44–54. 6 Huizinga, Homo Ludens. 7 Aki Järvinen, “Understanding Video Games as Emotional Experiences,” in The Video Game Theory Reader 2, ed. Bernard Perron and Mark J.P. Wolf (New York: Routledge, 2009), 95.

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The physiological responses to SNS activation include: the release of epinephrine

(also known as adrenaline) from the adrenal gland (acting in the body to raise heart rate and increase muscle tension to prepare for potential flight); the release of norepinephrine (or noradrenaline) in the locus coeruleus in the brain (leading to raised sensitivity of the sensory systems, making the player more alert and mentally focused); the release of acetylcholine to increase muscle response; increased blood pressure; faster pulse rate; increased perspiration; and increased oxygen consumption. The stimulus startling the player will be relayed to the thalamus and then move into the amygdala, causing an automatic, quick fear response. From there, the signal will travel to the sensory cortex, which evaluates the signal and then sends either an inhibitory or reinforcing signal back to the amygdala. In the video game, the

“danger” is virtual instead of proximate, and so these startle responses are most likely to evoke an eventual inhibitory signal from the sensory cortex. Activation of the sympathetic nervous system by sound in the video game will lead to short bursts of energy, physiological changes that lead to a spike in the player’s overall alertness, priming them for action.

There are several acoustical features associated with sympathetic arousal: such as an increase in the loudness and speed of the stimulus. Several other kinds of sounds increase phasic arousal: physically proximal sounds, approaching sounds, unexpected or surprising sounds, highly-emotional sounds, and sounds that have a learned association with danger, opportunity, or that are personally addressed to the player. Video game sound effects often serve many of these functions at once: they tend to be louder or otherwise distinguished from the background musical texture in order to stick out; they are often surprising; they tend to invoke the player’s learned association with the meaning of the effect (danger,

144 reward, opportunity, discovery of a secret, etc.; see Example 3.3); and all are directly addressed to the player as a communicative device conveying information about the gameplay state.

Example 3.3. Koji Kondo, The Legend of Zelda (Nintendo, 1986), secret.

The sound effect is meant to evoke an orienting response—in other words, it commands attention from the player.8 If an orienting response is triggered (causing the player to look or turn their head in the apparent direction of the eliciting stimulus), the player will experience additional physiological changes: pupil dilation, a bradycardic heart response (where the heart rate goes down, then up, and then back to the base line), cephalic vasodilation (the blood vessels in the head become dilated), peripheral vasoconstriction

(blood vessels in the extremities constrict), and increased skin conductance.9 All of these physiological changes due to SNS activation or orienting response prime the player for action by temporarily raising their phasic arousal via short, deliberate signals.

However, as suggested earlier, it is not ideal to remain at a high phasic arousal; not only is this a costly energy expenditure, it can cause fatigue and stress. In the context of a game, a player will be less likely to continue play if they experience an incessant barrage of

8 Alvin Bernstein, “The Orienting Response and Direction of Stimulus Change,” Psychonomic Science 12, no. 4 (1968), 127-128; Bernstein demonstrated that orienting response is asymmetrical with respect to intensity; humans are more sensitive to increases than decreases in intensity. 9 John W. Rohrbaugh, “The Orienting Reflex: Performance and Central Nervous System Manifestations,” in Varieties of Attention, ed. Raja Parasuraman and D.R. Davies, 325-348 (Orlando, FL: Academic Press, 1984); Evgeny N. Sokolov “The Neural Model of the Stimulus and the Orienting Reflex,” Problems in Psychology 4 (1960), 61-72; Evgeny N. Sokolov, Perception and the Conditioned Reflex (New York: Macmillan, 1963).

145 stimuli activating the SNS. Sound can reduce phasic arousal, especially when it is low-energy; e.g., slow, predictable, or soft. Effective game sound design will seek a balance; maintaining or lowering phasic arousal (e.g., with background music and silence) to maintain player concentration while raising it to draw attention to particular elements and prime the player to respond (e.g., with sound effects). Atmospheric Foley will serve the first goal; it does not trigger and signal the way sound effects do. Sounds of wind, rain, dripping water, or ocean waves are constants that have more to do with creating a sense of space and adding realistic ambience to the particular game environment, and are likely to lower phasic arousal.

Repetitive background sounds may serve an additional function, beyond merely preventing player stress from overstimulation of the SNS. According to the Yerkes-Dodson law, for simple tasks, higher phasic arousal leads to better performance. For complex tasks, lower phasic arousal leads to better performance.10 Therefore, the more complicated the video game task (in terms of motor skills and/or critical thinking), the less active, arousing, and attention-getting the soundscape should be. Sound effects seem to work alongside musical cues to pique the player’s phasic arousal to a level optimal for game performance at any given moment.

Most of the atmospheric Foley in games is similar to functional music (e.g., Muzak) in that it is not designed to be a particularly-salient stimulus in the auditory scene of the game.11 Music for an office work environment is meant to increase productivity without

10 Robert M. Yerkes and John Dillingham Dodson, "The Relation of Strength of Stimulus to Rapidity of Habit- Formation" Journal of Comparative Neurology and Psychology 18 (1908), 459–482. 11 Muzak is a company that creates functional music meant to influence the listener in particular ways, though the word music is often used to refer to functional music in general (this is similar to how many people will refer to all facial tissues as Kleenex).

146 distracting the individual from the task at hand; therefore, it must escape conscious attention and not trigger an orienting response, while still maintaining a relatively-high level of arousal in the listener.12 This kind of functional music avoids human voices, crescendos, or other signs of approaching or proximal sound, and abrupt changes in dynamics or texture.

Functional music works better if it is familiar, predictable, and fairly up-tempo; it is significant to note that all of these features are characteristic of early video game loops. The repetition of the loop can lull the player into a kind of ease or comfort with the rhythms of play, and yet the quick tempo will motivate them to continue on in the level.

Game composers may opt to intentionally manipulate the player, however, and use music that will lead to a higher arousal level in a simpler area, in order to increase the difficulty of the level (and increase player satisfaction upon successful completion of the level). Koji Kondo famously used music this way in Super Mario Bros. (Nintendo, 1985), doubling the tempo of the background level track as a signal that the player was running out of time. To further grab the listener’s attention, at the 100-second mark a short chromatic signal would play before the tempo doubled, startling the player and potentially raising her heart rate and stress levels as she rushes to complete the level in time (see Example 3.4).

12 Lorraine Plourde, “Sonic Air-Conditioning: Muzak as Affect Management for Office Workers in Japan,” The Senses and Society 12, no. 1 (2017), 18-34; Carl J. Charnetski, Francis X. Brennan, Jr., and James F. Harrison, “Effect of Music and Auditory Stimuli on Secretory Immunoglobulin a (IGA),” Perceptual and Motor Skills 7, no. 3 (1998), 1163-1170.

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Example 3.4. Koji Kondo, Super Mario Bros. (Nintendo, 1985), “Hurry!”

Game Sound and Attention

Attention relates directly to arousal; an orienting response occurs when a sound commands a player’s attention. Sounds that lower phasic arousal can help a player to concentrate or remain invested in a task. However, attention is not synonymous with arousal, and thus warrants its own discussion before moving on to more complex systems of emotional elicitation in gaming. As Elisabeth Weis asserts, “The soundtrack of real life is too dense for film. In the real world, our minds select certain noises and filter out others…On film, the sound effects editors and rerecording mixers have to focus for us.”13 This process of focusing on certain sounds to the exclusion of others in a noisy environment is known as the cocktail party effect (or selective attention), first described by E.C. Cherry in 1953.14 As

Hildegard Westerkamp writes:

Audio technology allows us to use environmental sound as a type of language that has its own set of meanings depending on the context within which it occurs or into which we place it in a composition. The soundscape composer may use it like a writer uses words in order to comment on the essential characteristics of a soundscape and heighten the listener’s perception of it. Or alternately the composer

13 Weis, “Sync Tanks,” 58. 14 E.C. Cherry, “Some Experiments on the Recognition of Speech, with One and Two Ears,” Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 25 (1953), 975-979.

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may work like a caricaturist who exaggerates the contours, say, or a person’s face and thus sharpens the viewer’s perception of it; or like a landscape painter who deepens our understanding of and relationship to a place through a certain use of color, light and shadow; or like a photographer who zooms in on the details not visible to the naked eye. In the same way the soundscape composer can draw our ears more deeply into the contours of sound, its colors and textures and into its details, and thereby enrich our perceptions of and change our attitudes towards our daily sound environment.15

Selective attention is often taken care of for the auditor in the ludic context: the mix controls the volume of each individual element in the soundscape and helps to focus the player’s ears on the most important sounds at any given point.16 By removing the need for the player to selectively attend to game sound, there are greater opportunities to manipulate exogenous

(passive) attention (when an event in the environment commands awareness, as in a sudden sound effect that startles the player), or endogenous attention (when the player willfully focuses on a stimulus or thought, as when the player is concentrating intently on their task in the game).

Music, in addition to potentially lowering phasic arousal, can shift players into a mode of endogenous attention, which could be one reason for the pervasive use of wall-to- wall background music in early video games.17 The musical loops facilitated endogenous attention, so that the introduction of communicative sound effects could act as an

15 Hildegard Westerkamp, “Soundscape Composition: Linking Inner and Outer Worlds,” Talk for Soundscape before 2000, (November 19-26, Amsterdam), 3. 16 In long-form modern games, there are often options in the main menu screen to control for the volume of the dialogue, sound effects, and music separately. An experienced player can thus customize the soundscape to avoid audio fatigue or to become more sensitive and responsive to auditory cues, but a novice might want to rely on the default mix for optimal performance. Early games did not typically have this kind of customization, as the sound and music were both synthesized in the same locations on the PSG and SPC-700 sound chips. 17 Thomas Schäfer and Jörg Fachner, “Listening to Music Reduces Eye Movements,” Attention, Perception & Psychophysics 77, no. 2 (2015), 551-559; Schäfer and Fachner found that music lowered phasic arousal and had other physiological effects such as reducing eye movement.

149 exogenous attentional cue and raise phasic arousal as needed. A study by MacLean et al. from 2009 investigated whether a sudden-onset stimulus could improve sensitivity during a task that required participants to sustain attention; they found that exogenous attention can enhance perceptual sensitivity, so it would appear that the combination of music (facilitating endogenous attention) with effects (facilitating exogenous attention) can help players to focus and stay involved in their task.18 This manipulation of attention has a powerful effect on neural patterns during play.19

Sensation is inherently utilitarian, discerning the most important information form the environment in order to make decisions that increase one’s adaptive fitness. In other words, the purpose of sensation is not to tell the whole truth and nothing but the truth; senses are not equipped to handle all types of sensory stimuli available, and instead focus on a limited range of possible sensations that may be most salient for survival.20 Each organism evolves the mechanisms it needs to survive best in its given environment, and so the perceptual range is based on adaptive necessity. The auditory sense focuses on finding sources of sound in the environment, in order to detect potential threats or opportunities or to strengthen human social bonds. The auditory sense is a subjective experience of acoustical

18 Katherina A. MacLean, Stephen R. Aichele, David A. Bridwell, George R. Mangun, Ewa Wojciulik, and Clifford D. Saron, “Interactions between Endogenous and Exogenous Attention During Vigiliance,” Attention, Perception, & Psychophysics 71, no. 5 (2009), 1042-1058; MacLean et al. found that the effect of the sudden-onset stimulus on performance had to do with expectation: when the stimulus was unpredictable, sensitivity went up but performance did not. When the sudden-onset stimulus was more predictable (as in a video game, when a certain action prompts a sound and the player knows to expect this response), the participant did not suffer the decrement in performance. 19 Cohen, “Music as a Source of Emotion in Film,” 894. 20 Jad Abumrad and Robert Krulwich, “Colors.” Radiolab, May 21, 2012; For example, human eyes cannot perceive ultraviolet and infrared wavelengths, but some species have extra cones in their ocular structures that allow them to see colors we are not able to.

150 sound; sorted and processed by the brain as it parses the acoustical environment into an auditory scene that makes sense (a process known as auditory scene analysis).

In film and video games, the sound sources would often be invisible or impossible in real life, but the auditory sense creates an attribution of the sound to a visual source, resolving the acoustic input into a meaningful whole. Annabel Cohen echoes this assertion, stating, “The simultaneous presentation of music and film automatically elicits bottom up principles that entail perceptual grouping in both auditory and visual domains. When the auditory information and visual information are structurally congruent (e.g., share temporal accent patterns), the congruent information becomes the figure, the focus of attention.”21

Video game sound is always a complete abstraction; rather than emanating from the characters on the screen, it is always either synthesized by the sound chip, or prerecorded and recalled according to player input—the avatar is soundless, but the synchronization of synthesized sounds to player actions or game state changes creates a kind of magnetic field between visuals and sound.22 After game sounds engage attentional processes, they can then do other work, such as communicating information about the game state or eliciting emotion.

Game Sound as Communicative Signal

Sound effects’ most important function is to provide information to the player, to serve as sonic signals. Signals, first described by Konrad Lorenz in 1939, are intentional

21 Cohen, “Music as a Source of Emotion in Film,” 893. 22 Inger Ekman, “A Cognitive Approach to the Emotional Function of Game Sound,” in The Oxford Handbook Interactive Audio, ed. Karen Collins, Bill Kapralos, and Holly Tessler, (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2009), 201; “Sound is one of the building blocks for creating a coherent, plausible environment, and engaging the player with the narrative setting. But apparent realism is not the end goal of narrative fit. Sound has high narrative fit when it facilitates narrative comprehension, even if it does so with unrealistic sound.”

151 communicative acts comprising several distinctive features: multi-modality (including distinctive visual and auditory elements), the employment of purpose-specific anatomical and behavioral elements (such as a rattlesnake’s rattle, which is reserved for signaling impending attack), the intention to influence the behavior of others, and the tendency to be quite obvious in order to better convey certain information.23 In the animal kingdom there are also unintentional communicative acts known as cues, which tend to be unimodal, do not involve purpose-specific anatomy, are learned rather than innate, and tend to be a more subtle display from the creature because the communicative act is accidental.24 Video game sounds are learned associations as a result of their fictive nature; many of these sounds are not ‘natural,’ and so the player must learn their meaning in the process of play.25 And yet, everything else about game sound effects labels them as a signal; game sounds are obvious

(standing out from the background track in terms of tempo, register, timbre, or harmonic implication), frequently multi-modal (the sound is often joined to a visual component; or, in later games, haptic feedback through “rumble packs” on controllers), employ specific sounds for a singular purpose (sound effects rarely represent multiple meanings), and meant to influence the behavior of the player (informing a player of impending danger will make them more cautious, whereas a sound indicating a secret in the room helps the player to recognize an opportunity). David Huron has written that signaling theory, drawn from the ethology

23 Konrad Lorenz, Vergleichende Verhaltensforschung, Zoologische Anzeiger Supplement, no. 12 (1939), 69-102; John M. Smith and David Harper, Animal Signals (Oxford: Oxford University Press 1939). 24 David Huron, “Cues and Signals: An Ethological Approach to Music-Related Emotion” Signata 6 (2015), 331-351. 25 Ekman, “Cognitive Approach,” 207; “During play, the game links events with sounds…Accordingly, sound- meaning links that might be arbitrary in the beginning will become associated with repeated encounters.”

152 literature, could represent a powerful mechanism for affect induction.26 Signals are meant to influence or change the behavior of the observer, just as game sounds may serve to alter a player’s strategic choices during play.

Game Sound and Habituation

The background musical loop will play over and over again while the player navigates a specific area. Depending on the number of times the track repeats, this incessant looping will likely lead to habituation, the decreased sensitivity to the musical stimulus due to its repeated presentation.27 I discussed habituation in Chapter 2, so I will not repeat that material in detail here, but it is an important component in understanding game sound’s appeal to the player’s attentional and perceptual processes. A level loop that repeats over and over will eventually be less salient in the soundscape; the player will eventually forget the music is even present. As David Huron mentions, habituation is not equivalent to auditory fatigue; “It is not that certain neurons in the cochlea, for example, reduce their rate of firing because of repeated stimulation. Habituation is an attentional process; it is the brain simply ignoring particular sensory inputs.”28 Therefore, the music will continue to exert influence

26 Huron, “Cues and Signals,” para. 65; Kai Tuuri and Tuomas Eerola, “Formulating a Revised Taxonomy for Modes of Listening,” Journal of New Music Research 41, no. 1 (2012), 1-16; Karen Collins, Playing with Sound: A Theory of Interacting with Sound and Music in Video Games (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2013), 5-6; Collins suggests adding a mode called Signal Listening to Chion’s modes: Causal Listening, in which we gather information or seek a source for a sound; Semantic Listening, in which we interpret a message; and Reduced Listening, in which we listen for the acoustic properties such as timbre. Collins’s Signal or Anticipatory Listening involves “…listening to navigational information about direction, proximity, and spatial cues; status information about a process or event; and semiotic information on the nature of virtual characters that we meet or places that we encounter.” 27 Huron, “Habituation-Fluency Theory of Repetition,” 9; “Formally, habituation is defined as a decrease in responsiveness resulting from the repeated presentation of an eliciting stimulus.” 28 Huron, “Habituation-Fluency Theory of Repetition,” 9.

153 on the player, maintaining arousal levels even if the music falls away from conscious awareness.

One can regain responsiveness to the initial stimulus if a novel, dishabituating stimulus is presented (this stimulus engages exogenous attentional mechanisms and can raise phasic arousal); in the case of the video game, sound effects often serve as a dishabituating stimulus. Thus, depending on the specific conditions of gameplay, game music and Foley can serve two main functions with regards to attention and arousal: first, the two types of sound can create a Muzak-like maintenance of optimal player arousal without attracting attention.29 The second function of sound and Foley is to directly manipulate the player’s attention and arousal levels through dishabituating changes in dynamics, tempo, or texture.

Combining music and Foley’s regulatory capabilities with the signaling mechanisms of sound effects, the game composer has an tremendous amount of control over the player’s affective experience of the video game.

Music, Emotion, and Measurement

In order to speak to the elicitation of emotion that is at the heart of game sound, it is important to establish what is meant by the word, and how it differs from affect. Although affect and emotion are often used as approximate synonyms, Jussi Parikka suggests that

“…affect should not be directly reduced to emotion, but instead refers to the embodied, visceral, pre-conscious, but also relational, tuning of bodies of various kinds.”30 Parikka

29 David Huron, “The Ramp Archetype and the Maintenance of Passive Auditory Attention,” Music Perception 10, no. 1 (1992), 83-92; This is consistent with David Huron’s work on the “ramp archetype,” a method of maintaining passive auditory attention (active is paying attention; passive is when something grabs your attention). 30 Parikka, What is Media Archaeology? 31.

154 positions this statement in a discussion of what media theory refers to as a ‘technics of the body’–a notion that our bodies have always been conditioned by and responsive to technology. His form of media archeology involves investigating the process of perception with an emphasis on both pre-conscious, physiological responses and our external attachments to various forms of media, just as I do here. So, if emotions are popularly conflated with notions of affect, as Parikka suggests, then how is emotion defined or delineated in psychology and music cognition, and how is it measured?

Affect is a broad, general term involving cognitive evaluation of objects, and comprising preference (liking or disliking), mood (a general state), aesthetic evaluation, and emotion.31 So emotion is a specific type of affective phenomenon. Although the meaning of the term emotion may have certain common understandings, its formal definitions vary widely. Kleinginna and Kleinginna investigated 92 different definitions of the concept in various textbooks, articles, and dictionaries, and identified eleven categories of definitions.32

Many definitions emphasize that emotions require an eliciting object or stimulus,

31 Patrik N. Juslin, “Emotional Reactions to Music,” in The Oxford Handbook of Music Psychology (2nd edition), ed. Susan Hallam, Ian Cross, and Michael Thaut (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2009); 132. 32 Paul R. Kleinginna, Jr., and Anne M. Kleinginna, “A Categorized List of Emotion Definitions, with Suggestions for a Consensual Definition,” Motivation and Emotion 5, no. 4 (1981), 345-379; the categories are based on the emphasis of the definition: Subjective aspects; Experiential aspects; Affective feelings of excitement/depression or pleasure/displeasure; Cognitive appraisal and/or labeling processes; External emotional stimuli; Mediating physiological mechanisms regulating emotion; Emotional/expressive behavior; Functional consequences: emotion as disruptive or maladaptive; Functional consequences: emotion as adaptive to increase the likelihood of an organism meeting its needs; the multiple aspects of emotion; Restriction or trying to differentiate emotion from other processes (such as motivation); Overlap of emotion and motivation; and Skeptical statements questioning the utility of the concept. On 355, they offer this composite definition: “Emotion is a complex set of interactions among subjective and objective factors, mediated by neural/hormonal systems, which can (a) give rise to affective experiences such as feelings of arousal, pleasure/displeasure; (b) generate cognitive processes such as emotionally relevant perceptual effects, appraisals, labeling processes; (c) activate widespread physiological adjustments to the arousing conditions; and (d) lead to behavior that is often, but not always, expressive, goal-directed, and adaptive.”

155 differentiating them from moods.33 As Annabel J. Cohen suggests, “Whereas both moods and emotions may be regarded as dispositions toward appraising emotional meaning structures and a readiness to respond in a certain manner, moods do not have objects; emotions do.”34 With this distinction in mind, Patrik N. Juslin and John A. Sloboda define emotions as:

…relatively brief, intense, and rapidly changing responses to potentially important events (subjective challenges or opportunities) in the external or internal environment, usually of a social nature, which involves a number of subcomponents (cognitive changes, subjective feelings, expressive behavior, and action tendencies) that are more or less ‘synchronized.’ ”35

In this body of research, music typically serves as the eliciting object (or the “potentially important event” that engenders response); however, researchers have also sought to explore whether musical emotion induction is a result of specific musical structures and their properties such as dynamics, tempo, acceleration/deceleration, rhythm, textural density, or harmonic progression.36 Changes in emotion can be captured in terms of shifts in arousal

33 Cook, Analysing Musical Multimedia, 23; “…we don't generally experience emotions in the abstract: we experience them in relation to specific objects in specific contexts (for instance, you might be jealous of your partner, or of someone else's, but you cannot just be jealous)…the broad expressive potential of musical sounds acquires specific meaning by virtue of its alignment with words and pictures--through its transfer, in other words, to a variety of diverse objects. But if this is valid, then it follows that music in the abstract--Kivy's 'music alone'--doesn't have meaning. What it has, rather, is a potential for the construction or negotiation of meaning in specific contexts. It is a bundle of generic attributes in search of an object. Or it might be described as a structured semantic space, a privileged site for the negotiation of meaning.” 34 Cohen, “Music as a Source of Emotion in Film,” 880. 35 Patrik N. Juslin and John A. Sloboda, “At the Interface Between the Inner and Outer World: Psychological Perspectives,” in Handbook of Music and Emotion: Theory, Research, Applications (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 74. 36 Ian Cross and Caroline Tolbert, “Music and Meaning,” in The Oxford Handbook of Music Psychology (2nd edition), ed.Susan Hallam, Ian Cross, and Michael Thaut (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2009).

156 levels (a state of alertness or readiness for action) or valence (positive or negative attributions).37

Emotions are most frequently measured from subjective self-reporting, expressive behavior, bodily responses, or brain scans and physiological measurements. Self-reports are common, but can be susceptible to data corruption due to demand characteristics—in other words, subjects may notice subtle cues from the researchers and respond as they feel they are expected to.38 As Juslin writes “It is precisely for this reason that it is advisable to combine self-report with measures that are less sensitive to demand characteristics.”39 Empirical studies have shown consistently that music has a measurable effect on the bodies of listeners.40 Researchers can monitor psychophysiological changes induced by musical stimuli in order to access internal, invisible, or pre-conscious responses to music that may belie self- reported arousal levels or perceived emotional changes; these measures can include heart rate, systolic and diastolic blood pressure, blood volume, respiration rates, skin conductance, muscular tension, temperature, gastric motility, pupillary action, or startle reflexes.41

Additionally, researchers have used mismatch negativity (MMN) from electroencephalogram

(EEG) data to understand neuronal responses to the event-related potentials (ERP) of

37 James A. Russell, “A Circumplex Model of Affect,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 39 (1980), 1161- 1178. 38 Martin T. Orne, “On the Social Psychology of the Psychological Experiment with Particular Reference to Demand Characteristics and Their Implications.” American Psychologist 17 (1962), 776-783. 39 Juslin, “Emotional Reactions to Music,” 134. 40 Ivan Nyklíček, Julian F. Thayer, and Lorenz J.P. Van Doornen. “Cardiorespiratory Differentiation of Musically-Induced Emotions.” Journal of Psychophysiology 11, no. 4 (1997), 304-321; this study investigated autonomic differentiation of emotions—whether cardiorespiratory measures could differentiate between discrete emotions. They found successful differentiation based on two components: respiratory (relating to arousal levels) and chronotropic effects (changes in heart rate). 41 David A. Hodges, “Bodily Responses to Music,” in The Oxford Handbook of Music Psychology (2nd Edition), ed. Susan Hallam, Ian Cross, and Michael Thaut (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2009).

157 particular sounds; these neural processes result in increased oxygenation of the blood that changes the local magnetic properties of certain tissues, allowing researchers to capture these changes through the use of functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI).42 A person’s body can register responses to the eliciting stimulus at a pre-conscious level, even if they report that they are not experiencing an emotion.

However, observed differences in physiological measures (such as heart rate) demonstrate the complexity of attempting to analyze the effects of musical stimuli; as David

A. Hodges found, it is often assumed that “stimulative music” (music that is fast, active, loud, etc.) leads to increases in heart rate, whereas “sedative music” (music that is slow, static, quiet, etc.) causes a decrease in pulse. However, heart rate does not always change in response to musical stimuli, and sometimes registers the opposite of the expected response.

Hodges suggests that this could be due to subjective differences in the appraisal of musical stimuli between researchers and participants; for example, preferences could cause a listener to have an unexpected response to a musical stimulus. A favorite sad song might lead to increased arousal despite the musical features that caused the researcher to categorize it as sedative. Hodges suggests that while these measures can tell us a great deal about the effects of music, there is room to acknowledge that some bodily responses might be idiosyncratic and influenced by the subjective. Though emotions have a biological basis, there are also a range of socio-cultural influences on the expression of particular emotions, and psychological mechanisms that serve as mediators between external events and the

42 Laurel J. Trainor and Robert J. Zatorre. “The Neurobiology of Musical Expectations from Perception to Emotion,” in The Oxford Handbook of Music Psychology (2nd edition), ed. Susan Hallam, Ian Cross, and Michael Thaut (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2009).

158 emotional response they elicit.43 As Juslin and Sloboda write, “…emotions cannot be explained merely in terms of objectively defined stimuli—the stimuli gain their significance from how they are processed by the individual in a specific context.”44

Although emotions are often described as a sequence of events, affective processing is continuous. David LaBerge found that attentional processes can modify auditory input at the earliest stage of cortical processing, using both top-down and bottom-up controls. Top- down involves higher-order processes such as musical expectation (recalling emotional experiences through association) and directs attention to musical context. Bottom-up control performs an evaluative function, directing attention to a sound’s source during sudden onset of a new stimulus.45 Building on this, Clore and Ortony proposed a Dual Process Model of

Emotion arising from cognitive appraisal in simultaneous bottom-up and top-down mechanisms.46 However, because of this simultaneous processing and the interaction of objective and subjective responses to sound, it can be difficult to definitively capture the boundaries of an emotional experience; this complexity suggests the need for a variety of approaches to the phenomenon of music and emotion.47

While there are inherent difficulties in relying on self-report to understand cognitive emotional processes such as demand characteristics, subjective measures can capture certain similarities in affective response that confirm the results of empirical studies. Emotions are

43 This is similar to how impairments have certain medical or biological bases but find social expression in processes of identification and disablement. 44 Juslin and Sloboda, “Psychological Perspectives,” 75. 45 David LaBerge, “Attentional Processing in Music Listening: A Cognitive Neuroscience Approach,” Psychomusicology: A Journal of Research in Music Cognition 14, no. 1-2 (1995), 20-34. 46 Gerald L. Clore and Andrew Ortony, “Cognitive in Emotion: Never, Sometimes, or Always?” in The Cognitive Neuroscience of Emotion, ed. Lynn Nadel and Richard D. Lane, 24-61 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000). 47 Juslin and Sloboda, “Psychological Perspectives,” 82.

159 understood on an innate level by those in the same cultural sphere, and so self-reports can help to outline that culturally-mediated understanding of emotion. Juslin and Laukka performed a meta-analysis of 41 studies focusing on the attribution of particular emotions to musical performance, and found that the ascribed emotion could be reliably predicted from a small set of characteristics of the stimulus relating to pitch, speed, intensity, and articulation.48 Västfjäll (2002) looked at 41 studies of musical emotion induction and found that the choice of musical material to elicit a particular emotion was remarkably similar; in some cases, the exact same piece was used in 12 or more studies to induce the same specific emotion. This study reflects that there is a common ascription of particular moods or emotional affects by the researchers involved.49 While these studies have a few issues (the pieces used were rather short, and the number of emotional categories rather small), they seem to demonstrate consistent underlying criteria for attributing emotion or affect to music for Western-enculturated listeners.

The BRECVEMA Framework

Although there are a variety of approaches to the study of music and emotion, there are certain consistent conclusions within the field: although music can induce a variety of different simple (happy, sad) and complex emotions (pride, longing), music tends to arouse positive emotions (sometimes even if the musical stimulus has a perceived negative valence).50 Mixtures of emotions can occur in response to a musical stimulus, but they are

48 Patrik N. Juslin and Petri Laukka, “Communication of Emotions in Vocal Expression and Music Performance: Different Channels, Same Code?” Psychological Bulletin 129, no. 5 (2003), 770-814. 49 Daniel Västfjäll, “Emotion Induction through Music: A Review of the Musical Mood Induction Procedure.” Musicae Scientiae, 5, no. 1 (2002), 173-211. 50 Alf Gabrielsson “Strong Experiences with Music;” Patrik N. Juslin et al., “An Experience Sampling Study of Emotional Reactions to Music: Listener, Music, and Situation,” Emotion 8 (2008), 668-683; Patrik N. Juslin et

160 less common.51 One thing is clear from the existing bodies of research: sound induces emotional responses with direct physiological implications that are objectively measurable.

However, researchers are still exploring exactly what emotions music can evoke, and the mechanisms behind how sound or music influences listeners.52 One influential model for understanding this process is the “BRECVEMA framework,” developed by Juslin and

Västfjäll.53 The BRECVEMA framework comprises eight mechanisms by which music can evoke an emotion:

• Brain Stem Reflex: an automatic, unlearned response to a musical stimulus that

increases arousal. This occurs when an acoustic feature of a sound exceeds a certain

threshold in the auditory system and causes it to immediately alert the brain. Sounds

that are startling (sudden, loud, dissonant, or accelerating) can all trigger this

response.54

al., “Emotional Reactions to Music in a nationally-representative sample of Swedish Adults: Prevalence and Causal Influences,” Musicae Scientiae 15 (2011), 174-207; John A. Sloboda, “Empirical Studies of Emotional Response to Music,” in Cognitive Bases of Muaical Communication, ed. Mari Riess-Jones and Susan Holleran (Washington, DC: American Psychological Association, 1992), 33-46; Marcel Zentner, Didier Grandjean, and Klaus R. Scherer, “Emotions Evoked by the Sound of Music: Characterization, Classification, and Measurement,” Emotion 8, no. 4 (2008), 494-521. 51 Gabrielsson, “Strong Experiences with Music.” 52 Leonard B. Meyer, Emotion and Meaning in Music (Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press, 1956); W. Jay Dowling and Dane L. Harwood, Music Cognition (New York: Academic Press, 1986); Hans Baumgartner, “Remembrance of Things Past: Music, Autobiographical Memory, and Emotions,” Advances in Consumer Research 19 (1992), 613-620; Patrik N. Juslin, “Vocal Expression and Musical Expression: Parallels and Contrasts,” in Proceedings of the 16th Conference of the International Society for Research on Emotions, ed. Arvid Kappas, 281-284 (Quebec City: ISRE Publications, 2000); Patrik N. Juslin and John A. Sloboda, “Psychological Perspectives on Music and Emotion,” in Music and Emotion: Theory and Research, ed. Juslin and Sloboda (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001). 53 Patrik N. Juslin, “Emotional Reactions to Music,” in The Oxford Handbook of Music Psychology (2nd edition), ed. Susan Hallam, Ian Cross, and Michael Thaut (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2009), 139; Patrik N. Juslin and Daniel Västfjäll, “Emotional Responses to Music: The Need to Consider Underlying Mechanisms.” Behavioral and Brain Sciences 3, no. 5 (2008), 555-575. 54 Patrik N. Juslin, László Harmat, and Tuomas Eerola, “What Makes Music Emotionally Significant? Exploring the Underlying Mechanisms,” Psychology of Music 42, no. 4 (2014), 599-623; Juslin and Västfjäll

161

• Rhythmic Entrainment: a process where a listener’s internal rhythms (such as breathing

or heart rate) synchronize with that of the musical rhythm.55

• Evaluative Conditioning: when a musical structure (such as a melody) triggers a

conditioned response due to repeated exposure to that type of structure with a

particular emotional experience. After conditioning, the musical stimulus can evoke

the emotion independently.

• Contagion: As Juslin defines it, emotional contagion is a process “whereby an emotion

is induced by a piece of music because an independent ‘brain module’ response to

certain stimulus features as if to mimic the moving expression internally.”56

• Visual Imagery: wherein the listener “conjures up inner images through a nonverbal

mapping between ‘metaphoric affordances’ of the music and ‘image schemata’

grounded in bodily experience.”57

• Episodic Memory: Also called the “Darling, they are playing out tune” phenomenon,

episodic memory involves the induction of emotion due to the association of the

music with a personal experience.58

“Emotional Responses to Music” demonstrates how a sound will undergo several analyses before it even reaches the primary auditory cortex. 55 Martin Clayton, Rebecca Darlene Sager, and Udo Will, “In Time With the Music: The Concept of Entrainment and Its Significance for Ethnomusicology,” Eurpoean Meetings in Ethnomusicology 11 (2005), 1-82; G. Harrer and H. Harrer, “Music, Emotion, and Autonomic Function,” in Music and the Brain: Studies in the Neurology of Music, ed. Macdonald Critchley and R.A. Henson (London: William Heinemann, 1977). 56 Juslin, “Emotional Reactions to Music,” 139. 57 Juslin, “Emotional Reactions to Music,” 139; see also George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Metaphors we Live By (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980). 58 John B. Davies, The Psychology of Music (London: Hutchinson, 1978); Baumgartner, “Remembrance of Things Past.”

162

• Musical Expectancy: emotion induced due to the music either failing to conform to the

listener’s expectations about its progression in some way, delaying an anticipated

resolution, or confirming an internal musical prediction.59

• Aesthetic Judgment: an emotion arising from a listener’s appraisal of the aesthetic value

of music.60

Listeners might activate one or more of these mechanisms when listening; this may account for individual differences in emotional responses to particular musical stimuli.

Although it is clear that sound can elicit certain responses from players, it is difficult to attribute physiological stress responses or other results solely to a single domain in gaming: it is difficult to isolate the effects of musical stimuli in the game context, where they are inherently integrated into the experience with visuals and gameplay.61 For example, Van der Vijgh et al. found that combining game music with other aversive stimuli tended to decrease heart rate and stress responses, which was not consistent with the hypothesis based on their literature review. However, they remark that most studies focusing on game music and increased cardiovascular response have isolated particular musical structures rather than

59 David Huron, Sweet Anticipation: Music and the Psychology of Expectation (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2006); see also Trainor and Zatorre. “The Neurobiology of Musical Expectations from Perception to Emotion,” 15; “These prediction mechanisms are largely cortically based, but interact with the dopaminergic reward system, which plays an important role in learning and motivation, and is also closely linked to pleasure and valuation. We provided extensive physiological evidence from EEG, fMRI, and MEG studies that music makes use of these general-purpose mechanisms, and that musical structure constantly engages the brain in a game of prediction.” 60 Juslin, “Emotional Reactions to Music,” 139; “Perceptual, cognitive, and emotional inputs about the musical event are then filtered through a relative weighting of the subjective criteria by the listener.” 61 Benny Van der Vijgh et al., “Meta-analysis of Digital Game And Study Characteristics Eliciting Physiological Stress Responses,” Psychophysiology 52 (2015), 1083; Estate M. Sokhadze, “Effects of Music on the Recovery of Autonomic and Electrocortical Activity After Stress Induced by Averse Visual Stimuli,” Applied Psychophysiology and Biofeedback 32, no. 1 (2007), 31-50; Richard A. MacFarland, “Relationship of Skin Temperature Changes to the Emotions Accompanying Music,” Biofeedback and Self-Regulation. 10, no. 3 (1985), 255-267; and Nyklíček, Thayer, and Van Doornen, “Cardiorespiratory Differentiation of Musically-Induced Emotions.”

163 presenting them holistically in a realistic gameplay scenario. Therefore, the specific qualities of the game music that may have lowered heart rate were difficult to ascertain and code in the meta-analysis. They suggest this explanation for the deviation from other empirical findings: “An alternative explanation could be that the addition of game music to a digital game stressor requires more auditory processing and attention, resulting in a decrease in heart rate.”62 From the literature presented above, it is clear that the sound can function in different ways with regards to a player’s arousal and attention, and so it makes sense that the data on game sound in context is less clear than the controlled studies in music cognition.

While studies of game sound in isolation can demonstrate clear effects on the bodies of players, sound in context is appraised continuously and combined with other stimuli.63

Mark Grimshaw speaks to this connection between aural and visual modalities, while also suggesting the primacy of sound for evaluating situations in games:

…notwithstanding the perceptual effects of combined sensory phenomena, removing all sensory information but that derived from my hearing and combining it with general experience and knowledge, I would still be able to describe in great part the environments in which I may be situated. Even when the other senses are available, I often rely solely on sound to inform me.”64

Grimshaw remarks how sounds can provoke images (visual imagery from BRECVEMA), and how seen but unheard objects can evoke sounds (which can involve several processes

62 Van der Vijgh et al., “Meta-Analysis,” 1092. 63 Ekman, “Cognitive Approach,” 197; “…sound is typically present in combination with other modalities (visual, haptic), as part of a narrative, and embedded in a functional framework of play...Hence, even if different game sounds have identifiable emotional affordances, no single acoustic property, sound type, voice quality, or tonal progression can be associated with a specific emotional power independently of its function in the system as a whole.” 64 Mark Grimshaw, “Sound and Player Immersion in Digital Games,” in The Oxford Handbook of Sound Studies, ed. Trevor Pinch and Karin Bijsterveld (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2009), 347-348; Cook, Analysing Musical Multimedia, 22.“

164 such as evaluative conditioning or episodic memory). Ekman suggests that although the visual mode is privileged in games, this is precisely what grants sound its power: “With our focus mostly turned to the visual modality, sound tends to slip into our experience relatively unnoticed. This makes us especially receptive to the emotional influences of sound.”65

Emotion and Game Sound

Although I have been reviewing some of the literature from music psychology and cognition, we have seen that many of the same processes apply to communicative sounds in the game, particularly those from the 8- and 16-bit eras. Due to the nature of sound synthesis on the NES and SNES (described in Chapter 2), many sound effects were deployed in the same sound channels as the music and were built from the same assembly- language processes, sampling procedures, and libraries of available tones. David Huron describes our experience of listening to sound as an active process of creating an auditory image, “the subjective experience of a singular sonic entity or acoustic object.”66 The images can, and often do, relate to identification of a sound’s source. The functional boundaries described in Chapter 2 between categories of sounds are largely perceptual, based on the clarity of the auditory image evoked by each stimulus. And yet, there is slippage, and the boundaries are not finite or absolute: Walter Murch has written that even in film, most sound effects are like “sound-centaurs;” simultaneously communicative and musical.67 As

65 Ekman, “Cognitive Approach,” 200; Deborah J. Macinnis and C. Whan Park, “The Differential Role of Characteristics of Music on High- and Low- Involvement Consumers’ Processing of Ads.” Journal of Consumer Research 18, no. 2 (1991), 161-173; Collins, Playing with Sound, 27; “The theory of multisensory integration holds that there is a synthesis or binding of information that occurs between modalities in which the information that emerges could not have been obtained from each modality on its own.” 66 David Huron, “A Derivation of the Rules of Voice-leading from Perceptual Principles,” Music Perception, 19, no. 1 (2001), 1-64. 67 Murch, "Dense Clarity,” 3.

165

William Gibbons asked of the iconic descending tetrachord figure in Space Invaders (Taito,

1978) “Is this tetrachord the sound of the aliens’ inexorable march, is it a musical underscore, or is it both?” (see Example 3.5).68 And, as the earlier examples prove, there is also ambiguity between sound effects and music in early games. As a result of this inherent ambiguity, the BRECVEMA framework serves as a useful starting point for understanding some of the potential sources of emotion in game sound.

Example 3.5. Tomohiro Nishikado, Space Invaders (Taito, 1978).

Emotion is a clear site of bodily investment, implicating a player’s physiological responses to stimuli, phenomenological experiences, and subjective processes of making and articulating meaning. As we have also seen, emotion relates to perception, attention, and memory— other emphases in the broader field of cognitive psychology.

If emotion consists of responses to potentially-important events in the environment, and emotional attribution remains fairly consistent within a particular cultural milieu, then sound effects and Foley in the soundscape of a film or video game serve as potent stimuli.

These sounds represent salient events in the external environment that are cognitively appraised by the player using any number of mechanisms from the BRECVEMA framework, leading to changes in their emotional and physiological state and behavior during gameplay. They also serve as important sites of incorporation, linking the game body of the

68 Gibbons, “The Sounds in the Machine,” 348. When I set a metronome to it, I found that the loop begins at about 70 bpm, but gradually increases as the player progresses.

166 avatar to that of the player. Nicholas Cook and Annabel Cohen have suggested that musically-elicited emotion in multimedia adheres to salient features of the visual field or to the narrative; Cohen writes, “The emotional associations generated by music attach themselves automatically to the visual focus of attention or the implied topic of the narrative. Because film content provides the object of emotion generated by the music, the film helps to control the definition of the object of the emotion experienced during the presence of music.”69 In order to have any effect on the player, the game sound must engage directly with attentional processes, constantly maintaining or manipulating player’s attention to achieve certain goals. Signaling involves several domains from the BRECVEMA framework; brain stem reflex (the automatic response to the sound that increases arousal, particularly before the player has learned the meaning of the sound in the game context); evaluative conditioning (in that a sound signal can evoke a learned emotional response to a particular stimulus or structure); contagion (a tense sound might cause an anxious response in the player, for example); and visual imagery (e.g., evoking embodied experiences—a sound of injury to the avatar might cause a player to recoil as if they have been hit).

There are several kinds of emotions that can be elicited in the game context. Aki

Järvinen describes five different categories of emotional response in video games: prospect- based, fortunes-of-others, attribution, attraction, and well-being.70 Prospect-based emotions are associated with events and causal sequence and involve a mental consideration of prospects and expectations (emotions such as hope, fear, satisfaction, fears-confirmed, relief,

69 Cohen, “Music as a Source of Emotion in Film,” 880. 70 Järvinen, “Understanding Video Games as Emotional Experiences,” 85-108.

167 shock, surprise, and suspense are often related to goals, and fall under this category). In terms of game sound, this type of game emotion is often triggered purely by game sound effects. Fortunes-of-others emotions are displays of player goodwill and are most often triggered in response to events in massively multiplayer online role-playing games

(MMORPGS), where the player feels happy or sorry for another player. These types of emotions are rarely elicited by the soundscape of the game, and only apply in a limited ludic context. Attribution emotions are reactions geared towards game agents (other human beings in online games or characters within the diegesis), or the game as a whole), and usually triggered in response to the violation of an expectation. Attribution emotions include pride, resentment for an enemy, and frustration, and can be triggered by sound effects as well as particular musical tracks (such as a player bristling when the ludic leitmotif of a major adversary is heard). Attraction emotions are object-based, including liking or disliking elements of the game settings, graphics, soundtrack, or level design. These emotions can change based on familiarity and are invoked musically by the player’s aesthetic appraisal of the music and sound effects. Finally, well-being emotions relate to desirable or undesirable events in gameplay, including delight, pleasant surprise at wining or achieving a goal, distress, or dissatisfaction at game loss. Well-being emotions are often triggered musically, through short fanfares representing obtaining items or minor victories (see Example 3.6), or music representing death (Example 3.7) or game over (Example 3.8). The intensity of the elicited emotion is proportional to the extent that the event is desirable or undesirable, expected or unexpected in the game context. Well-being emotions frequently relate to gameplay as a whole (victory or failure), as opposed to the more proximal goal-oriented category of

168 prospect emotions. Sound is an important elicitor of ludic emotion in four out of Järvinen’s five categories.

Example 3.6. Hirokazu “Hip” Tanaka, Metroid (Nintendo, 1986), “Item Found.”

Example 3.7. Koji Kondo, The Legend of Zelda (Nintendo, 1986), “Death.”

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Example 3.8. Nobuo Uematsu, Final Fantasy II (Square, 1988), “Dead Theme.”

Interactivity

Some might argue that all of the expressive potential and power of a game arises from procedural rhetoric—from the rules embedded in source code—since the game cannot exist without these limitations and affordances. However, this construction paints the game as an object rather than as a dynamic process. As Olli Sotamaa writes, “Accentuating the role of coded rules in meaning making may lead to the conceiving of players as mere activators of embedded meanings.”71 Indeed, Karen Collins describes games “not as texts, but as sites of participation and practice where players construct meanings.”72 Similarly, she defines game sound “as a site of practice and productivity in which sound becomes method, material, and

71 Olli Sotamaa, “Artifact,” in The Routledge Companion to Video Game Studies, ed. Mark J.P. Wolf and Bernard Perron (New York and London: Routledge Taylor & Francis Group, 2014), 6. 72 Collins, Playing with Sound, ix.

170 mediator of experience.”73 In treating a games and the soundscapes as sites, we suggest virtual space; yet, the nature of this gamespace is rather complicated. In discussing the invented space between the real world and the bare code, game scholars speak of interactivity, immersion, transportation, presence, involvement, engagement, incorporation, and embodiment, often conflating terms or using them as approximate synonyms. What these terms have in common is that they evoke a sense of motion toward or into the game.

The player does not enter the console, but instead a world between; represented and actively, imaginatively constructed. Discussions of terms such as interactivity have tended to privilege either the player or the system, rather than the process of incorporation through play.74 After brief explorations of the variety of terms surrounding this unique quality of the medium, I will demonstrate how sound helps to create both a site of interactive potential and a process, incorporating the body of the player into the avatar.

Brenda Laurel describes interactivity as a continuum (or what she calls a “thresholdy phenomenon”) rather than a binary turned on or off by pressing a switch on the console; interactivity can be influenced by variables such as the significance of a user’s choices and their perception of their own level of participation within the system.75 Margaret Morse emphasizes the prefix of “inter,” of a space between the physical and virtual realms; interactivity in this construction is treated as a kind of translator or diplomatic liaison

73 Collins, Playing with Sound, 9. 74 Lev Manovich, The Language of New Media (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2001), 56; Manovich suggests one reason why new media theorists have tended to avoid experiential elements such as presence: “Although it is relatively easy to specify different interactive structures used in new media objects, it is much more difficult to deal theoretically with users’ experiences of those structures.” 75 Brenda Laurel, “Interface as Mimesis,” in User Centered System Design: New Perspectives on Human-Computer Interaction, ed. D.A. Norman and S. Draper (Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1986); Brenda Laurel, Computers as Theatre (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley Publishers, 1991), 20-21.

171 between player and game.76 Lori Landay builds on these constructions, describing interactivity as a property of the game system; gameplay and player agency are separate processes that nevertheless create a conversation with the code’s interactive affordances.77

The user’s sense of agency in an interactive context is dependent on what Lev Manovich has termed open and closed forms of interactivity.78 A closed form involves the user choosing among fixed elements in a particular order (even if those choices branch out and diverge).

An open form is a more dynamic, conversational model; the user’s choices generate elements or change the structure of the game. When examining games as interactive systems, certain elements influence the perceived degree of interactivity, such as the number of elements that the player can modify and the extent to which the player can enact change in the game world, as well as the speed with which the system responds to the user and how well the user feels that their input corresponds to the response.79 Interactivity is sometimes broken down into two related domains depending on which end of the process the researcher wants to explore: the experience of the user (sometimes described as spatial presence) and the affordances of the system that allow for this experience (immersion).80 By this logic,

76 Margaret Morse, “The Poetics of Interactivity” in Women, Art, and Technology, ed. J. Malloy, 16-33 (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2003), 19. 77 Lori Landay, “Interactivity,” in The Routledge Companion to Video Game Studies, ed. Mark J.P. Wolf and Bernard Perron, 174-184 (New York and London: Routledge Taylor & Francis Group, 2014), 175; “The feedback loop created by the physical participation of the user, the computer system, and the text (for example, the game) is a particular kind of communication and control.” 78 Lev Manovich, The Language of New Media, 40. 79 Matthew Lombard and Jennifer Snyder-Duch, “Interactive Advertising and Presence: A Framework,” Journal of Interactive Advertising 1, no. 2 (2001). 80 Werner Wirth et. al. "A Process Model of the Formation of Spatial Presence Experiences.” Media Psychology, 9 (2007): 493-525; on 496, Wirth writes, “Presence is conceptualized as the experiential counterpart of immersion. In short: If the media provide high immersive technologies, humans may respond with feelings of Spatial Presence. However, if immersive impulses are not provided by the media product, internal processes, for example, imagination, can compensate for that deficit in external stimulation—at least to a certain degree.”

172 immersion engenders transportation, leading to the sensation of presence within the game and its narrative.

Immersion

Definitions of immersion use a somewhat literal metaphor—a feeling of being surrounded by the game or submerged as if into a liquid; for example, Winifred Phillips describes immersion as “sinking completely within” a game.81 Other definitions suggest the pleasure of wandering, losing one’s sense of time, and flow; Tim Summers writes that

“Immersion is the rewarding experience of being joyfully lost, enveloped in the game…”82

Zach Whalen echoes Laurel’s notion of continuum, defining immersion as “…giving in to the seduction of the text’s story, to be blissfully unaware of one’s surroundings and the passing of time as one escapes into the pleasure of reading.”83 Mark Grimshaw notes that immersion is poorly understood, conflated with other terms, and ambiguously and broadly defined; however, it is also a concept that many scholars seem to intuitively understand, which accounts for its popularity.84

One popular model of immersion in game studies is the SCI model developed by

Frans Mäyrä and Laura Ermi. SCI stands for: Sensory Immersion, Challenge-Based

81 Winifred Phillips, A Composer’s Guide to Game Music (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2014), 38; she describes immersion as “sinking completely within” a game. 82 Summers, Understanding Video Game Music, 58; “Immersion is the rewarding experience of being joyfully lost, enveloped in the game…” 83 Whalen, “Play Along;” “By contrast the experience of being engaged with narrative (or any other semantic object or expression) involves an abstracted level of awareness of the object qua object. In schematic terms, immersion is the act of relying on learned behavioural scripts at a level of instinct – being ‘in the moment’ without having to be aware of what it takes to be in the moment – while engagement is the process of learning the scripts and requires an objective awareness of the object supplying the new schema. In practice, immersion and engagement provide a continuum of experience.” 84 Grimshaw, “Sound and Player Immersion,” 358; “…concepts such as presence, being there, engagement, and flow are used in part, whole, or in combination to describe states or processes of immersion.” See also Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience (New York: Harper Perennial, 1990).

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Immersion, and Imaginative Immersion. Sensory immersion arises from the vividness of audiovisual representation; the degree to which the represented reality appears credible to the player. Challenge-Based immersion arises from gameplay, rulesets, and difficulty, relating to the balance of ability and challenge that engender flow.85 Pursuant to this, Alison

McMahan has suggested that the game facilitates immersion through manipulation of player expectation, providing a balance of surprise and certainty about where the game will go next.86 Imaginative immersion engages the player’s creative or imaginative processes through the use of narrative. This model is useful in that shifts from the study of games as objects to discuss the notion of games (and gameplay itself) as dynamic process.87

Game sound can vitally participate in all three forms of immersion. This is why the soundscape is such a potent site of player incorporation. Game sound need not be “real” in order to create credibility and vividness; although Ermi and Mäyrä suggest that modern games are “audiovisually impressive, three-dimensional and stereophonic worlds that surround their players in a very comprehensive manner,” we have seen from our earlier

85 Grimshaw, “Sound and Player Immersion,” 358; “The process of internalizing these frames is related to flow but…cannot be equated with it as flow is a description of activity rather than a description of the environment in which such activity takes place.” 86 Alison McMahan, “Immersion, Engagement, and Presence: A New Method for Analyzing 3-D Video Games,” in The Video Game Theory Reader, ed. Mark J.P. Wolf and Bernard Perron, 67-87 (New York: Routledge, 2003), 75-76. Recall that musical expectation was one of the components of the BRECVEMA model—an important elicitor of emotion in games. In McMahan’s formulation, surities conform to or confirm player expectations, whereas surprises provoke the player, priming them for action or helping them to navigate the world. 87 Laura Ermi and Frans Mäyrä, “Fundamental Components of the Gameplay Experience: Analysing Immersion,” in Changing Views: Worlds in Play. Selected Papers of the 2005 Digital Games Research Association’s Second International Conference, ed. Suzanne de Castell and Jennifer Jenson, 15-27 (2005); 21; “…sensory immersion related to the audiovisual execution of games…[challenge-based immersion] is the feeling of immersion that is at its most powerful when one is able to achieve a satisfying balance of challenges and abilities …We call this dimension of game experience in which one becomes absorbed with the stories and the world, or begins to feel for or identify with a game character, imaginative immersion.”

174 examples that fidelity to an authentic audio source is not necessary to create a compelling sense of realism in the game.88 Mario’s jump sound is more immersive because of its unrealism (rather than in spite of it), because of how it engages with the player’s cognitive processes and embodied image schema. As Grimshaw suggests,

The sonification of the player’s in-game actions is the realism required, in part, for immersion in the game world rather than, necessarily, the use of authentic audio samples. In simulating the processes of acoustic environments of the real world within virtual worlds, game designers provide not only indexical, real-world sounds, sometimes in addition to more fantastical sounds, but also a simulation of sound genesis and behavior in the game world that is similar to that found in the real world…This is an immersion based primarily on contextual realism rather than object realism, verisimilitude of action rather than authenticity of sample.89

Sounds related to jumping and landing in other platformer games serve this verisimilitude of action, helping the player to feel the weight and presence of her actions and giving her information about when to move next. For example, the speed of play in Mega Man

(Capcom, 1987) is much faster than in Super Mario Bros.; therefore, the sound effect is tied to landing rather than jumping, but still has an upward contour suggesting the springing. Rather than suggesting the downward motion of landing, this effect gives the player a precise indication of the instant when she can jump again (see Example 3.9).90

88 Ermi and Mäyrä, “Analysing Immersion,” 21. 89 Grimshaw, “Sound and Player Immersion,” 16; see also Mark Grimshaw, “Sound,” in The Routledge Companion to Video Game Studies, ed. Mark J.P. Wolf and Bernard Perron, 117-124 (New York and London: Routledge Taylor & Francis Group, 2014), 119; “What typically characterizes these sound effects is that they conform to a realism of action; do a sound, hear a sound (a play on the film sound design mantra of see a sound, hear a sound)…Through synchronization and realism of action, the sound becomes the sound of the depicted event.” 90 The speed of this effect creates the sensation of one foot landing just slightly before the other.

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Example 3.9. Manami Matsumae, Mega Man (Capcom, 1987), Mega Man landing.

The example given earlier of the “Hurry” cue from Super Mario Bros. is an example of game sound participating in the creation of challenge-based immersion; game music also supports the tempo and rhythms of play. Finally, game sound and music often supports imaginative immersion in the form of character leitmotifs and cinematic scoring meant to influence a player’s emotional investment in the narrative; for example, “Sad Song” from Super Mario

RPG provides pathos for scenes involving the character of Mallow, an orphaned prince (see

Example 3.10).91 And in StarTropics (Nintendo, 1990), “Mica” scores a scene at the end of the game where the alien children Mike rescues from a spaceship explain how they are the last of their kind, and how their father sent them to Earth to find peace when it became clear their home planet was going to be destroyed (see Example 3.11).

91 I have included a reduction here; all eight channels split a simple piano theme in order to allow each note to sustain longer, giving the impression of an acoustic, honky-tonk piano with each note having a sense of echo and decay.

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Example 3.10. Yoko Shimomura, Super Mario RPG (Square, 1996), “Sad Song,” mm. 1-5.

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Example 3.11. Yoshio Hirai, StarTropics (Nintendo, 1990), “Mica.”

Gameplay and Process

Karen Collins has an interesting response to the notion of immersion as a quality of the game itself; she writes that

we often talk of the player’s immersion in the game, but rather than view the game strictly as a separate space into which players may become immersed, we may more accurately speak of the player being immersed in the gameplay. The act of play…leads to the immersive experience.92

92 Collins, Playing With Sound, 141; emphasis original.

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Gameplay, like interactivity, is notoriously difficult to define and pin down.93 However, many definitions exist, such as Jukka Vahlo’s suggestion that “A player participates in gameplay by exploring and coordinating the contingencies between herself and the environmental other, the formal dynamic system of the game…the contingencies are enacted, discovered, and mastered by the player.”94 Andreas Gregersen and Torben Grodal describe gameplay as a moment when a player enters “an embodied awareness in the moment of action, a kind of body image in action—where one experiences both agency and ownership of virtual entities. This is a fusion of a player’s intentions, perceptions, and actions.”95 Analysis of gameplay suggests equal participation from both components; a kind of electrical circuit running between the bodies in play and bestowing both impulse and connection.96

Identification, Incorporation, and Embodiment

Terms such as identification, presence, engagement, incorporation, and embodiment suggest a player’s active role, co-creating the game with the code.97 It is to these modes of

93 Eugénie Shinkle, “Video Games, Emotion, and the Six Senses.” Media, Culture, & Society 30, no 6 (2008), 907- 915; 909; Graeme Kirkpatrick, Aesthetic Theory and the Videogame (Manchester: Manchester University Press), 167; Olli Tapio Leino, “Untangling Gameplay: An Account of Experience, Activity, and Materiality within Computer Game Play,” in The Philosophy of Computer Games ed. John Richard Sageng, Hallvard Fossheim, and Tarjei Mandt Larsen (Dordrecht, Heidelberg: Springer, 2012), 58-59. 94 Jukka Vahlo, “An Enactive Account of the Autonomy of Videogame Gameplay,” Game Studies: The International Journal of Computer Game Research 17, no. 1 (2017); “Enactivism has been described as noncartesian, nonreductive and nonfunctionalist naturalism that focuses on researching the dynamics of coupling, that is, the mutual situational influence between an embodied agent and its environment, from which meanings are understood to emerge.” 95 Andreas Gregersen and Torben Grodal, “Embodiment and Interface” in The Video Game Theory Reader 2, ed. Bernard Perron and Mark J.P. Wolf (New York: Routledge, 2008), 67. 96 Newman, “The Myth of the Ergodic Videogame.” “a continuous feedback loop where the player must be seen as both implied by, and implicated in, the construction and composition of the experience." 97 Juul, Half Real, 83, 88; Jesper Juul has described gameplay as the interaction between the player and the ruleset; Jørgensen, “Audio and Gameplay;” “Gameplay is…an emergent aspect of interaction between the game system and the player’s strategies and problem-solving processes.”

179 traversing and inhabiting the game that I now turn, in order to bring my arguments about game and gamer bodies to a close. According to Jeffrey Sconce, there are three recurring cultural narratives in modern media that seem particularly germane to the study of games: (a) disembodiment, or leaving the body; (b) teleportation (described in the game studies literature as immersion, incorporation, or transportation); and (c) the anthropomorphization of media technology.98 These narratives seem to suggest the bodies in play that I have alluded to throughout the first three chapters: the body of the gamer, the game body of the avatar, and a hybrid body created through these processes of identification, disembodiment, teleportation, and incorporation.

Laurie Taylor discusses identification as a combination of immersive affordances from the system itself (echoing definitions of interactivity) and a player’s imaginative projection of their own mind or body into the game:

Identification with the player's position in the game space, experienced as both a simple extension or duplication of the player and as the narcissistic incorporation of the image of the in-game position into the player's specular image, allows the player to enter into the game space as a valid and verisimilar agent of the game space.99

Taylor expands on this notion of narcissistic projection, claiming it as the necessary precondition for entering the game space as an embodied actor rather than as a separate operator.100 Taylor also suggests that the perspective of play creates two different depths or modes of player identification. While the first-person perspective appeals to player empathy and allows them to operate on the gamespace, the third-person perspective appeals to

98 Jeffrey Sconce, Haunted Media: Electronic Presence from Telegraphy to Television (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000). 99 Laurie Taylor, “When Seams Fall Apart: Video Game Space and the Player.” Game Studies 3, no. 2 (2003). 100 Taylor, “When Seams Fall Apart.”

180 sympathy, allowing the player to function within the game space; this would seem to suggest that first-person perspectives are more immediate or visceral for the player. However, as

James Paul Gee suggests, both perspectives have powerful potential: “[first-person] feels closer to the character and allows you to identify tightly with [the avatar’s] situatedness in the world. Third-person mode allows you to see [the avatar’s] body, actions, and reactions and identify with him from a thematic point of view…”101

James Newman describes the relationship between the player and the avatar as a mode of “vehicular embodiment;” an important consequence of this construction is that, as he writes, “the level of engagement, immersion or presence experienced by the player – the degree to which the player considers themselves to ‘be’ the character – is not contingent upon representation."102 The player can treat the avatar as an actor might treat a role, or they might instantly identify with the character in some way, but this initial identification is only the first stage of the relationship regardless of whether the game employs a first- or third- person perspective. Waggoner suggests that the player begins to “ego-invest” in the avatar, moving from conscious control to a more collaborative mode in which they share a character’s motivations and blur the boundaries between the avatar and the self.103

101 James Paul Gee, Why Video Games are Good for Your Soul (Australia: Common Ground Publishing, 2005), 71. 102 Newman, “The Myth of the Ergodic Videogame.” He continues: “It is important to note that, while my examples have focused upon videogames in which a clearly defined player-controlled "character" may be identified (whether that be man, woman, car, spaceship, fungus), this principle can be seen at work in games where there is no apparent mediating "character" or even abstract "cursor", in Jenkins’ terms. As one of my PhD field research participants boldly but insightfully proclaimed, "when I play Tetris, I am a tetraminoe,” in exploring these issues more thoroughly, they suggested that they didn’t consider themselves to be a single Tetris block so much as every Tetris block whether falling, fallen or yet to fall." 103 Waggoner, My Avatar, My Self, 11.

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I spoke to the notion of incorporation in Chapter 1, because I wanted to highlight my reasons for favoring this term. Recall Calleja’s definition of incorporation as a process of obtaining fluency through the avatar, “the subjective experience of inhabiting a virtual environment facilitated by the potential to act meaningfully within it while being present to others.”104 In addition to providing this alternative conception of the relationship to the avatar, Calleja presented a model, identifying six domains through which a player becomes incorporated into a game:

• Tactical: interaction with the rules (and/or with other players) and any form of

decision-making in the game (this implies a more ludic interaction with game

affordances and limitations);

• Performative: essentially, learning how to inhabit the avatar. This mode involves

learning how to control the avatar (e.g., what buttons on a controller do what),

leading to a fluency of movement with/through the character. “In the case of third-

person point of view, the player occupies a double-awareness: the player awareness

of the surrounding environment portrayed by the camera outside the avatar…and

that awareness filtered through the avatar.”105

• Affective: described as the cognitive, emotional and/or kinesthetic feedback loop

formed between the game and player.106 Affective involvement suggests how games

can influence a player’s mood or emotional state;

104 Calleja, “Digital Games Involvement,” 254. 105 Gordon Calleja, “Digital Game Involvement: A Conceptual Model,” Games and Culture 2, no. 3 (2007), 236- 260; 254. 106 Calleja, “Digital Game Involvement,” 245; “Game design, like other forms of textual production, is imbued with the rhetorical strategies of affect…A significant portion of this rhetorical power can be associated with the

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• Shared: responses to one’s avatar. Not only the player’s responses to the avatar, but

also other game non-player characters or other human agents (in online play);

• Narrative: not only the narrative of the game world, its history and background (the

quest, back story, mission, or designed narrative), but also the player’s experience of

the game (personal narrative)107;

• Spatial: the player locating themselves within the game environment and the space’s

history. This process can draw on exploration of game space, in-game maps and

directions, and the player’s own mental maps of certain locations.

There is an emphasis here on process; a player becomes more fluid in each domain over time: "Each of the frames described above demonstrates a spectrum of experience ranging from conscious attention to internalized knowledge.”108 Incorporation is a more cybernetic connection between player and game; instead of merely surrounding the player, the feedback mechanisms of the game code itself work two ways: “Incorporation makes the game world present to the player while simultaneously placing a representation of the player within it through the avatar.”109 Although there may be some difference in the initial stages of becoming immersed in first- vs. third-person perspectives, I believe that the processes of identification and incorporation follow a similar contour and are equally powerful whether

mode of representation of the particular medium. In the case of the moment-by-moment involvement with digital games, the main channels of rhetorical delivery are visual and aural, both of which tend to be heavily influenced by the physics built into the game environment. Game theorists and designers have rightly argued that graphical power is not what makes games compelling.” 107 Calleja, “Digital Game Involvement,” 252; Narrative, as I am using it here, emphasizes this continuity of lived experience between the technologically mediated and the everyday, taking the interaction between personal and designed narratives as the locus of meaning making within designed environments. (252) 108 Calleja, “Digital Game Involvement,” 254. 109 Calleja, “Digital Game Involvement,” 254.

183 or not the nature of identification begins with empathy or sympathy. I would also argue that empathy and sympathy as categories of involvement eventually collapse or inflect one another as a player simultaneously holds the embodied self and the inhabited other in the same imaginative space.

James Paul Gee theorizes videogames according to studies of situated cognition, arguing that embodied thinking is characteristic of most video games.110 Gee describes the avatar as a “surrogate,” and describes the process of play in this way: “…we players are both imposed on by the character we play (i.e., we must take on the character’s goals) and impose ourselves on that character (i.e., we make the character take on our goals).”111 Gee has theorized three forms of identity implicated in the process of play: the virtual identity of the avatar existing in the fictional world of the game; the real-world identity of the player, and a projective identity, which he defines as “The kind of person I want [the avatar] to be, the kind of history I want her to have, the kind of person and history I am trying to build in and through her.”112 Waggoner takes up the notion of a projective identity as a liminal space where games do their most interesting and important work by influencing and inflecting the bodies of players and game characters. As Waggoner defines it, liminality is “a phase of transition during which normal limits to self-understanding are relaxed, thus opening the way

110 James Paul Gee, “Video Games and Embodiment,” Games and Culture, 3, no. 3-4 (2008), 258; I was similarly inspired to explore this dissertation topic after a realization that not only are most games embodied, they use health and ability as a core game mechanic. 111 Gee, “Video Games and Embodiment,” 260. 112 Gee, Why Video Games are Good for Your Soul, 56; James Paul Gee, What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007); Gee remarks that real-world identity involves several non-virtual identities (e.g., scholar, daughter, professor, Stardew Valley fan, amateur Egyptologist) that we access at will, as necessary.

184 to something new.”113 In his ethnographic work on MMORPG players and their avatars,

Waggoner found that players tended to distance themselves from their avatars when speaking about them, claiming that the avatar is a distinct entity or a tool with which to explore the game. Yet, those same players tended to unconsciously shift between first- and third-person language when talking about the avatar, slippage between the real and the virtual that suggests a lack of clear boundaries—in other words, experienced players tended to speak from this space of projected identity. As Sheila C. Murphy describes it,

While one is playing a game, one enters into a complicated play with not only his or her identity but also with his or her body and its McLuhanesque ‘extensions.’ …no one ‘true’ identity is uncovered or left behind in the process. In the case of video games, identity is most substantially modified by the ways that gamers can control their digital characters—and also in the ways that gamers surrender control over themselves and their characters in order to play.114

The avatar’s body is unusual in that it becomes something both inhabited and invisible; a site of both ergodic effort and erasure. This has led some theorists to treat games as “simultaneous experience of disembodied perception and yet and embodied relation to technology,” a notion I find compelling in its complexity.115 Despite the myriad contested models, what is clear is that gameplay creates a unique relationship to embodied experience, collapsing boundaries between the real and virtual and suggesting that a person can exist in multiple modes simultaneously through identifying with and as a digital avatar.

113 Waggoner, My Avatar, My Self, 15. 114 Sheila C. Murphy, “Controllers,” in The Routledge Companion to Video Game Studies, ed. Mark J.P. Wolf and Bernard Perron (New York and London: Routledge Taylor & Francis Group, 2014), 24. 115 Martti Lahti, “As We Become Machines: Corporealized Pleasures in Video Games,” in The Video Game Theory Reader, ed. Mark J.P. Wolf and Bernard Perron (London: Routledge, 2003), 168.

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The player body remains intact, allowing sensation and perception of the game world that is vital to begin the process of incorporation.116 The controller serves as a mediator and even as a kind of musical instrument or conductor’s baton through which the player summons sound, improvises, and co-constitutes the soundscape with the game. Through the elicitation of sound and movement in the game, the controller allows for the player’s body to become technologically mediated and more powerfully incorporated. But the controller does not extend the body into the screen—our embodied sensations and perceptions of the game world do that. Sound is the modality through which the game world begins to extend out from the screen and immerse us; sound powerfully engages our cognitive and physiological mechanisms to incorporate us into our avatars. The controller summons sound so that we may absorb it and, in turn, become absorbed.

Game sound is one of the most important elicitors of ludic emotion. Sound is uniquely invasive among the senses; while the player can close their eyes or turn away from the screen, sound will continue to play, emitting acoustical vibrations, frequencies that travel deep inside the ear and are transmitted as electrical signals to the auditory processing centers of the brain. Simply muting the sound would be detrimental to game performance, as most important information about the game state is communicated through the audio track in the

116 Timothy Crick, “The Game Body: Toward a Phenomenology of Contemporary Video Gaming,” Games and Culture 6, no. 3 (2011), 266; “If there were no reasons to assume that the virtual body in a game world is the same as our body in the actual world, then the U.S. Marines’ licensing of the classic FPC video game Doom (Id Software, 1993) in the mid-1990s may suggest otherwise. Licensed and rebuilt as ‘Marine Doom,’ the use of video games as military training tools is particularly instructive in establishing a phenomenological link between embodied perception in the virtual and real world.” 266; “…during some gaming moments, I will be aware that my body intuitively leans toward the direction to which I require my avatar to run…”

186 form of sound effects.117 Thus, the game composers and sound designers hold the player enthralled, immersing them in affect, manipulating their emotions, their physiological arousal levels, their exogenous and endogenous attention, and their orienting responses. The player cannot escape the immense affective power of the soundscape of the game. Empirical work in game studies has a lot of work to do in order to fully understand the mechanics behind these processes, but an appreciation for the intensity of the auditory domain in determining the player’s affective experience will help direct future investigation. Through all of these mechanisms and processes, game sound critically involves the body of the player into the game by way of the soundscape; I argue that the soundscape is vital to the process of incorporation, joining the material body of the player to those of the game.

117 Jørgensen, “Left in the Dark” 167; recall that Jørgensen’s work suggests that turning off the sound results in decreased performance in the game and increased anxiety for players.

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Chapter 4. Paging Dr. Mario: Injury and Illness in the Video Game Soundscape

“Artists use lies to tell the truth.”1 This line from V for Vendetta may as well have been written about early game sounds: they are lies in the sense that they lack fidelity to the acoustical properties of sounds in the real world. Instead, the player experiences a barrage of invented, imaginative, and iconic representations of soundless sensation and action. As we saw in the previous chapter, 8- and 16-bit sounds are typically devised electronically, built using the same musical tones and timbres as the musical tracks.2 Composers and sound engineers had to get creative—evoking through a kind of affective assonance that convinces players of a sound’s physical presence and reality, particularly in the absence of any real- world referent. There was obviously something about these fictions that got to players, that told them certain truths about the games they played—and about who they were as they played them.

Most of the aural stimuli in games are not music qua music, as mentioned in Chapter

2; while games have a hypnotic lull at times, with minimalist, static scores directing player attention and teaching the rhythms of play, they must also constantly communicate information to the player in real time as the game state changes around them. These

1 Alan Moore, V for Vendetta (New York: Vertigo, 1988). 2 Cheng, Sound Play, 58; “As game audio design came of age, composers and players engaged in a semiotic business of audio data compression and decompression. They were tasked with negotiating technological constraints—or, more specifically, with cultivating the medium’s expressive possibilities to forge effective forms of sonic shorthand.”

188 interruptions—devices conveying change, challenge, and reward—engage systems of attention and physiological arousal to shape a player’s actions. Game sound is uniquely positioned to influence players’ personal identification and incorporation within the narrative, due to the immediacy and invasiveness of the medium.

One of the most common game mechanics is to incorporate a player into a virtual world through the use of the avatar. Success in the game often depends on navigating the world with the avatar’s body intact: as the player incorporates or becomes more fluent with the game system, they learn how to avoid failure states in order to progress. The virtual avatar’s body is perfect or perfectible: if the player is not skilled enough to preserve this perfection, she can simply pick up a heart or a health potion or a medical kit. Or she can try again until she is able to consistently maintain control and fluidity of action. As Diane Carr writes,

…what games can do, of course, is to offer a context in which these fantasies of loss and dysfunction, and this destabilization, become constituents of play. [The avatar’s] capacity to act is conflated (visually, functionally, and spatially) with the player’s capacity to act. The player is invited to demonstrate the attributes associated with able bodies (control responsiveness, accuracy, effectiveness, and precision). The game offers its players the opportunity to perform ability within a fictional setting that is full of disturbing threats and losses that are culturally associated with disability.3

Game sound must often represent intense experiences in the abstract—pain, disorientation, or symptoms of illness. When an avatar is injured, infected, or otherwise impaired or incapacitated, a game will often signal this change multi-modally: through the use of visual cues, controller vibrations, and, most powerfully, sound. Sound primes players

3 Diane Carr, “Ability, Disability, and Dead Space,” Game Studies 14, no. 2 (2014).

189 for action—by manipulating affective responses in order to make the player more emotionally invested in the narrative, focusing attention, or adding a layer of difficulty to the task at hand. These sounds are symbolic and evocative—after all, the physical sensation of pain makes no sound in itself—and must be heard and understood almost instantly by the player if the game is to communicate effectively. If the effect is effective, the player may wince or recoil as if she had experienced a blow—suggesting effective incorporation through sound.4 This effect is all the more striking in games where the player must not only identify with their avatar, but also respond to aural cues and adjust gameplay accordingly.

These moments of rupture—where the body of the avatar is compromised in play— are ludic impairments, impediments to progress. Any loss of physical perfection or mental stability is a threat—and awakens anxiety about how to correct these costly mistakes and restore the avatar to perfect health in order to continue uninterrupted play.5 However, negative emotions such as frustration, anger, shame, or failure work similarly to sound, binding the player to the avatar and to the game.6 As Jesper Juul writes,

It is the threat of failure that gives us something to do in the first place. It is painful for humans to feel incompetent or lacking, but games hurt us and then induce an urgency to repair our self-image. Much of the positive effect of failure comes from the fact that we can learn to escape from it, feeling more competent than we did before.7

4 Grajeda, “Listening to Violence,” 173; “…we are sutured not merely as an ‘internal auditor’ in the text but moreover as an ‘interiorized’ one—listening from within a damaged body…” 5 Jesper Juul, The Art of Failure: An Essay on the Pain of Playing Video Games (Cambridge and London: MIT Press, 2013), 30; “Failure in games tells us that we are flawed and deficient. As such, video games are the art of failure, the singular art form that sets us up for failure and allows us to experience and experiment with failure.” 6 Juul, The Art of Failure, 14. 7 Juul, The Art of Failure, 45.

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Players’ responses to these symbolic sounds of loss is to seek a cure, reading impairments as temporary setbacks in performance, cues to restore the avatar to normal. Of course, this

“normal” is constructed in the game as a kind of superhuman strength and ability.8 The message is clear: if you possess sufficient skill, your virtual body can remain perpetually healthy, ageless, superhuman, and unmarked. If you deviate from this ideal form, you can always return to this state through medical or technological intervention.

This chapter will explore how game sound communicates pain, violence, and disease through iconic aural representation of both exterior events (physical impacts, vocalizations of exertion, or responses to injury) and interior states (symptoms of illness or sensations of pain). Sounds communicating temporary forms of disablement in games are omnipresent, as a large number of games rely on the health and able body of the avatar as a central game mechanic. However, this seemingly-simple representation of negative motivators in the game state invokes complex discourses on the nature of pain, violence, gender, and chronic illness.

Pain and Temporary Disability

Pain is a deeply personal phenomenon. However, to the medical profession, it represents “a sensation, a symptom, a problem in biochemistry.”9 The diagnostic attitude often dismisses the way that pain persists and permeates experience, the way it “…engages the deepest and most personal levels of the complex cultural biological process we call living.”10 Pain is reduced to a problem that medicine can fix, even as it is immensely difficult to measure. Doctors ask patients to rate pain subjectively; posters in doctor’s offices often

8 Davis, Enforcing Normalcy, 24. 9 David P. Morris, The Culture of Pain (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1991), 5. 10 Morris, The Culture of Pain, 7.

191 include the Wong-Baker FACES pain rating scale, with numbers corresponding to facial expressions that progress from pleasant to intensely distressed.11 Those with chronic pain are often written off by medical practitioners as weak or manipulative, and can thus spend years in search of a sympathetic doctor and a legitimizing diagnosis.12 Pain is poorly theorized under the social model of disability, likely because it represents an interiority that points to individual embodiment rather than collective experiences of oppression.13 However, social discrimination is treated as a form of collective pain, and in this way enters the disability discourse as an experience that cements minority identity and galvanizes political activism.14

Just as pain is poorly theorized, so too is the notion of temporary experiences of disability.15 One reason for this, though, is fears about the individualization of impairment in

11 Subjective reporting of pain is problematic for several reasons. Individual tolerance to pain may vary, but certain people may be less likely to give an honest self-assessment out of a fear of being labeled a hypochondriac or a drug seeker. An individual’s definition of the “worst pain imaginable” (a 10 on the scale) can also change over time; when I developed a case of shingles in summer of 2017, the experience redefined my relationship to pain, and became the new top of my scale—previously, I had considered my upper limit to be the pain I experienced from a corneal scratch when I was six years old. 12 Sasha Scambler, “Long-term Disabling Conditions and Disability Theory,” in the Routledge Handbook of Disability Studies, ed. Nick Watson, Alan Roulstone, and Carol Thomas, 136-150. London and New York: Routledge, 2012) 140; Scambler suggests that diagnosis can serve to legitimize experiences as well as alleviate guilt over the inability to perform everyday tasks. Though a diagnosis does not remove uncertainty about the etiology and future trajectory of the chronic illness, it does perform an important role for the individual. 13 Tobin Siebers, “Disability, Pain, and the Politics of Minority Identity,” in Foundations of Disability Studies, ed. Matthew Wappett and Katrina Arndt, 17-28 (New York, N.Y.: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 19; “Pain and disability are not equivalent, although prejudices against disabled people often reduce disability to pain, but both supposedly individualize the concept of identity.” See also Gleeson, “Lost and Found in Space,” 76; “It is fair to say that the early enthusiasm to embrace a socialized understanding of disablement (including my own) tended to disembody and bury subjectivity.” 14 Siebers, “Disability, Pain, and the Politics of Minority Identity,” 17; “Pain serves as the glue that laminates the outside and inside of minority identity, ensuring that the violence enacted by society against individuals remains embedded in their psyche... Identity politics apparently steeps the subject in pain by privileging the defective and weak identities produced by historical injustices like sexism and racism and by asking individuals to dwell on their suffering to produce political capital for themselves.” 15 Scambler, “Long-term Disabling Conditions,” 136; This mirrors assertions in the literature that invisible disabilities (such as mental illness or chronic conditions) are less-theorized than more identifiable disabilities: “A token chapter on chronic illness can be found in the main textbooks but these lack the depth of discussion, research and theorizing that surrounds other forms of disability.”

192 the broader political project of disability activism—recall that the social model sought to critique medical, personal tragedy, and deficit models that isolated disability as a problem of individual bodies. If identity is treated as fluid, contingent, and processual in postmodernist and feminist disability work, then this lack of theory on temporary forms of affiliation to disability identity is surprising—and likely to change as the work re-centers personal embodied experiences of impairment. Despite assertions in the disability studies literature that everyone is or will become disabled in some way, there has been a lot of work that seeks to explore the tacit cultural construction of the binary and its boundaries—of what ‘counts’ as disabled. This is not a matter of disciplinary gate-keeping—attempting to exclude or delegitimize temporary impairment—but of outlining the commonalities of experience that gave the social model its collective power.16

Likely because of systemic social barriers to participation and the broader disablist discourse, it is uncommon to claim a disabled identity due to illness or injury, unless it becomes clear that impairments are no longer temporary. Illness is often theorized as a temporary “sick role” played by social actors; sickness is accommodated until it becomes a persistent facet of identity.17 Temporarily-disabling conditions represent the most frequent encounter that many of us have with impairment throughout our lifetime. As such, they represent a poignant experience through which ostensibly-normative individuals can begin to

16 Siebers, “Disability, Pain, and the Politics of Minority Identity,” 25; “Disability identity is not based on impairment similarity but on social experience that includes a shared encounter with oppression, discrimination, and medicalization, on the negative side, and a shared knowledge of survival strategies, healthcare policy, and environmental conditions, on the positive side.” 17 Talcott Parsons, The Social System (New York: Free Press, 1951); Scambler, “Long-term Disabling Conditions,” 137: “People who are unable to work through illness need legitimization for their inability to perform their ‘normal’ social roles and so take on a ‘sick-role’ for a temporary period until they are able to revert to their usual roles.”

193 comprehend the barriers presented to those with chronic or permanent disablement. These experiences with human vulnerability have the potential to galvanize individuals to fight for access as allies.

Most depictions of pain, injury, and illness in media perform affective labor, serving as sites of psycho-emotional disablement and the reification of stereotyped, reductive tropes.

As Snyder and Mitchell have suggested, “…disabled bodies have been constructed cinematically and socially to function as delivery vehicles in the transfer of extreme sensation to audiences.”18 In video games, the incorporated player can experience vicarious threats to bodily integrity or enact cathartic violence through the avatar, and so the transfer of sensation is all the more palpable.

Physical Impact and Pain in Game Sound

Sounds of injury are ubiquitous in gaming. From the crunch of Mega Man’s laser pellets making contact with an enemy to the piercing magical beam of Link’s Master Sword, these sounds are often symbolic or iconic, emphasizing gesture and percussive impact through the use of exaggerated melodic contour, large leaps, and extraordinary speed (see

Example 4.1).19 Although highly sped-up, these 8-bit effects are all composed of sequences of tones rather than recorded from real life; they can all be transcribed into notation if slowed down and manipulated. In this way they are like cinematic Foley in that they are typically an invention of the programmer meant to evoke an embodied image schema of the

18 Sharon L. Snyder and David T. Mitchell, Cultural Locations of Disability (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 162. 19 This sound is interesting and very complex; I am unable to notate all of it intelligibly. The noise channel performs a pitch sweep that adds a necessary mechanical hiss or buzz to the sound, and the triangle channel supports the contour of the pulse channel notated here. It is interesting that this effect actually co-opts several NES sound channels instead of just displacing one.

194 implied motion through the capabilities of the sound chip. As Inger Ekman writes, “This direct link to the body invokes a powerful repertoire of experiential mappings, tying sound perception directly to our lived experience.”20

Example 4.1. Manami Matsumae, Mega Man (Capcom, 1987), Mega blaster hit, pulse 1 channel.

Koji Kondo’s effects for Super Mario Bros. and The Legend of Zelda are proof of this concept, evoking a sense of motion through contour. For example, the sound of Mario receiving a power-up mushroom is a three-part rising figure depicting his growth into his larger form; the sound of stomping an enemy has a contour that suggests both the impact and springing off of the landing; entering a pipe to travel to the underground levels offers a squeaky descent figure (see Example 4.2).21

20 Ekman, “Cognitive Approach,” 209. 21 Ekman, “Cognitive Approach, 204-205; Ekman suggests that functional sounds—those that communicate action affordances and goal-related cues—do not need to be at all realistic: “…the goal is to find mappings that are as intuitive and as fast to learn as possible…Where audiovisual synchrony lends information to congruent visual events, sounds added to player actions are perceptually grouped with the physical actions of playing. The consistent and responsive action-sound coupling also contributes to a sense of agency and control in a game.”

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Example 4.2. Koji Kondo, Super Mario Bros. (Nintendo, 1985), sound effects.

Sound effects create a virtual reality, a hyper-real sense of motion and life in the game context.22 One reason these sounds seem congruent with the image is that our sensory mechanisms are used to making these kinds of attributions of sound to source, particularly in film and new media.

Although I would argue that these sound effects are musical, they do not evoke an auditory image of a melody. Some sounds evoke clearer perceptual images than others—a pure tone will register more clearly as musical than aperiodic noise. As David Huron writes,

“In general, pitched sounds are easier to identify as independent sound sources, and sounds that produce the strongest and least ambiguous pitches produce the clearest auditory

22 Summers, Understanding Video Game Music, 111; “Baudrillard worries about this ‘more real than real’ phenomenon—he calls ‘hyperreality’ the situation whereby the fictional becomes more authoritative than actual reality…gamers embrace the fantastic inauthenticity of simulacra that, as players are well aware, often have no true actual world origin—indeed, this lack of authentic truth (despite its assertion on the part of the game) is all part of the joy of the playing experience…”

196 images."23 Using this logic, sound effects should never employ the pulse channels on the

NES, because the sound waves they output are the closest to pure sine wave tones and could thus be mistaken for the music of the game. However, other factors influence the construction of a vivid auditory image, such as the perception of the temporal continuity, resolved into a single auditory stream by the listener.24

In this case, the exaggerated tempo of these sound effects renders the sequence of tones into a single gesture, perceived as an energetic, percussive contour of sound rather than as intelligible notes. The clarity of the pitches is undermined by the exaggeration of other musical elements, but this does not mean that the listener fails to perceive any sense of musicality or pitch in these effects; for example, a listener can begin to hear a “melody” in a short sample of recorded speech, and listeners can roughly discern the relative pitches of indefinite sounds (in order to determine that a wood block has a higher pitch than a bass drum, for example).25 The perception of actions as musically animate helps to create a vibrant and convincing game environment, even if these sounds have only a vague relationship to motion in the real world.

This abstraction is interesting because the programmers or sound designers must grapple with the question of how to evoke soundless concepts such as pain evocatively and palpably to the player. The degree to which the sound is successful at communicating a specific state and influencing player behavior depends on how loud the effect is set and how

23 David Huron, “Perceptual Principles,” 7; Psychoacousticians use the term ‘tonality’ to refer to this clarity of pitch perception, but tonality already has implications in music, so Huron suggests toneness as a replacement. 24 Albert S. Bregman and Jeffrey K. Campbell, “Primary Auditory Stream Segregation and Perception of Order in Rapid Sequences of Tones,” Journal of Experimental Psychology 89, no. 2 (1971), 244-249. 25 Huron, “Perceptual Principles.”

197 distinct its timbre and tempo are from any background music. For example, let us return to the paradigmatic example of throbbing pain in early games: the effect triggered when Link is down to a single heart in The Legend of Zelda. Example 4.3 is a transcription of the Dungeon music for the game. The melody is spread out between the pulse channels, implying an echo in the cavernous underground spaces; here I have included a composite of the pulse channels that suggests how a player would likely parse the auditory stream and resolve it into a coherent melody.

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Example 4.3. Koji Kondo, The Legend of Zelda (Nintendo, 1986), “Dungeon.”

If Link loses enough lifeforce in this level, the throbbing heart sound effect co-opts pulse channel 1, sounding at approximately 190 bpm (see Example 4.4).26

26 What I have created below is just an illustrative example to give a sense of the lack of alignment between sounds; the note value of the effect would fall approximately between a dotted sixteenth and an eighth, becoming more off-kilter and out of phase as the sound continues its incessant throbbing.

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Example 4.4. Koji Kondo, The Legend of Zelda (Nintendo, 1986), danger in the dungeon, mm. 1-4.

This sound is similar to “Danger” from Déjà vu in its incessant repetition; however, it is a more of a sound effect than a musical signal in how it is deployed over the background music for the dungeon. Although D is consonant in the key of G minor, the player will still learn to parse the sound as a separate object in the stream through its sheer out-of-phase repetition and the fact that the effect sits an octave higher than most of the melody.

The player learns to associate this sound with a particular meaning: the vulnerability of their avatar. As Ben Winter suggests, this stylized representation of a heartbeat causes players “to equate a fictional character’s endangered corporeality with an awareness of our own sense of bodily precariousness.”27 Therefore, any appearance of this sound is likely to cause stress for the player; even outside of the context of play. This is a function both of the

27 Ben Winters, “Corporeality, Musical Heartbeats, and Cinematic Emotion,” Music, Sound, and the Moving Image 2, no. 1 (2008), 4.

200 quality of the sound itself (its high-pitched bleeping timbre) and its context (associated with impending failure or imminent repetition of gameplay to make up for lost ground). The more the player identifies with the virtual world and incorporates into the body of the avatar, the more salient and effective these sound effects will be; as Carr suggests, “There are times when the bodies…are gripped, seized, and convulsed, and it is feasible that these correspond to moments when its players might feel gripped, seized, or otherwise ‘viscerally manipulated.’ ”28 The purpose of such sounds is to modify behavior: (a) to make the player more careful and focused on finding a way to replenish health; or (b) to increase the likelihood of mistakes due to the player panicking and rushing through the area. A player is taught to fear losing her life in the game, even though ludic death is not absolute or permanent: this represents the failure state of many games, as the player has to begin again from a previous point. In some cases, the player must start the game over again completely after death, as in Zelda II: The Adventure of Link (1988). Therefore, the attentive player will stop and seek a way to restore health and continue uninterrupted play.

Foley and Fighting Games

On the NES, the most common sound signifying injury occurs in the noise channel; typically, low, percussive, and short in duration. These hits are almost ubiquitous in action- adventure games, platformers, and RPGs—where the protagonist is struck by a passing enemy, stumbles over an obstacle, or receives damage in a turn-based battle system. On the

28 Carr, “Disability and Dead Space.”

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NES, the noise channel often sounded like a scratchy or dull thud; it conveyed the articulate attack of an impact, but in a rather generic way. It lacked a certain specificity of the body.

However, fighting games from the 16-bit era are rife with embodied sound, from the

Foley-esque representations of physical impact to a cacophonous variety of offensive and defensive vocalizations representing pain, exertion, or taunts.29 In order to experience these sound effects, a player must press a button on the controller or arcade cabinet in order to kick or punch an opponent. This action could be accompanied with either an utterance of exertion or the sound of the punch making contact with its intended target (or both)— aurally confirming the player’s action. The primary mode of interacting with fighting games is tactile and rhythmic, and expert players have precise, virtuosic, almost musical mastery of the controller, memorizing complex sequences of button presses to chain together long strings of combination moves that inflict greater damage on the opponent.30 If the resultant sound output merely confirms a player’s button presses, then that relegates the sounds to a simple, clear function. However, the sounds are dense, hyperreal, and heavily gendered; compared to other genres, the communicative function of sound effects in fighting games is gravely diminished by incessant deployment and repetition. These sounds convey less specific information about the game to the player, but this opens up the sounds to do something else—such as promoting characterization.

29 Summers, Understanding Video Game Music, 61; As Summers defines the genre, “Fighting games have a simple premise—characters attack each other, until either one fighter’s health meter reaches zero, or a time limit expires.” 30 Summers, Understanding Video Game Music, 1-3; in his introduction, Summers discusses a well-known internet cartoon by David Soames called “The Ultimate Combo” which shows a sequence of buttons on one side and a fighting game character on the other. The single button press is a kick, a more elaborate sequence creates a fireball, and the final row depicts an absurdly long and complex button sequence on the one side, with the fighter seated at a grand piano on the other, suggesting a virtuosic musical performance.

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When the soundscape is this dense, the player can actually habituate to the incessant barrage of sounds—that is, they will stop consciously perceiving these sounds as distinct communicative acts. The degree to which a sound effect is successful depends on how loud the effect is set relative to the background track, how distinct its timbre and tempo is from background music, and how strongly the player identifies with the avatar and registers the sound as a representation of a physical hit. Why would games want to undermine the communicative function of sound effects, dulling their affect by deploying them in such rapid succession? If the player habituates to the sound effects rather than experiencing them as dishabituating stimuli, then what other function do these sounds perform? In this section

I will argue that fighting games use representations of embodied utterances to cultivate a sense of violent realism as well as to convey or construct dangerous stereotypes about gender and voice.

The first inclination in explaining these sounds might be to suggest that they participate in the glorification of violence. Anxieties over violent imagery in the media— whether fictional as in games and films, or nonfictional images on the news—concern notions of spectacle and allegations that the media profits from the an exploitative commodification of suffering.31 Even in fictional portrayals, the unreality of ultraviolence does not aestheticize it, render it as emotionally detached; instead, the presence and prevalence of such images in popular culture engenders what Steve Jones refers to as the

“sadistic gaze paradigm,” suggesting that those who enjoy ultraviolent media are “…cynically

31 Steve Jones, Torture Porn: Popular Horror after Saw (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 70; see also Linda Williams, “Film Bodies: Gender, Genre, and Excess,” in Film Theory and Criticism, ed. Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999).

203 distanced from and desensitized to violent imagery, and yet simultaneously presumed to enjoy that violence.”32 It is not tenable to suggest that players are both disengaged and deeply engaged at the same time; how can one be both enthralled and apathetic? Fictional media are often assumed to be cathartic spaces where one can experience intensely negative events or emotions in a controlled environment, devoid of lasting consequences.

Part of the presumed pleasure of consuming violent media arises from the intensity and hyperrealism of the audiovisual effects in summoning powerful affective responses in this safe, fictionalized space.33 In film, the sound of a superhero punch is an abstract representation of the motion, a particularly bold and blatant exaggeration. As noted in the previous chapter, a punch sound can consist of four layered sounds. These four elements are mixed into a coherent whole to create a stronger sense of depth and give the illusion of motion, but no punch in the real world could ever match this sound. And yet, this punch sounds completely natural: this is the power of this hyperreal convention. In a sense, the unreal version sounds more compelling than an actual recording of the sound it is supposed to represent; constant exposure to the fictional version renders the real sound dull, flat, or inert. Both films and video games demonstrate this kind of creative approach to the creation of Foley and sound effects. For example, when designing the soundscape for Killer Instinct

Season Two (Microsoft Studios, 2013; the remake to the popular SNES title Killer Instinct by

32 Jones, Torture Porn, 80. 33 Coulthard, Lisa. "Acoustic Disgust: Sound, Affect, and Cinematic Violence,” in The Palgrave Handbook of Sound Design and Music in Screen Media: Integrated Soundtracks, ed. Liz Greene and Danijela Kulezic-Wilson (London: Palgrave Macmillan Ltd., 2016), 184; “…arguably the envelopment and intimacy associated with hearing create a particularly fecund environment for this affective impact…Sonic disgust not only represents violence but also has the potential to create a kind of violent revulsion in the viewer, attaining an affective and sensation-based impact beyond that of the violence depicted.”

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Midway and Nintendo, 1994) sound designer Jeff Dombkowski explained some of the techniques used to design sound for an undead ghost girl character named Hisako:

When she’s walking in particular, we really wanted that sound of kind of everything inside her, all her bone and sinew, everything, kinda settling with every footstep so it kinda sounded like she wasn’t held together as much as a regular human being would be. So, we came up with the idea of taking taco shells and gluing those into, kinda groups of about 4 or 5 or so, and then just slowly breaking them and bending them back and forth.34

This kind of creative layering gives more of a sense of the physical body moving through space or receiving that blow, more of a sense of how the source of the sound would actually feel than how it would sound in real life.35 And these sounds have grown more violent—Daniel Engber writes that “We’ve already heard the thud turn into a crunch on its way to a squish.”36 Sounds of violence in media are “orchestrated like a musical chord,” and several elements can combine to give a gut-wrenching affect to a sound.37 The shift from the thud to the squish demonstrates how sounds have gradually become wetter over time, often

34 “The Sounds of Killer Instinct,” YouTube video, 9:59, posted by “Killer Instinct,” July 21, 2015. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IoMyR6LxT0M; note that “Season Two” refers to additional content created for the base game (also known as DLC); today, players can purchase Killer Instinct with all of this extra content integrated into the game. 35 Coulthard, “Acoustic Disgust,” 185; “This traumatic squish renders the body an inert mass through a ‘humid, viscous’ sound that fits with the audience’s imagination of what this might sound like, even if it does not adhere to sonic realism…The crushing of a human head may not in fact sound like a melon, but the affective impact of the sound emphasizes the softness, vulnerability, and fragility of that element of the human body most associated with subjectivity and being—the head.” 36 Daniel Engber, “The Sounds of Violence,” Slate Magazine (2012). http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/culturebox/2012/02/drive_the_sound_editing_in_the_elevator_stomping _scene_.html 37 Engber, “The Sounds of Violence.” “An editor might start with a thumping bass note, he says—the sound of a 2-by-4 being smacked against a side of beef—and then add in some upper frequencies with a bundle of dry twigs being snapped or a plastic cup getting broken. Then he’d finish off the effect by filling out its mid-notes with something gloopy, like the sound of a ripe melon dropped on cement. By tweaking the proportions of these ingredients, he can build something dry and tough, or moist and oozy.”

205 at the expense of fruits and vegetables.38 This shift objectifies the human body with an uncanny and disconcerting intimacy, as Lisa Coulthard suggests:

In addition to these sonic intensities are sounds of the body wounded by violence, sounds that can be over-amplified or incongruous, turning the human form into object, thing, or mass by an act of violence. It is these sounds that I contend are most closely aligned with acoustic disgust: silence, noise, and music all have significant impact on the effects of scenes of sonic violence, but the sound of the body itself, its materiality and moisture is where sonic disgust thrives.39

Wet sounds suggest the inside of the body, creating an aural equivalent of the extreme close- up. Notions of objectification and intimacy suggest a disturbing but common connection between horrific violence and sex; wet sounds suggest immersion or contagion, and serve as evocative signifiers in either context.40 Extreme violence in media has long been denigrated via an assumed connection to the pornographic; as Steve Jones writes about the tendency to label certain ultraviolent films as torture porn.41

Fighting games are a surprisingly intimate genre; the spaces or levels are small and compact, keeping the player close to the combatant.42 The pleasure of exploration is replaced with physical brutality, and sounds of play involve not only hyperreal impacts but also voice acting and compressed vocal samples, sounds that give a player access to the voices of the

38 Engber, “The Sounds of Violence;” “A few years ago, the Joystiq blog posted a charming clip of sound editors reaming cucumbers, squeezing oranges, and attacking watermelons and cantaloupes with a hammer to make the juicy sounds they needed for a first-person shooter.” Coulthard, “Acoustic Disgust,” 191; ““Mouth, saliva, and fruit: the moist sounds associated with these objects work transsensorially to call to mind taste, tactility, and smell. It is no accident that the most disgusting sounds of violence are resonant of and frequently created by food; from the pushing of meat to the squishing of melons, the Foley studio is rife with the acoustics of food and these sounds dominate in scenes of physical brutality, quite literally turning the human form into meat and matter.” 39 Coulthard, “Acoustic Disgust,” 185. 40 Coulthard, “Acoustic Disgust,” 188. 41 Jones, Torture Porn, 15; “…the ‘porn’ in ‘torture porn’ is interpreted as a synonym for ‘worthless’…dismissed as throwaway, immoral entertainment.” 42 Martin Picard, “Levels,” in The Routledge Companion to Video Game Studies, ed. Mark J.P. Wolf and Bernard Perron (New York and London: Routledge Taylor & Francis Group, 2014).

206 avatars they inhabit. It is no accident, then, that the wall-to-wall use of vocalizations in fighting games both renders the violence and genders its soundscape.

The Gendered Soundscape of Fighting Games

Gender is often “represented, contested, and reinforced through the aural;” rooted both in biological difference and in socialized performance.43 At the onset of puberty, both males and females experience physiological changes that influence the sound of the voice; the larynx grows and the vocal folds thicken and lengthen, causing a lowering of the pitch of the voice. Women tend to drop half an octave in pitch, and men drop a full octave on average, and so men’s voices are typically deeper. However, “Bound to some degree by these physiological parameters, humans can and do place their voices in ways that are consistent with the performative aspects of gender, and voice pitch is both highly variable and subject to cultural/historical framing and self-fashioning.”44 The notion of a gendered soundscape, according to Christine Ehrick, “…can help us conceptualize sound as a space where categories of ‘male’ and ‘female’ are constituted within the context of particular events over time, and by extension the ways that power, inequality and agency might be expressed in the sonic realm—in other words, tuning in to sound as a signifier of power.”45 How do the voices in fighting game franchises depict the power and agency of their characters differently, in game worlds where all of the combatants possess quick reflexes and physical strength?

43 Christine Ehrick, "Vocal Gender and the Gendered Soundscape: At the Intersection of Gender Studies and Sound Studies.” Sounding Out! (2015). 44 Ehrick, “Vocal Gender.” 45 Ehrick, “Vocal Gender.”

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The soundscape of a fighting game is replete with characters performing and reifying tropes of masculinity and femininity, adding an extra aural dimension to the vocal sounds of exertion and injury. Michael Newman and John Vanderhoef suggest that the performative, hegemonic hyper-masculinity associated with gamer identity and emphasized in video games arose out of a deep gendered anxiety in geek culture, painting adult male gamers as childish, unmotivated, and still living in their parents’ basements. Additionally, “…computer users are also positioned as emasculated, even feminine men with soft bodies due to too much time spent immobile before screens. These gendered positions extend to video game users, explaining gamer culture’s anxious reproduction of hegemonic masculinity.46 Male representation in gaming is as exaggerated and unrealistic as it is for females; however, instead of intensely sexualized portrayals, men are depicted as impossibly muscular, strong, and brave. Male voices are likewise deep, authoritative, and unwavering in order to contribute to the construction of a hegemonic masculinity.

Research on gender representation has focused on damaging and overly-sexualized portrayals of women, finding that women are typically treated as sex objects in games (and depicted with revealing clothing and unrealistic proportions) and experience a high degree of gendered violence.47 Powerful women can (and do) appear in games, especially fighting

46 Michael Z. Newman and John Vanderhoef, “Masculinity,” in The Routledge Companion to Video Game Studies, ed. Mark J.P. Wolf and Bernard Perron, 380-387 (New York and London: Routledge Taylor & Francis Group, 2014), 382. 47 See for example, Christine Daviault and Gareth Schott. “Looking Beyond Representation: Situating the Significance of Gender Portrayal Within Game Play,” in The Routledge Companion to Media and Gender, ed. Cynthis Carter, Linda Steiner, and Lisa McLaughlin (London and New York: Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group, 2014) 440; Tracy L. Dietz, “An Examination of Violence and Gender Role Portrayals in Video Games: Implications for Gender Socialization and Aggressive Behavior.” Sex Roles 38, no. 5-6 (1998); Edward Downs and Stacy L. Smith, “Keeping Abreast of Hypersexuality: A Video Game Character Content Analysis,” Sex Roles 62, no. 11 (2010), 721-733; Nicole Martins, Dmitri C. Williams, Kristen Harrison, and Rabindra A. Ratan, “A Content Analysis of Female Body Imagery,” Sex Roles 61 (2009), 824-836; Karen E. Dill and Kathryn P.

208 games when they participate in the brutal tournaments alongside men; in these instances

Carrie Heeter suggests that “Such a character’s power is transgressive (a strong female in a male world), but hyper-sexualization reinforces their status as objects of male sexual desire.”48 Female characters are typically associated with passivity, cooperation, and expressivity, traits that inflect their vocalizations as well.49

As Droumeva, Evans, Furtado, and Bangert argue, fighting games have tended to typify female characters along three stock tropes, which they identify as warrior women,

“butt-kicking dolls,” and seductresses.50 The authors captured 166 fighting sequences demonstrating average or typical play (in which both male and female characters dealt similar amounts of damage) for nine major female characters in the Mortal Kombat, Street Fighter, and

Soul Calibur franchises. Their analysis demonstrated a gradual increase in the total number of sounded elements in fighting games since the 1990s—the soundscape has gradually become more cacophonous overall—with a particularly marked increase in the proportion of female vocalizations for a typical fight sequence (30-45% of the soundscape in the 1990s vs. 50-60% in modern titles).51 Droumeva et al. found that a range of female voice types connected to these three tropes, but all of the utterances and taunts tended to either infantilize or sexualize the character, or both. Warriors had a medium-high register with clear timbre, coded as middle-class and white,” and used a more confident tone overall, reserving breathy tones for

Thill, “Video Game Characters and the Socialization of Gender Roles: Young People’s Perceptions Mirror Sexist Media Depictions” Sex Roles 57 (2007), 851-864. 48 Carrie Heeter, “Femininity,” in The Routledge Companion to Video Game Studies, ed. Mark J.P. Wolf and Bernard Perron (New York and London: Routledge Taylor & Francis Group, 2014), 373. 49 Heeter, “Femininity,” 374. 50 Milena Droumeva, Kaeleigh Evans, Nesan Furtado, and Renita Bangert. "It Gets Worse...The Female Voice in Video Games.” First Person Scholar, November 1 2017. http://www.firstpersonscholar.com/it-gets-worse/ 51 Droumeva et al., “It Gets Worse.”

209 emphasis of significant elements (often in cut-scenes providing context for her singular mission; warrior women types often seek to avenge someone or prove themselves in male- dominated tournaments). Her taunts are often flippant, but her exaggerated vocal performance in cut-scenes characterizes her as overly-emotional. The cute “butt kicking doll,” however, is “overly apologetic, playful and giggly, ever delighted and reactive. Her voice is often artificially pitched up, light, breathy, and at times squealy,” and she is likely to

“sound 10 yet appear 25.”52 Finally, the Seductress possesses an animalistic, sensual, guttural tone of voice that seems too mature for her; unlike the butt-kicking doll, the Seductress sounds 35 yet appears 25. As Droumeva et al. write:

…In this trope, the raspy growl and elements of her overly inviting sexuality seem to be intrinsically linked to a kind of otherworldly quality: connections to magic and the arcane, and/or physical hybridity or deformities. For instance: Mileena’s (MK) animalistic growl may stem from her distinctly inhuman background, the handkerchief around her face hiding a gigantic set of fanged teeth. Yet her sexuality is a more defining characteristic than her monstrous visage, and this can readily be observed with her vocal performance uttering lines such as ‘Was it good for you?’ in her fights.53

It is of note that these vocal types have resonances in opera—soprano voices are typically reserved for youthful ingenues, whereas roles of older women, seductresses, and witches are written for mezzo-soprano.

Killer Instinct (Midway and Nintendo, 1994) presents a representative case study in the differences between feminine and masculine utterances in the genre, confirming the findings of Droumeva et al. Although the game includes a number of supernatural combatants (a

52 Droumeva et al., “It Gets Worse.” 53 Droumeva et al., “It Gets Worse.” They continue: “Street Fighter’s Juri and Soul Calibur’s Ivy are also prime examples of this trope, both exhibiting the raspy witchy growl while existing in young sexualized bodies and utilizing highly sexualized taunts in their battle sequences such as ‘Feels good, huh?’ (Juri) and ‘I’ll play with you, for a little while’ (Ivy).”

210 velociraptor, a werewolf, a skeleton), it also includes a young female assassin named Orchid and a championship boxer named T.J. Combo. Whereas T.J. wears a gym shorts and a patriotic tank top, Orchid wears a form-fitting leotard with the word “hot” written in yellow along the side (see Figure 4.1). Her fighting stance is quite wide (perhaps to balance in her high-heeled boots); even when she takes damage in a fight, she recoils by jutting her hips outward rather than curling in on herself (see Figure 4.2). Even when knocked unconscious,

Orchid lands on her back with legs falling open(see Figure 4.3).

Figure 4.1. T.J. Combo and Orchid, Killer Instinct (Midway and Nintendo, 1994)

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Figure 4.2. Orchid injured in battle, Killer Instinct (Midway and Nintendo, 1994)

Figure 4.3. Orchid knocked out, Killer Instinct (Midway and Nintendo, 1994)

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Combo’s utterances are forceful, expressive, and complex. Of 31 total vocalization sounds for Combo in the game, 21 of them represent exertion or taunts, and 10 of them represent defensive vocalizations of injury or impact. Some of his sounds do not use any vowels in the hit, suggesting that his mouth is not open (e.g., a [hn] sound). All of Combo’s attack sounds start with h or y, consonants that form at the back of the tongue and that push extra air forward; e.g., [hwuɑ] or [ʍwuɑ]. These sounds suggest exertion—pushing more air through a vowel shape than is needed to form the vowel in order to make the vocal cords vibrate. Combo’s injury sounds all start with a glottal attack—in other words, the glottis is closed, creating a stopped sound that air then forces open and through (such as [ˈəu]). His utterances suggest a punch in the stomach knocking the wind out of the character, an escape of air punctuated with an initial glottal attack (suggesting the surprise of the blow) that then leaves the body through a more open vowel shape without forming either a fricative or labial consonant. This is a natural sound to emit in this context. Combo also has several complex vocalizations—many of them comprise two or three sounds, with a wide variety in pitch and a longer duration.

Orchid has 36 total sounds; 15 of them represent injury, 2 represent her “fire cat” form (like Mileena, Orchid has an animalistic aspect), and another 9 are intensely sexual moans. Her moans are throaty and not as high in pitch as her other utterances: more of an

[ou] sound. Orchid’s injury utterances use some of the same softer sounds as her moans, including a large number of schwa syllables [ʌ] or [ə]. A schwa is the result of opening one’s mouth without forming a vowel, creating an “ah” or “uh” sound—even her injury sounds carry a sexual undertone. When she does express vowels, usually in exertion sounds, all of

213 them are brighter and more forward in her mouth than Combo—they are more nasal and less throaty. For example, when vocalizing the vowel “a” for offensive sounds, Orchid will use [æ], the sound used for the words cat and stand. Orchid’s attacks are typically variations of [hiæ]. This brighter form, [æ], requires raising the cheeks, engaging the same zygomatic muscles used in smiling. This face shape causes a slight shortening of the resonant cavity of the mouth, and the resultant tone is associated with younger voices and female voices.

Although subtle, this sound seems to emphasize her femininity. Women are socialized to smile more, to placate others in social situations, and her vocalizations echo this kind of submission, softening, or passivity. Her sounds are shorter and simpler overall than

Combo’s—single vowel sounds delivered with less force (she never uses a glottal stop), breathier, and more sexual.

Droumeva et al. note that female fighting game characters often have drastically different (even contradictory) vocal presences in cut-scenes vs. in gameplay, serving to disembody them and depersonalizing them into generic feminine types.54 Gendered disembodiment enters into video game soundscapes when female characters are made to sound much younger or older than they look. But Orchid’s vocalizations echo a more troubling tendency in fighting game soundscapes; as Droumeva et al. concluded:

In our reading of sounds across Mortal Kombat, Street Fighter and Soul Calibur there seems to be almost no difference between when women take damage and when they’re dealing damage to their opponent. In other words, what the content analysis doesn’t show us is that even when sonic elements are almost equal in frequency,

54 Droumeva et al., “It Gets Worse.” See also Mary Ann Doane, “The Voice in the Cinema: The Articulation of Body and Space” in Film Sound: Theory and Practice, ed. Elisabeth Weis and John Belton (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985).

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women simply sound most of the time as if they are being hit, while men make very few defensive cries.55

Embodied sounds representing injury help situate a player, help her to empathize and incorporate, and suggest courses of action (e.g., by encouraging her to take defensive or evasive maneuvers). But fighting games evoke deeply embodied sound while simultaneously disembodying female characters. All of this is destabilizing for a player, who cannot rely on the soundscape for reliable information about the state of her female fighting character’s health; if she exhibits whimpers or moans throughout the bout, the sounds do not provide useful information to differentiate between game states. For male characters, there is a clearer distinction between exertion sounds and injury sounds when they occur. Men do not have as many of either type of sound in a standard match, but when they do the listener can more easily differentiate between taking damage and inflicting it.

Gendering the soundscape in this way is detrimental to performance, suggesting that the stereotypical, objectifying gender work that these sounds perform (for both Combo and

Orchid) is more important than allowing sound effects to perform their most important function in the soundscape: communicating with the player. Disembodying the sound and removing its typical functionality has distressing implications, as well; encouraging a more detached interaction with violent games and potentially desensitizing players to violence (or even gendered violence) and the objectification of women. Elizabeth Behm-Morawitz and

Dana Mastro, for example, found preliminary evidence that playing a sexualized videogame heroine can unfavorably influence beliefs about women in the real world; therefore, a

55 Droumeva et al., “It Gets Worse.”

215 constant barrage of gendered violence conflated with sexual objectification could have deleterious effects on players.56 Mike Yao, Chad Mahood, and Daniel Linz performed a study examining the effects of game content featuring female objectification on male players, measuring cognitive accessibility to sexually-objectifying thoughts through a lexical decision task; they found that this content “may prime thoughts related to sex, encourage men to view women as sex objects, and lead to self-reported tendencies to behave inappropriately towards women in social situations.”57

However, not all research unequivocally supports the notion that players passively receive game images and content, especially with regard to violence; Ben DeVane and Kurt

Squire suggest that players “use their own experiences and knowledge to interpret the game—they do not passively receive the games’ images and content. The meanings they produce about controversial subjects are situated in players’ local practices, identities, and discourse models as they interact with the game’s semiotic domain.”58 While this may be true to some extent, one cannot discount the effects of repeated exposure to objectifying media—and how this influences the formation of an individual’s discourse model.59 Fighting

56 Elizabeth Behm-Morawitz and Dana Mastro, “The Effects of the Sexualization of Female Video Game Characters on Gender Stereotyping and Female Self-Concept,” Sex Roles 61 (2009), 808-823. 57 Mike Z. Yao, Chad Mahood, and Daniel Linz, “Sexual Priming, Gender Stereotyping, and Likelihood to Sexually Harass: Examining the Cognitive Effects of Playing a Sexually-Explicit Video Game” Sex Roles 62 (2010), 77. 58 Ben DeVane and Kurt D. Squire, “The Meaning of Race and Violence in Grand Theft Auto” Games and Culture 3 no. 3-4 (2008), 264-285; 264. 59 Robert Zajonc, “Attitudinal Effects of Mere Exposure,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 9, no. 2 (1968) 1-27; Zajonc found that repeated exposure to a stimulus enhances a person’s attitude or liking for that object. This is attributed to processing fluency—the brain appreciates when it can quickly assess a stimulus, and familiarity facilitates this mechanism; see also Max Weisbuch, Diane Mackle, and Teresa Garcia-Marques, “Prior Source Exposure and Persuasion: Further Evidence for Misattributional Processes,” Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 29, no 6 (2003), 691-700; 691; Weisbuch et al. explored whether persuasive messages could persuade participants (when exposed subliminally or explicitly, and compared against a control group that was not exposed); they found that “…prior subliminal exposure increased source persuasiveness to the extent that the source was liked more and only absent a recall cue.”

216 games pull no punches with players, and their sounds might have more impact than we realize.

Illness and Game Sound

…injury is not the only way the journey of impairment begins. Indeed, for most, it evolves and unfolds though in often surprising and discomfiting ways.60

Two forms of microbe can cause illness in human beings: bacteria and viruses.61

Bacteria are single-celled organisms with a thin membrane surrounding a core of cellular fluid, that can reproduce independently and survive outside the body. Most forms of bacteria do not harm humans, and some are even beneficial (as in the live cultures in yogurt). Bacteria typically respond to antibiotics, though some antibiotic-resistant bacteria have evolved in response to the overuse of these drugs and antibacterial cleaning products. Viruses are much smaller than bacteria, and do not have as complex of a structure—mostly a core of genetic material surrounded by protein—and require living hosts in order to multiply. Viruses reproduce by invading a cell and reprogramming it, ordering it to produce copies of the virus until it bursts and dies. Most common symptoms exhibited by a person fighting an infection

(such as fever, chills, fatigue, and vomiting) are due not to the bacteria or virus, but to the autoimmune response of the body. Bacterial and viral infections represent the most common forms of illness, and many people recover from these conditions within weeks. As Parsons suggests, the person who is unwell is expected to perform a “sick role” for the duration of

60 Gleeson, “Lost and Found in Space,” 76. 61 James M. Steckelberg, “Bacterial vs. Viral Infections,” Mayo Clinic, September 7, 2017. https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/infectious-diseases/expert-answers/infectious-disease/faq- 20058098; Melinda Ratini, DO, MS. “Bacterial and Viral Infections.” WebMD, April 25, 2017. https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/infectious-diseases/expert-answers/infectious-disease/faq- 20058098

217 the illness (until they can resume their usual social roles), isolating themselves so that they will not pass disease onto others through sneezing, coughing, or other contact (see Figure

4.4).62 Although the sick role represents a form of temporary impairment, and does result in some social distancing behaviors (as others try to avoid contagion), it does not cause disablement unless the illness becomes chronic.

Figure 4.4. Performing the sick role, The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past (Nintendo, 1991)

62 Parsons, The Social System; Eliot Friedson, Profession of Medicine: A Study of the Sociology of Applied Knowledge (New York: Harper and Row, 1970); although Parsons suggests that the sick role is compensatory, explaining temporary lapses in performance or participation, Friedson suggests that the level of social acceptance for this role depends on three factors: whether the illness is considered serious, whether the individual is believed to have caused the illness (e.g., developing lung cancer after a lifetime of heavy smoking), and whether the illness is believed to exist or accepted as legitimate (e.g., those with chronic pain disorders such as fibromyalgia).

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Chronic illnesses are long-term conditions (persisting for at least three months), with complex causes and long latency periods, that have no cure and that affect a person’s daily life, requiring routines of care and intervention to manage resulting impairments.63 Although many conditions do not have specific bacterial or viral causes, infectious agents can cause chronic illness. For example, the Epstein-Barr virus causes Burkitt lymphoma, Borrelia burgdorferi causes chronic Lyme arthritis, Campylobacter jejuni causes Guillain-Barré syndrome, and Hepatitis C causes chronic liver disease.64 Chronic illness challenges the societal construct of the sick role, because its effects are persistent (if not permanent). Additionally, the impairments from chronic illnesses can manifest inconsistently, with asymptomatic periods of relative health. This uncertainty contributes to direct psycho-emotional disablement; reflecting anxiety both about the disease itself (whether it is communicable, and its progression) and about a person’s ability to fulfill their usual social roles and contribute to society. Those who experience stigma or ignorant discrimination from others due to chronic illness may respond by: (a) withdrawing from society to avoid negative interactions with others; (b) attempting to deny or downplay impairment to perform health for others and mitigate social tension; or (c) carefully managing disclosure of their diagnosis to others.65

Manifestations of illness and disease in games are far less common than injury, and often occur in non-player characters (NPCs). Often, sick characters are comatose, serving as the catalyst for a small quest in which the avatar must fetch a rare healing item or medicine.

For example, in Final Fantasy IV (Square, 1991), Rosa contracts desert fever on the outskirts

63 Scambler, “Long-term Disabling Conditions,” 136. 64 Siobhán M. O’Connor, Christopher E. Taylor, and James M. Hughes. “Emerging Infectious Determinants of Chronic Diseases,” Emerging Infectious Diseases 12, no. 7 (2006), 1051-1057. 65 Scambler, “Long-term Disabling Conditions,” 138.

219 of the town of Kaipo, and the party must acquire a sand pearl from the den of a giant antlion to cure her. In StarTropics (Nintendo, 1991), Chief Miracola’s daughter Bananette has been cursed with a permanent sleeping sickness; the Chief sends Mike in search of a mountain hermit who can break the spell. Most of the examples of wooziness and disorientation in games arise not from illness but from environmental toxins or alcohol.66 In many RPGs, enemies can summon poisons that will slowly drain a character’s lifeforce until the player administers an antidote or casts the correct healing spell.

Despite this dearth of representation, Dr. Mario (Nintendo, 1990) treats disease as a central theme; the player combats infection (enemy microbes) with an aggressive course of anti-viral medicines (see Figure 4.5).67 The game is similar to Tetris (Nintendo, 1989) in that the player must align items that fall from the top of the screen in order to clear the playing field of obstacles.68 In this case, Dr. Mario dispenses color-coded pill capsules that the player can rotate and manipulate to align while they fall. The player must create a column or row of at least four of the same color capsules next to a virus in order to eliminate it. The main objective is to eradicate all of the microbes on the screen; their numbers increase with each level, as does the complexity of their arrangement. A game over occurs if mismatched capsules clutter the playing space and obstruct the neck of the bottle, preventing the doctor

66 Peter Smucker, “Gaming Sober, Playing Drunk: Sound Effects of Alcohol in Video Games,” (paper presented at the North American Conference on Video Game Music, Ann Arbor, Michigan, January 2018) 67 Mario, like Barbie, has had several careers in his lifetime: carpenter (Donkey Kong, Nintendo, 1981; Wrecking Crew, Nintendo, 1985), plumber (Mario Bros., Nintendo 1983), racecar driver (Mario Kart, Nintendo, 1992), boxing referee (Punchout!!, Nintendo, 1987), and submarine captain (Super Mario Land, Nintendo, 1989), to name a few. 68 I am citing the Game Boy version of Tetris because it is one of the most popular versions, and the one that was released the closest to Dr. Mario. Alexey Pajitnov developed the game in 1984 in Moscow, and the game has been remade for many platforms since then. For more on the history of Tetris, and its music, see Plank- Blasko, “ ‘From Russia with Fun!’

220 from sending in another dose. On the options screen, the player has a choice between two musical accompaniments for the game: “Fever” and “Chill.” While the music serves to acclimate the player to the speed of the game and motivate them to continue on with a repetitive task, these two tracks also represent symptoms of illness to the player through timbre and through the use of unpredictable musical gestures, incursions that disrupt the musical flow and suggest a momentary loss of control in the musical body.

Figure 4.5. Gameplay, Dr. Mario (Nintendo, 1990)

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Timbre is an immediate sensation; a result of perceiving certain acoustical features that characterize a sound’s physical properties, allowing listeners to differentiate between notes of the same pitch played on different instruments. Timbre relates to the proportion of overtones and partials in a particular sound wave, as well as to how the proportions can change over time.69 A given sound has a defined envelope, comprising qualities of its attack, sustain, and decay, and differences in these three qualities can influence perceptions of timbre. However, timbre is not an entirely objective phenomenon; as Megan Lavengood writes, “Timbre is affected by neural processes that make any number of extramusical or non-acoustic associations, and timbre becomes interwoven with culture, identity, and other sociological and non-acoustic components.”70 Descriptions of timbre often metaphorically invoke either visual phenomena (such as color or brightness) or physical sensations apprehended through touch (texture, or warmth). For example, a sound’s perceived temperature relates to several features, such as pitch (higher notes are perceived as colder than lower notes) the perceived level of brightness (cold sounds are brighter; warm sounds are darker) and clarity (cold sounds are clear, warm sounds are blurry or have a softer articulation).71 A sense of musical temperature also relates to the perceived activity level of

69 Megan L. Lavengood, “A New Approach to the Analysis of Timbre,” (Ph.D diss., City University of New York, 2017), 4. 70 Lavengood, “Analysis of Timbre,” 5. 71 Lavengood, “Analysis of Timbre,” 106-107; Lavengood also suggests that perceived temperature is a direct result of the physical properties of the sound and its source: “Many who think analog synthesizers have a warmer sound argue the warmth comes from the sound’s generation with physical vibrations…The sound created by an analog synthesizer inherently has imprecisions, flaws, and microfluctuations, peculiar to each synthesizer and its auxiliary equipment, and furthermore dependent on the environment. These variations generate a tiny amount of randomness in an analog synthesizer’s tone, which accounts for its perceived warmth.”

222 the music; just as a faster vibrato on the violin suggests warmth or intensity, a dense, fast, rhythmically-active texture appears warmer than a slow, sparse, or open texture.

In “Fever,” Hirokazu Tanaka (credited as “Hip” Tanaka in the game) implies heat through all of these features; the track opens with all three voices in a bass register at a tempo of 150 bpm (see Example 4.5). The noise channel’s tone falls somewhere between a closed high hat and a snare; I have notated it as a snare for this track. The DPCM channel has two sounds, similar to a low and high conga which sound as approximately pitched to C and F when isolated. The galloping rhythm in the noise channel adds a sense of urgency and energy, while the DPCM channel accents the important rhythms in the other voices. In the first six measures, there are two moments that destabilize the sense of musical flow. The first is the chromatic descending quintuplet in m. 4, jumping back and forth from the treble the bass register and then back up. This moment gives an effect like a musical sneeze, cough, or shudder. The gesture is similar to a slide, but the notes are articulate and distinct—not so rapid as to elide into a glissando effect. The second moment is a more involved shift in texture in m. 6, when the top three voices articulate the gallop of the noise channel and the lower voices give a square beat. This measure seems sudden and out of character, interrupting the progression of the melody. Although sort of silly, both moments introduce a sense of unpredictability to the track.

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Example 4.5. Hirokazu “Hip” Tanaka, Dr. Mario (Nintendo, 1990), “Fever,” mm. 1-8.

This theme of random interjection continues throughout the song, as in the large leaps and register changes on beats four of mm. 15-19 (see Example 4.6). Just as in m. 6, all five voices continue to drop the musical line throughout “Fever” to accentuate certain beats in an insistent homorhythm. The track closes by trailing off, losing steam and dissipating the heat motive from the introduction before looping back to measure 3 (see Example 4.7).

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Example 4.6. Hirokazu “Hip” Tanaka, Dr. Mario (Nintendo, 1990), “Fever,” mm. 15-18.

Example 4.7. Hirokazu “Hip” Tanaka, Dr. Mario (Nintendo, 1990), “Fever,” mm. 37-42.

“Fever” lacks focus; it shifts suddenly from one idea to the next, with frequent interruptions and changes in texture that constantly engage the player’s attentional processes and prime them for action. “Fever” is not meant to lull—it actively prevents the player from habituating to the track, even in long stretches of play.

“Chill” is perceptibly slower than “Fever” (120 bpm vs. 150 bpm) and suggests a colder timbre through the use of register, texture, and articulation (see Example 4.8). The noise channel’s tone also falls somewhere between a closed high hat and a snare; here, however, I have notated it as a closed high hat, as it has less low-end punch than in “Fever.”

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The DPCM channel uses two sounds, a bass drum and a higher-pitched sound similar to an open high conga or a high tom (or even a cuica)—I decided to notate the rhythms with the conga, as there is a quality to the slap of the sound that suggested hand drumming. Of course, these effects are heavily compressed and low-fidelity, and so these attributions are not absolute. The track opens with the pulse channels sounding exceedingly high, sharp, staccato chords. The triangle channel is also relatively high in register, and also quite short and articulate.

Example 4.8. Hirokazu “Hip” Tanaka, Dr. Mario (Nintendo, 1990), “Chill,” mm. 1-6.

The phrase structure is much more balanced and regular than in “Fever,” even a little mechanical or rigid for most of the track; all of the phrases resolve in an even number of measures (4, 8, or 12). The most complex section begins at m. 41 with a wandering melody set slightly out of phase between the two pulse channels, and a more rhythmically-complex accompaniment in the DPCM and triangle channels (see Example 4.9).

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Example 4.9. Hirokazu “Hip” Tanaka, Dr. Mario (Nintendo, 1990), “Chill,” mm. 41-51.

Overall, this track is coolly laid-back yet precise, clinical, or exact in its rhythmic attacks.

“Chill” is sparser and more open than “Fever,” and the most salient aspects are the colder timbres and the staccato articulation creating space between almost every note. The overall function of the tracks is to motivate the player and align them with Dr. Mario rather than

227 with the person in the passive sick role, “solving” the puzzle of illness through targeted application of various medicines. However, these contrasts in the timbral features that characterize temperature suggest an attempt by Tanaka to musically mimic the sensations of sickness—heat, shivers, and sudden coughs or sneeze—in an iconic sonic form, providing novelty and interest to the soundtrack by evoking the physical symptoms in the abstract.

Dr. Mario and the Limits of Transcription

Sherston Johnson, in an article comparing differences in print and Braille musical notation, demonstrates some of the limitations facing sighted musicians due to their dependence on sheet music. She emphasizes the “tenuous mappings” between the score and the sounding phenomena, and how these visual metaphors engendered by notation have come to dominate musical thought.72 I came across this article in the midst of performing transcriptions for Dr. Mario, and it seemed a fitting reminder of the limits to what I am able to capture in this format.

The purpose of transcription shapes its form. When I transcribe game audio for analytical purposes, I reveal the inner architecture of the sound, and gain a kind of intimacy and clarity that drives my scholarship. In striving for accuracy, however, I often encounter moments where the music in the machine refuses to reconcile with notational convention, and I must make a decision about whether to privilege integrity or intelligibility. I typically perform transcription by ear; isolating the individual sound channels and notating each part

72 Shersten Johnson, “Notational Systems and Conceptualizing Music: A Case Study of Print and Braille Notation,” MTO: A Journal of the Society for Music Theory 15, no. 5 (2009); “Sighted musicians…are generally so notation-dependent that it’s easy to accept notational conventions as ‘just the way music is.’ The influence of notation on what we hear and how we perform and compose goes almost unnoticed, and, despite what are sometimes tenuous mappings between sound and notation, the distinctions between the written and the audible blur in our musical discourse.”

228 as if taking dictation. When I come across a passage that is too difficult to transcribe at tempo, I extract the channel data and export it into a wav file, and open it in audio editing software, where I can slow it down without changing the pitch. For most passages, this extra step is sufficient to capture the gesture; most of the time these passages involve rapid arpeggiated figures or chromatic runs that do not follow a strict chordal or scalar pattern, and slowing it down helps me find where the note skips. However, “Fever” and “Chill” each contained single measures that were impossible to apprehend even after slowing down the channel data by 400-800% in audio editing software, necessitating a more exact approach.

Both tracks include single moments of unparalleled rhythmic complexity. Measure 10 of “Fever” sounds like a computer blip—the pulse channels jump up from a middle to a high register, sounding cold and random, yet precise (see Example 4.10). The triangle voice drops out, and the noise and DPCM channels merely punctuate beats one and four. The measure is so complicated that it runs off the page of the score. Measure 12 of “Chill” also presents a complicated rhythmic figure, and yet the gesture follows a clear stepwise, chromatic descent (see Example 4.11). Of the twenty notes in the pattern (which unfold in the space of a half note), pitches sound two to three times. This randomness adds to the shuddering or chattering effect. I could take an editorial shortcut in “Chill” by writing a glissando, but the measure in “Fever” is too random to simplify into a more musically- intuitive form. The strangeness of these measures makes them the most salient features in the music, and so it was important to try to capture what was happening. But the process of arriving at these transcriptions demonstrated the limits of my perception—I had to disconnect from my own embodied sensation and explore music as numerical data.

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Example 4.10. Hirokazu “Hip” Tanaka, Dr. Mario (Nintendo, 1990), “Fever,” pulse channels, m. 12.

Example 4.11. Hirokazu “Hip” Tanaka, Dr. Mario (Nintendo, 1990), “Chill,” pulse 1 and triangle channels, m. 10.

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Music on the NES was encoded in such a way that modern scholars can parse the music in its original format (.nsf, or “Nintendo Sound File”) using a program called a tracker, which shows the raw data encoded on the PSG chip. It looks a bit like a long spreadsheet, with the main columns representing the channels (see Figure 4.6). The data scrolls vertically (from top to bottom) rather than from left to right. The placement of the notes indicates the attack or onset of the note, and the other symbols on the same row list information about octave designation, volume, and effects applied to the oscillator that can shape the timbre of the note.

The tracker scrolls at a default rate of 150 beats per minute, and so the number of frames between sounding pitches determines the overall tempo: a larger number of frames will result in a slower tempo and allow the programmer to encode smaller or larger note values by dividing or multiplying the number of frames. Of course, assigning frame counts to note values is an arbitrary exercise; one might just as easily decide that an eight-frame duration represents a quarter note instead of an eighth, and the transcription will change accordingly. This is an intuitive listening enterprise as much as a technical one—discerning meter and then using the tracker data to find the exact rhythmic relationships. For “Chill,” I determined that eighth notes were 14 frames apart, an uneven number that makes it difficult to notate note values smaller than sixteenths. In the example above, the pulse channels have notes every second or third frame, and so they fall between the other durations. Using an unequal (rather than divisible) number of frames between notes could be a result of manipulating the tempo of the track; or, perhaps Tanaka made precise and deliberate use of the technology and assembly-language code to create an unsettling musical output. In

231 attempting to evoke the symptoms of illness, Tanaka invokes the technological to create moments of rupture.73 These unnatural or disembodied sounds disrupt the musical body to depict deeply subjective, internal sensations of the real body battling illness. 74

Figure 4.6. A tracker representing .nsf data for m. 10 of “Chill”

73 Here I am reminded again of Jennifer Iverson, “Mechanized Bodies,” 157-158; “…electronic music often activates a sense of the Other, since electronic sound has aspects that may not seem intuitive, ‘natural,’ gestural, or embodied.” 74 Cook, Analysing Musical Multimedia, 73; “…the very fact of juxtaposing image and music has the effect of drawing attention to the properties that they share, and in this way constructing a new experience of each: the interpretation is in this sense emergent.”

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Coughs and Caution

As Diane Carr writes, “Many action-adventure games feature representations of injury and monstrosity mixed with depictions of ability and augmentation.” 75 Players are taught to avoid damage through every element of the game: its core mechanic depends on keeping the body intact and able to perform, and visual and auditory cues constantly reinforce these rules. However, games do not represent these temporary forms of impairment equally. While injury is nearly ubiquitous as a game mechanic—and makes up a considerable proportion of game soundscapes—illness is relegated to the realm of the plot and the non-player characters, serving as rationale for a mission or quest. While both injury and illness represent obstacles preventing the player’s progress in the narrative, I believe this disparity in representation arises from a perceived lack of agency: the sick role is antithetical to the notion of an avatar, who must serve as an agent of action for the player rather than resting and recuperating in bed.

Injury is more robust as a game mechanic: a health bar quantifies lifeforce for the player, and injuries result in quantifiable damage and loss of vitality. And while in the real world an injury might cause a more complicated form of impairment, the avatar never needs to renegotiate their relationship to their body or ways of moving and being in the game space. While injury is confined to the moment of impact, or the sensation of throbbing pain, disease can sap energy unpredictably—a person can experience a sudden onset of illness or a gradual weakening and loss of vitality that is more difficult to quantify or depict dynamically and procedurally. Developing a game mechanic based on fatigue would have to involve

75 Carr, “Disability and Dead Space.”

233 some form of rest, stopping play and disrupting a player’s incorporation while they wait for their character to recover.

Game designers do not apply these binaries consciously—health vs. hurt, powerful vs. precarious—because the underlying paradigm is taken for granted. We live in a culture that attempts to erase, minimize, obscure, disguise or pacify representations of impairment.

Disability is reduced, ignored, enfreaked, or given comforting explanations in the form of overcoming narratives in order to manage fear and reaffirm a sense of control and normalcy in the spectator. 76 The procedural rhetoric of games makes this relationship to control explicit: building directly upon notions of rules, limitations, and affordances. Anxieties about disability are powerful cultural forces, shaping game design and our experience of play.

Games are tacitly infused with this same discourse; they construct and communicate ability and impairment to the player and create a ludic narrative of control and overcoming.

How different bodies relate to one another in the real world maps directly onto the representation of those bodies in the game world. The soundscape dismisses the female fighter by sexually objectifying her through her body, her voice. The male fighter participates in upholding a crushing, hegemonic form of masculinity. The sheer vocality and density of the fighting game soundscape renders the utterances of exertion and injured bodies into cacophonous, violent spectacle, devoid of lexical function but rife with evocative potential for the players and spectators who participate in simulated combat.

Sounds in games emphasize skill and control as central to the structure and experience of play and foster fears of failure and loss through sheer repetition. Injury is

76 Lerner and Straus, Sounding Off, 2.

234 marked as the result of failure. Disease is transmitted because the player was careless. The sounds thus become marked with consequence, impacting a player’s very physiology. Game sounds reinforce ableist paradigms, promoting an unrealistic view of the idealized normative body and mind and reflecting deep cultural anxieties about the implications of the impairment. The player is unable to reconcile bodily variety with their desire to progress in the game: they are never asked to consider or embody new ways of thinking, being, and acting in and upon the game world. They have to play along.

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Chapter 5. Frightful Energy: Musical Madness in Final Fantasy VI

“Hee hee! Nothing can beat the music of hundreds of voices screaming in unison!”

Kefka exclaims, hearing music in genocide as he gleefully poisons the water supply to Doma castle. At first blush, the garishly dressed villain of Final Fantasy VI (FFVI; Square, 1994) is clownish, screaming at his underlings to clean sand from his boots in the middle of the desert.1 This second encounter shifts from silly to sinister as Kefka blithely kills dozens of men, women, and children to the mischievous and unsettling leitmotif representing his character (see Figure 5.1). The use of music in this scene is a vital clue to the true terror of his unstable mind: the impish tune and plucky timbres serve as grim counterpoint to senseless killing, an immediately intelligible and potent symbol of insanity.

1 FFVI was released on the SNES as Final Fantasy III in North America; in Japan, FFIII refers to a game released in 1990 for the Famicom. See Chris Kohler, Power Up: How Japanese Video Games Gave the World an Extra Life (Indianapolis: Brady Games, 2005), 116-120. I will refer to this game as Final Fantasy VI (as William Cheng has done in Sound Play) in order to avoid confusion with the earlier Japanese game; from FFVII and beyond, the numbers match between the U.S. and Japanese releases.

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Figure 5.1. Initial encounters with Kefka, FFVI (Square, 1994)

Video games often feature the compelling clash of good and evil—the trouble is, evil is often synonymous with generic, sadistic forms of unspecified insanity such as Kefka’s.2

Rather than writing a complex, nuanced, and empathetic representation, games often replicate harmful stereotypes casting mental disability itself as a villain. This chapter explores an iconic musical manifestation of the mad villain trope.3 From the release of terrifying toxins to the sweeping final movements of the five-part final boss suite, “Dancing Mad,”

Kefka’s themes employ militaristic rigidity, violent dissonance, Baroque counterpoint, operatic grandeur, and destabilizing turns in meter and instrumentation, allowing the player

2 Peter Byrne, “Psychiatric Stigma: Past, Passing, and To Come.” Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine, 90 (1997), 618-621; 618; Byrne writes that “Whether in public perception of through media representation, stigma does not differentiate between individual mental illnesses.” 3 Poundie Burstein, L. “Les chansons des fous: On the Edge of Madness with Alkan” in Sounding Off: Theorizing Disability in Music, ed. Neil Lerner and Joseph N. Straus, 187-198 (New York: Routledge, 2006), 187; “The characterization of madness in art is not a benign one, however, for it can lead to unfortunate distortions. In particular, it can wrongly suggest that the emotions and qualities associated with eccentric artworks are held only by an isolated segment of society rather than ones shared to some extent by everybody. Yet all people have a certain degree of unwarranted fears, obsessions, and anxieties….At what point of severity or frequency these qualities warrant a classification of madness is not absolute but is rather one that varies according to a culture.” In my use of the term “mad,” I invoke this work, but I also mean to reflect the game’s own descriptions of the character, and the “Dancing Mad” music associated with him.

237 to hear the music of his genocide. Kefka’s leitmotifs cast him as an object of fear, telegraphing his inner chaos and nihilism with frightful energy.

Just as the player faces four levels of twisted gods and monsters in the final boss battle (see Figure 5.2), there are four themes that structure this inquiry into Kefka’s leitmotifs. First, I will discuss the most common methods for representing mental disability in the media—the trope of the insane villain and its influence on the formation of societal stigma and distancing behaviors. Then, I will outline how these stock portrayals manifest in

Kefka’s character arc; how he begins the game as a poor fool worthy of ridicule and pity, and ends it as a towering figure of terror as he remakes and unmakes the world in his twisted and desolate image, slowly snuffing out the last vestiges of life. From there, I will explore how

Nobuo Uematsu’s music foreshadows this trajectory of insanity from the beginning, and how it draws on established cultural musical codes to embody Kefka’s deepening madness.

Finally, we will move beyond the representation to reception, the complicity of the player in perpetuating these tropes of mental disability in video games. In other chapters, I have explored embodiment and identification directly; here the game encourages empathy with those that Other and stigmatize rather than the with the character pathologized as mentally ill. We take these depictions for granted, take them as natural motivations for the gameplay at hand—but how do these games unconsciously or unintentionally shape our attitudes toward mental disability in the real world?

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Figure 5.2. Final battle with Kefka, in-game graphics and original concept art by Tetsuya Nomura, FFVI (Square, 1994)

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Mental Disability Representation in Media

It is easy to think of examples of mental disability in the media. From Norman Bates and Hannibal Lecter to Psycho Mantis of Metal Gear Solid (Konami, 1998) or Vaas

Montenegro from Far Cry 3 (Ubisoft, 2012), to perpetrators on Law & Order: Special Victims

Unit, or the Joker from The Dark Knight (Christopher Nolan, 2008). Depictions on television and in cinema typically rely on one of two main stock tropes: in the first, the mentally ill character is dismissed as an object of pity or derision, reduced to a one-dimensional rendering, bravely struggling against adversity or attempting to overcome limitations. The second common trope is for this kind of character to suddenly snap, transforming into a monstrous, terrifyingly unpredictable killer. There are a few other tropes, such as the romanticized mad waif or the mad prophet whose incomprehensible mutterings foretell future events or presently overlooked truths (Drusilla in Buffy the Vampire Slayer, for example), but by far the most common portrayal conflates mental disability with powerlessness or latent violence, presenting characters as either dangerous or incompetent, unable to care for themselves, or childlike and ineffectual. All of these tropes tend to collapse a complex person into a series of stereotyped gestures, expressions, and behaviors to achieve a certain narrative effect.

Mental disability is typically latent or emergent—it does not reliably manifest in overt visual or external signs—for this reason, it is considered an invisible illness or disability. As

Samantha Bassler writes, “An invisible illness may be temporary or curable, such as a non- threatening virus, or it may cause a long-term invisible disability, such as in the case of autoimmune diseases like rheumatoid arthritis and diabetes…invisible illnesses may be

240 difficult to diagnose, treat, and understand...”4 Mental disabilitieses are some of the most common forms of invisible illnesses, and they are also socially constructed like disability.5

However, the relationship between these designations is complicated. Categories can differ across eras and cultures; disorders, syndromes, and diseases as well as their diagnostic criteria continue to change with each new edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental

Disorders (DSM).6 For example, various forms of female hysteria were once common diagnoses, but the terms fell out of fashion after the DSM-II.7 Additionally, though the

American Psychological Association (APA) removed the diagnosis of homosexuality from the DSM in 1973, the World Health Organization (WHO) did not change the language of the International Classification of Diseases (ICD-10) to remove specific references to homosexuality until 1990.8

4 Bassler, “’But You Don’t Look Sick.’ ” 5 James Deaville, “Sounds of Mind: Music and Madness in the Popular Imagination,” in The Oxford Handbook of Music and Disability Studies, ed. Blake Howe, Stephanie Jensen-Moulton, Neil Lerner, and Joseph Straus, 640-660 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016); 642; Deaville also suggests that music “functions as a privileged site for madness in the popular imagination.” 6 The DSM is a taxonomic and diagnostic manual for mental health practitioners by the American Psychiatric Association. It is currently in its fifth edition (DSM-V, first published in 2013), though there are also regular updates. Although terms such as disorder, condition, and syndrome are used interchangeably in common usage, their meanings differ. According to the DSM-V, a symptom is an observable behavior or state. A mental health professional will observe symptoms in order to diagnose the underlying cause. Syndromes are constellations of related symptoms that often occur together and that characterize a particular disorder or disease. For example, down syndrome results from having an extra copy of chromosome 21, but several distinctive physical features characterize down syndrome at birth. A disorder is also a cluster of symptoms, but the term suggests a known underlying cause that accounts for these symptoms (but not the etiology of the disease). Finally, a disease is a disorder with a known underlying etiology (the cause or origin of the disease). 7 Carol S. North, “The Classification of Hysteria and Related Disorders: Historical and Phenomenological Considerations.” Behavioral Science, 5.4 (2015), 496-517; the DSM-II listed two types of “hysterical neurosis,” as well as “hypochondriacal hysteria,” but the DSM gradually phased out the terms in subsequent editions. Instead, several of the disorders were reclassified under categories such as somatoform disorders, conversion disorders, and dissociative disorders, and their diagnostic criteria have shifted dramatically. 8 Jack Drescher, “Out of DSM; Depathologizing Homosexuality.” Behavioral Science, 5, no. 4 (2015), 565-575; see also Barnes, “Understanding the Social Model,” 16.

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Partially as a result of these shifts, Mental disability has a fraught history and a complicated relationship to notions of impairment and disability. As Elizabeth Emens has suggested, there is a separation in the popular imagination between visible and invisible disabilities that have direct effects on the conception of a person’s ability to contribute to society.9 These social mechanisms have served to separate mental disability from physical forms, and created two troubling narratives. On one hand, mental disability is seen as something somebody should hide or manage privately (though therapy or medication), hiding conditions from family, friends, and employers and attempting to pass as normal. On the other hand, mental disability is viewed as a condition that inherently disqualifies the whole person, a ticking time bomb that may erupt into violent instability.

Identification with the experience of social oppression due to disability can serve useful political goals—such as increasing awareness and education, removing stigma, improving media representations, increasing access to mental health services, and improving the quality of life for those with mental disability. However, many are reluctant to claim this designation, even in spite of its political utility and potential for coalition-building. This could be due to: (a) a desire to keep invisible illness hidden from others (rather than claiming disability, as Simi Linton has advocated); (b) perceived stigma associated with disability identity; or (c) a belief that disability refers only to visible physical manifestations of impairment and not to cognitive and neurological difference.10 Regardless of the reasons for

9 Elizabeth F. Emens “Disabling Attitudes,” 43; “The more popular disabilities are the ones (like paraplegia) that apparently affect only a discrete part of a person, leaving open the possibility of competence in other parts. Such a disabled person might still be ‘worth something,’ from this troubling perspective. By contrast, mental or psychiatric disabilities are presumed to affect the whole person.” 10 Simi Linton, Claiming Disability. New York: NYU Press, 1998.

242 this lack of identification, the tension between mental disability and disability demonstrates the sheer breadth and complexity of these identities and the influence of stigma on the individual.

A great deal of perceived stigma associated with mental disability is replicated and reified in the media. As Colin Cameron writes,

Media discourse is a conversation carried out between different media texts, a conversation in which conventional meanings are shared. In framing our ways of knowing about and relating to a subject, and in suggesting ways we might act upon or experience it, discourse simultaneously opens up certain possibilities and shuts down others…texts are always oriented social action, producing meanings: they act on us and help constitute our social contexts.11

According to Laurie E. Klobas, the most common elements of disability representation are:

(a) treating disability as a personal problem to overcome; (b) reductive portrayals of disability rather than presenting multifaceted, complex characters; and (c) focusing solely on the disability instead of treating disability as integrated into a full life.12 David Mitchell and

Sharon Snyder have suggested in the influential Narrative Prosthesis that any deviation from a norm in a particular character in a story serves as a catalyst for plot development—in other words, the narrative promises to account for this difference in some form: “Our phrase narrative prosthesis is meant to indicate that disability has been used throughout history as a crutch upon which literary narratives lean for their representational power, disruptive potentiality, and analytical insight.”13

11 Cameron, Colin, editor. Disability Studies: A Student’s Guide. Los Angeles: Sage, 2014; 95; for more on media texts as social action see Tanya Titchkosky, Reading and Writing Disability Differently: The Textured Life of Embodiment (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007). 12 Laurie E. Klobas, Disability Drama in Television and Film (Jefferson, NC: McFarland and Co., 1988). 13 David T. Mitchell and Sharon L. Snyder, Narrative Prosthesis: Disability and the Dependencies of Discourse (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000), 49.

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Indeed, several writers have shown that disability is (and always has been) particularly pervasive in media.14 Cameron suggests that bodily difference represents opportunities for comedic exploitation, the evocation of horror, or an inspiring overcoming narrative. Most importantly, disability in media is often about everyone else in the narrative—about normative characters’ reactions to the pathologized individual. As Michael Bérubé has shown, the bodies of disabled characters in literature are often given over to metaphor; their disabilities “…are not presented as indexes of their moral standing but they serve nonetheless as indexes of everyone else’s moral standing, offering the other characters opportunities to demonstrate whatsoever they might do to the least of their brothers.”15 Neil

Lerner and Joseph Straus echo Bérubé’s notion of disability serving the normates, but also highlight the significance of these representations beyond the boundaries of the text itself:

“…the disabled character appears not for the purpose of sympathetic identification but rather to reaffirm the normality of the presumptively normal spectator.”16

Why does mental disability seemingly demand explanation in literature and in media?

As David Mitchell and Sharon Snyder state, “it is the narrative of disability’s very unknowability that consolidates the need to tell a story about it.”17 These stock tropes serve as a convenient stand-in for complex character development, providing the illusion of

14 Such as; Paul Darke, “Understanding Cinematic Representations of Disability,” in The Disability Studies Reader: Social Science Perspectives, ed. Tom Shakespeare (London: Cassell, 1988); Colin Barnes, “Images of Disability,” in On Equal Terms: Working with Disabled People, ed. Sally French (London: Butterworth-Heineman 1994); and Charles A. Riley, Disability and the Media: Prescriptions for Change (Hanover, NE: University Press of New England, 2005). 15 Michael Bérubé, “Disability and Narrative,” PMLA, 120, no. 2 (2005), 568-576; 570. 16 Neil Lerner and Joseph N. Straus, Sounding Off: Theorizing Disability in Music (New York and London: Routledge, 2006), 8. 17 Mitchell and Snyder, Narrative Prosthesis, 6.

244 psychological depth for secondary characters or irrational motivation for villains. But these stereotypes have real-world implications: they also help to shape public perception and stigma by normalizing these portrayals over more nuanced depictions—the media helps our culture to construct, consolidate, understand, express, communicate, and perpetuate beliefs about mental disability and its meanings.18 As Anderson suggests,

This is not to say that audiences (the public) cannot differentiate between fiction and reality, but that both are used together in juxtaposition to interpret and understand the message about mental illness…Thus, it is not just the cross-over of ‘fiction and reality’, it is the fact that different forms of media function at the same time, generating a similar kind of message about mental illness…it is not possible to see one form of media, such as film, as the only ‘ideological apparatus’ serving to represent one particular view.19

Many studies have shown that negative reports in the press and representation in media contribute to the formation of negative public attitudes towards the mentally ill, and that these portrayals in turn lead to intolerance and stigma.20 Characters in the media are

18 Erving Goffman, Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1986); Goffman’s book is one of the formative texts on stigma, but his definitions of the term vary. On page 9, he describes stigma as the situation of one who is denied full social participation or acceptance; on page 12, he describes it as the attribute that causes others to view a person as tainted and discounted; on page 14, he describes stigma as the relationship between the attribute and the resulting stereotype; on page 15, he describes stigma as undesired difference itself. All of these formations have been useful in discussing discrimination in disability studies. However, as Colin Cameron suggests in Disability Studies: A Student’s Guide, 148; “…critiques of Goffman’s work suggest that impairment causes stigma, or inevitably leads to it, and suggests that those who are stigmatized always yearn for acceptance, suggesting a dependence on the approval of the normal.” Goffman’s work is predicated on an uncritical, medical model view of impairment as something inherently wrong with a person. 19 Martin Anderson, “’One Flew Over the Psychiatric Unit’: Mental Illness and the Media,” Journal of Psyhicatric and Mental Health Nursing, 10 (2003), 303. 20 Here is a sampling of studies that have shown how negative depictions in the media contribute to the formation of negative public attitudes toward the mentally ill: Greg Philo, Jenny Secker, and Stephen Platt, “The Impact of the Mass Media on Public Images of Mental Illness: Media Content and Audience Belief,” Health Education Journal, 53, no. 3 (1994): 271-281; Greg Philo, Jenny Secker, Sstephen Platt, L. Henderson, G. McLaughlin, and J. Burnside, “Media Images of Mental Distress,” in Mental Health Matters: A Reader, ed. T. Heller, J. Reynolds, R. Gomm, R. Muston, S. Pattison. (Macmillan, London, 1996); Otto Wahl, “Mass Media Images of Mental Illness: A Review of the Literature,” Journal of Community Psychology, 20 (1992), 343-352; JoAnn A. Thornton and Otto F. Wahl, “Impact of a Newspaper Article on Attitudes Toward Mental Illness,” Journal of Community Psychology 24, no. 1 (1996), 17-25; Mick Mckeown and B. Clancy, “Images of Madness: Media Influence on Societal Perceptions of Mental Illness,” Mental Health Nursing, 15, no. 2 (1995); Nancy

245 presented as violent, aggressive, fear-inducing, unattractive, failing at life, ridiculed by others, and seldom benefitting from treatment. For example, Otto Wahl’s work focuses on the depiction of mental disability in children’s television programs; characters who say silly or unusual things, or who act differently than the main characters, are often dismissed as

“crazy,” reinforcing and reifying a popular conception of mental disability from an early age.21 Wahl also mentions that the terms used in these programs are usually colloquial and condescending.22 The use of this dismissive and disparaging language has several important implications, particularly considering the young audience for the cartoons and films he studied:

Pervasive images of people with psychiatric disorders as unattractive, villainous, and dangerous likely facilitate the rejection of mentally troubled peers. Media images also encourage insensitivity and lack of empathy, as children learn from models who disparage people by using mental illness labels and who freely use offensive slang to refer to those with psychiatric disorders. Furthermore, these depictions give children an idea of the hostile environment they may face if they acknowledge mental health problems, thereby undermining treatment seeking.23

Heather Stuart’s article “Media Portrayal of Mental Illness and its Treatments” echoes

Wahl’s findings; she writes that 85% of Disney films contain casual references to mental disability, and that regardless of the genre,

Signorielli, “The Stigma of Mental Illness on Television,” Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media, 33 (1989), 325-331; R. Allen and R.G. Nairn, “Media Depictions of Mental Illness: An Analysis of the use of Dangerousness,” Australian and New Zealand Journal of Psychiatry, 31.3 (1997), 375-381; S.E. Hyler, “DSM III at the Cinema: Madness in the Movies,” Comprehensive Psychiatry, 29, no. 2 (1988), 195-206; J.R. Cutcliffe and B. Hannigan, “Mass Media, ‘Monsters,’ and Mental Health Clients: The Need for Increased Lobbying,” Journal of Psychiatric and Mental Health Nursing, 8, no. 4 (2001), 315-321. 21 Otto Wahl, “Depictions of Mental Illness in Children’s Media,” Journal of Mental Health, 12.3 (2003), 249-258. 22 Wahl, “Mental Illness in Children’s Media,” 252; Characters were seldom identified through medical or professional labels; rather they were usually referred to by slang terms such as ‘crazy,’ ‘psycho,’ and ‘lunatic.’ In addition, 21 other films contained references to mental illnesses, and those references tended to involve the use of psychiatric terminology to disparage the views or behaviors of others (e.g., ‘You’re certifiable.’ ‘He’s not as crazy as he looks.’ ‘Have you lost your mind?”). 23 Wahl, “Mental Illness in Children’s Media,” 255.

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…the media have been found to provide overwhelmingly dramatic and distorted images of mental illness that emphasize dangerousness, criminality, and unpredictability. The media also model reactions to the mentally ill, including fear, rejection, derision, and ridicule.24

Other work emphasizes intertextual reinforcement of negative stereotypes about the mentally ill, both across mediums and across fiction and non-fiction portrayals of mental disability.25

Beyond children’s media, Wahl has also suggested that mental disability is a particularly pervasive trope throughout cinematic history: “Even excluding films dealing only with mental retardation, alcohol or substance abuse, or mental health therapists rather than patients, I have found well over four hundred films, from all decades of moviemaking, that were advertised to potential viewers as involving mental illness.”26 Stuart found that, in the

United States, one-fifth of prime time programs in 2006 depicted some aspect of mental disability; half of those characters hurt others, and one in four mentally ill characters killed someone.27 The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services reports that individuals living with a serious mental disability only account for 3%-5% of violent acts, yet people with severe mental disability are ten times more likely to be victims of violent crime than the

24 Heather Stuart, “Media Portrayal of Mental Illness and its Treatments: What Effect Does it Have on People with Mental Illness?” CNS Drugs, 20, no. 2 (2006), 103; she continues: “Through programs aimed at children, the entertainment media act as a powerful socializing agent, communicating dominant cultural stereotypes and giving vivid examples of the language and behaviors that are to be used in adult life. The images found in the entertainment and news media interact to create, reinforce and amplify stigmatizing images of mental illness. Factual and fictional images are mutually reinforcing.” 25 Raymond Nairn, John H. Coverdale, and Donna Claasen, "What is the Role of Intertextuality in Media Depictions of Mental Illness? Implications for Forensic Psychiatry.” Psychiatry, Psychology and Law 13.2 (2006): 243-250; 244; they write that Intertextuality creates “commonsense associations” between mental illness and violence, and that these meanings accumulate across texts and time. 26 Otto Wahl, Media Madness: Public Images of Mental Illness (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2003), 4. 27 Heather Stuart, “Media Portrayal of Mental Illness,” 101.

247 general population.28 And yet, the media depicts the mentally ill as violently unstable criminals—the tropes themselves are so familiar as to be taken for granted as a stock motivation for villains. The initial recognition of difference leads to dilution and distortion, and eventually discrimination.

Beyond this foundational work in newspapers, television, children’s media, and film, recent writers have implicated video games in perpetuating similarly harmful and pervasive negative representations of mental disability. Aaron Souppouris writes that “…video games in particular lean on lazy stereotypes and tropes. Mental illness is used as motivation for villainy, thrown in as an ‘interesting’ game mechanic, or mischaracterized as the sum and whole of a character’s personality."29 Jack Harwood writes that “These depictions say a lot about how ingrained the portrayal of the mentally ill as violent has become within our culture at large, where mental health patients regularly act as shorthand for a threat to an audience to elicit fear.”30 Patrick Lindsay invokes Wahl’s and Stuart’s work directly, writing that the horror genre of video games “…loves to play around with mental illness; specifically the vague, generalized Saturday Morning Cartoon-style ‘insanity’ that doesn’t match any real definition of the term.”31

28 U.S. Department of Health & Human Services. “Mental Health Myths and Facts.” https://www.mentalhealth.gov/basics/myths-facts/ 29 Aaron Souppouris, “Video Games are Tackling Mental Health with Mixed Results.” Engadget (August 20th, 2015). http://www.engadget.com/2015/08/20/video-games-mental-illness/ 30 Jack Harwood, “Mental Illness in Video Games and Why We Must Do Better.” Alphr (September 14, 2016). http://alphr.com/games/1002271/mental-illness-in-video-games-and-why-we-must-do-better 31 Patrick Lindsay, “”Gaming’s Favorite Villain is Mental Illness and This Needs to Stop,” Polygon (July 21, 2014). http://www.polygon.com/2014/7/21/5923095/mental-health-gaming-silent-hill; “…the concept of sanity is ubiquitous within the genre as a thematic, narrative and mechanical device that several horror games feature [in]famous ‘sanity meters,’ literally a way to quantify how ‘crazy’ characters are…Developers perpetuate the societal disparity that breeds harmful stigma when they resort to generic, undefined, almost pseudo-mystical ‘insanity.’ It’s a brush-off and a hand-wave, painting mental illness as a magical black box we can neither see

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Depictions of mental health professionals are nearly as damaging, characterizing psychiatrists as “unethical, exploitative or mentally deranged.”32 Stuart blames this kind of imagery in the media for causing both a public distrust of mental disability, and distrust of mental health providers that can lead to refusal to pursue medical intervention of any kind or poor adherence to treatment regimens. Byrne also outlines three common negative stereotypes of psychiatrists, all of which mirror depictions of mentally ill characters themselves: the first is “ineffectual…tainted with the lunacy of his charges” (relating to depictions of the mentally ill as weak or incompetent); the second is a good doctor, but his quest to cure the incurable is futile, and he is “a solitary figure to be pitied” (echoing depictions of the mentally ill as tragic, childlike, or incapable of growth or change); the third is evil, inflicting pain and abuse on his charges (connecting to portrayals of latent violence and dangerous unpredictability).33

Beyond shaping generic attitudes, some of the real-world effects of these portrayals are much more deleterious. Those who feel stigmatized and misrepresented in the media might attempt to downplay impairment, attempt to pass as normal, or deny the impairment itself.34 Individuals might self-medicate or abuse substances in an attempt to avoid treatment and further stigma, suffer from feelings of shame or failure, avoid others, or experience a decrease in self-esteem. Declining psych referrals, avoiding treatment, and poor adherence to

into nor ever hope to understand, rather than as a condition that real human people with brains and feelings and mortgages live with on a daily basis.” 32 Stuart, “Media Portrayal of Mental Illness,” 102-103. 33 Byrne, “Psychiatric Stigma,” 618. 34 Goffman outlines these three strategies in Stigma; Cameron, Disability Studies, 148-149; Cameron mentions a fourth strategy of ‘coming out’ as disabled, a concept first articulated in Simi Linton’s Claiming Disability. This fourth strategy can be especially affirming and emancipatory, challenging negative attitudes and representation; however, in this context, the damaging portrayal may prevent positive identification with disability.

249 treatment can result in homelessness, unemployment, and increased risk of suicide.35 This distrust operates socially as well, correlating to a lack of supportive policies and services; the consequences reach beyond the individual patient or healthcare provider. Stuart writes that

“The presumption of dangerousness can be used by a fearful public to justify forced legal action, coercive treatment, bullying, and other forms of victimization.”36 The process of social exclusion often begins with misleading or incomplete representation: dismissive dialogue that treats any unusual thought or behavior as crazy, collapsing all forms of mental disability into generic labels of insanity or psychosis, treating conditions as shameful and threatening, and conflating mental disability with evil, as FFVI demonstrates.

Kefka’s Character Arc

Kefka Palazzo moves swiftly between two classic tropes of mental disability—he begins as childish, clownish, and ineffectual but becomes deadly, for no other reason than he simply enjoys watching the world burn.37 As Seth Macy’s description (tellingly) characterizes him:

A simple clown-man driven by, rather than to, insanity, Kefka is introduced in Final Fantasy VI as a cowardly weakling. Through the course of the game, his power grows and his insanity marches along lock-step. At first, he’s a kooky clown man who loves to cause mischief, but by the end he’s a literal god. Classic god-complex,

35 Byrne, “Psychiatric Stigma,” 621. 36 Stuart, “Media Portrayal of Mental Illness,” 103. 37 Kefka’s name evokes both Franz Kafka and Italianate grandeur: his last name Palazzo is the Italian word for palace. William Cheng remarks in an endnote on page 186 in Sound Play the similarity of the name Kefka to Kafka, suggesting a connection between the former’s nihilism and the latter’s existentialist writings. FFVI draws a great deal on Italian opera and commedia dell’arte in its music, plot structure, and character designs. Kefka does not evoke a specific stock character; however, he does seem to combine elements of Arlecchino (he serves as absurd comic relief early in the game) and Il Capitano (the vainglorious braggart with a history of military exploits). A forthcoming chapter by Ryan Thompson explores the notion of the entire game as an opera, drawing from both Wagnerian and Italianate traditions. Kefka’s childish aspect is more apparent in the Japanese version of the game, where he uses the pronoun boku-chin, typically reserved for young boys—he only switches to the gender-neutral watashi at the end of the game, when he has assumed the form of the mad anti- god.

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peppered with psychopathic tendencies. He once poisoned an entire town’s water supply just because it seemed like a hilarious lark. Oh, Kefka, you so crazy. No, literally, you need to seek help. Generally, people who present themselves as clownish figures also pride themselves on being insane and perhaps rolling with a posse. But Kefka has no posse, nor does he need one. His ultimate goal by the end of Final Fantasy VI is to just kill the hell out of everyone. Only a Jenga-like tower of Final Fantasy characters is able to bring down his final, mad-god form.38

Other writers have used similar language to describe Kefka, with dismissive colloquial terms for insanity.39 His brand of terror relies on irrationality—Kefka is not menacing merely because he kills, but because he kills swiftly and without reason. Kefka’s laugh is a chilling and potent symbol of his unhinged mind; as William Cheng writes in Sound Play, “…many players to this day count it among the most unforgettable, unsettling noises in video game history…”40 The laugh, a “rare manifestation of vocal excess in a game that otherwise includes no synthesized or recorded speech,” is even more prevalent than his leitmotif, and takes on a sense of foreboding as the game progresses.41 The initial laughter is mirthfully off- kilter, but it becomes more ominous each time it appears; as Cheng writes in an endnote,

38 Seth G. Macy, “Gaming’s Craziest, Most Diabolical Villains.” IGN (February 17th, 2015). http://www.ign.com/articles/2015/02/17/gamings-craziest-most-diabolical-villains 39 A vast number of forum and blog posts about the character echo this language, but here are two representative examples; Riomccarthy, “A Case of Thousands: Kefka.” Destructoid, July 4, 2008. https://www.destructoid.com/a-cast-of-thousands-kefka-93455.phtml; “Being one of the most psychotic characters in a Final Fantasy game, Kefka’s flamboyant style and dark humor isn’t one for the faint of heart. Granted, his insanity isn’t that of his own fault. It never fails that the villains usually have the most interesting story lines and are often misunderstood. From his painted up face to his colorful jester outfit, he’s pretty much asking for it. Though being the Court Mage of the Gestahlian Empire could be enough to drive anyone nuts.” Sephzilla, “Kefka is Stupid.” https://www.destructoid.com/kefka-is-stupid-129638.phtml; “…little is known about Kefka except that he’s crazy and he remains a static character throughout the game and just lingers like a bad case of herpes.” 40 Cheng, Sound Play, 55; Cheng writes about two moments of “vocal excess” in the game score—Kefka’s laugh and the synthesized operatic voices in the opera sequence. However, in the track “Colliery Narshe,” there is an audible exhale—it sounds as though it may be a recording of an actual person rather than a stock midi sound effect. Narshe is in the northernmost section of the world map, covered in snow; this sound has always evoked for me the aural equivalent of seeing your breath on cold air. However, this is anonymous breath—it is never mapped on to a specific character, and could be said to represent a generic response to the chill, evoking our own experiences and sensations rather than any narrative connection or gameplay response. 41 Cheng, Sound Play, 59.

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“his synthesized laugh occupies and uncanny middle ground because it sounds both out of control (dementedly so) and perfectly controlled (an electronic sample reproduced with the utmost precision).”42 While the sound remains an iconic constant, the Ted Woolsey translation for the U.S. Super Nintendo release gives Kefka a range of different laughs, from the gleeful chortle, to the deep guffaw, to the classic overwrought villain’s laugh.43 Beyond his mercurial laughter, and the potent sound symbol that remains with players to this day, there are four main categories of attributes and utterances that explicitly mark Kefka and reinforce his narrative role as an evil madman for the player to neutralize.

Before Kefka has committed the atrocity at Doma, others label him as insane, from those in the Returners’ resistance movement to soldiers in the Imperial Army debating

Kefka’s humanity behind his back; after an unpleasant encounter with his superior officer, one soldier whispers to his colleague “Phew…! Someone’s gotta put that guy away!”44 The other soldier states “I hate that weirdo, Kefka. I don’t even think he’s human, not like

General Leo…” Even Emperor Gestahl questions his choice of second-in-command, moments before a power-hungry Kefka ends his life, saying “Kefka! Are you nuts?!” to which Kefka replies “Nuts…?! Emperor! Don’t disturb me.” The game shows and tells

Kefka’s insanity, explicitly, for the player. Characters in the game frequently joke that he is

“missing a few buttons,” or refer to him as “psycho,” suggesting and reinforcing a common

42 Cheng, Sound Play, 186. 43 Ranging from “U’hee, hee, heee” to “Hee hee haw,” “G’ha ha ha,” “G’haw haw,” and “Mwa ha ha.” When I refer to the “Woolsey translation,” I am referring to FFVI as released on the Super Nintendo. The game was also ported to the Game Boy Advance, with a translation by Tom Slattery. 44 In a sepia-tinged flashback before this point in the game, it is revealed that Kefka took control of (protagonist) Terra’s mind using a slave crown, forcing her to burn dozens of soldiers alive as a test of her magical abilities. The player would already have been aware of this act before overhearing the soldiers’ conversation at the Imperial Base.

252 perception of insanity throughout the game. This pathologizing of Kefka begins as a series of casual and dismissive remarks. Once Kefka acquires the destructive power to render this presumed insanity dangerous and genocidal, characters continue to use these terms to reinforce their original diagnoses and express their horror and incomprehension at the evil he perpetrates.

The second category involves moments in the game that paint Kefka as a power- hungry narcissist, with delusions of grandeur and an obsession with spectacle. For example, in the Magitek Research Facility, the party stumbles upon Kefka talking to himself: “I’m all- powerful! Hee, hee, haw! I’m collecting Espers! I’m extracting magic!” Espers are quasi- mythical magical beings in this game; Kefka extracts their power by killing them.45 When

Espers die, they leave behind a crystalline shard known as Magicite, and this relic imbues members of the player’s party with magical powers, teaching spells and bolstering strength or defense. While Kefka gains this power through extermination, many of the Espers willingly give up their lives so that the player’s party can become strong enough to stop him. In the village of Thamasa, Kefka disguises himself as Emperor Gestahl to toy with General Leo before mercilessly stabbing him. Kefka even refers to his deceit in theatrical terms (see

Figure 5.3). The narcissist appears moments later, when Kefka begins to slaughter Espers.

45 The Espers’ names suggest a demigod-like status, referencing mythological characters and deities from all over the world: Maduin (the protagonist from an Old Irish epic poem, the Immram Maele Dúin), Bahamut a ,عفريت a whale in pre-Islamic Arabian mythology), Shiva (a Hindu god of destruction), Ifrit (Efreet or ,بهموت) class of Djinn in Arabian mythology), Siren (from the Greek sirens in The Odyssey), Kirin (the Japanese and Korean name for Qilin, a hooved Chinese chimera), Catoblepas (a legendary creature from Ethiopia), Golem (from Jewish and Medieval folklore), Seraphim (a class of celestial beings in the Hebrew Bible, and the highest rank of angels in the Christian hierarchy), Fenrir (from Norse mythology, a wolf-like creature and a son of Loki), Odin (from Norse mythology), and Raiden (Raijin, a god of thunder and lightning in Japanese mythology).

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He refers to building the “magical empire of Kefka,’ speaking about himself in the third person, an affectation that belies his sense of grandeur and overwrought vision of himself.

This bravado carries on to the Floating Continent (a climactic moment in the game), where he orders the Statues to give him their power, murder the emperor, and destructively rearrange the landmasses on the planet. Kefka’s hubris knows no bounds—rather than imploring the Statues, he orders and commands them, even shouting derisively at them when their bolt of lightning misses the Emperor on a first pass. In the prelude to the final boss fight, Kefka refers to the impending cataclysmic battle as mere “suitable entertainment,” and fashions himself a kind of birthday-party magician, exclaiming, “Now, for my next trick, I will make you all…disappear!” The way he speaks about the decisive battle suggests a distorted sense of scale, and a delight in violence as merely another spectacle to amuse him on his path to total destruction (see Figure 6.3).

Figure 5.3. Kefka’s love of spectacle and delusions of grandeur, FFVI (Square, 1994)

The third theme revolves around Kefka’s delight in disorder, chaos, and irrationality

(see Figure 5.4). When Kefka sets fire to Figaro castle as a punishment for refusing to

254 cooperate with the Empire, he treats the lives of the citizens with disdain, laughing and referring to his “barbecue.” When Edgar then escapes with Terra and Locke, Kefka expresses pleasure over the choice to abandon one’s kingdom, potentially leaving chaos and ruin. In the showdown in Thamasa, Kefka orders his men to burn the village because he does not like how it looks. On the Floating Continent, the barbecue theme returns—much of Kefka’s love of chaos involves the destructive power of flames. In the final battle, he explains the source of his delight in murdering innocents, asking the rhetorical question:

“But what fun is destruction if no ‘precious’ lives are lost!”

Figure 5.4. Kefka’s delight in chaos and flames, FFVI (Square, 1994)

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Kefka’s sheer hatred—while extended to ridiculous comedic effect in a few points in the dialogue, extends to his ultimate goal (see Figure 5.5).46

Figure 5.5. Kefka’s hatred, FFVI (Square, 1994)

Kefka reveals himself to be a nihilist, seeking absolute destruction because of a belief that life is inherently without meaning (see Figure 5.6). Kefka frequently gives callous orders to his soldiers to take innocent lives, including those of his own soldiers held as prisoners of war in enemy territory. On the Floating Continent, the Emperor finds Kefka’s specific lust for power to be incomprehensible and antithetical to his own goals to rule the world; some of his last words to his mutinous general are: “There’ll be no one to worship us.” In the final battle, Kefka states, “I will exterminate everyone, and everything!” and then goes on to ask why anyone bothers to rebuild when life is so meaningless. One of his final pieces of dialogue in the game promises: “I will destroy everything…I will create a monument to non- existence!”

46 The first panel is the first six of a total of seventeen repetitions of the word hate before Kefka finishes his sentence.

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Figure 5.6. Kefka’s nihilism, FFVI (Square, 1994)

It is the combination of Kefka’s nihilism and his delight in irrational chaos that gives form to our fear—Kefka’s specific pathology remains ill defined (what form of insanity does he embody?)—and yet we have constant implicit and explicit references to mental disability throughout the game, providing not only his (irrational) motivation, but the player’s motivation to stop his reign of terror. But what is most interesting for our purposes is that

Nobuo Uematsu depicts all of these elements in the ways he scores Kefka: the player can perceive the narrative as well as musical aberrancies as evidence of his deepening insanity.

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Kefka’s Leitmotif and Musical Markers of Insanity

Significantly, Kefka is not the only character who is described as mentally ill, nor who is musically depicted as such. Non-player characters in the town of Maranda on the

Veldt describe a “crazy old man” who lives alone in a small house to the north who went insane due to losing his son.47 His isolated location on the world map and his dialogue render him cranky and humorously bizarre; when the party engages him, he keeps asking if they are there to make repairs on his house.48 The old man’s theme telegraphs his status in the game as comic relief and portrays him as incompetent, ineffectual, or harmlessly insane; the entire track is sparse and open (see Example 5.1). Two marimbas carry the theme, with an off-kilter melodic contour based on leaps of perfect fifths and tritones and repeating the pattern down a whole step without resolution. Uematsu accompanies this theme with quirky auxiliary percussion, including a distinctive “whoop whoop” vocal sample in SPC4. Measure seven presents a symmetrical (if odd) phrase, with a chromatic descent followed by an optimistic rise, but then the theme trails off, startled back into the loop by a final “whoop whoop.”

47 The player later discovers that the son in question is actually Gau, one of the fourteen playable characters. 48 He shouts “Hey!!?! You the clock maker? I been waitin’ for ages!” when the player responds that they are not the clock maker, he replies “There it is, on the wall. Ain’t been tickin’ for 1, 5, shucks, maybe even 10 years!” If the player engages him again, he exclaims “Got it! Lawnmower repairman, eh? Couldn’t provide worse service! Grass’s 25 feet high out back!” He also suggests that the player fix the stove and his bed, which is “squeakin’ like all git-out!” Woolsey’s translations render the old man sort of folksy and harmless, if slightly grumpy.

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Example 5.1. Nobuo Uematsu, FFVI (Square, 1994), “???”

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Example 5.1 continued

Kefka’s leitmotif draws from some of the absurd elements of “???,” but its progression is far more grandiose and sinister—delineating Kefka’s brand of insanity as potentially dangerous from its first appearance in the Figaro desert when Kefka complains about the sand in his boots. In examining Stravinsky’s Pieces for String Quartet, Joseph

Straus has identified affective and formal fragmentation as a central marker of madness in music; shifts in mood that belie internal divisions and contradictions: “We seem to be in the presence of a mind that is splintered, shattered to bits, divided against itself. Instead of a coherent, unified focus of attention, we find a quicksilver darting from mood to mood…Some of the fragments themselves seem to bespeak disordered mental states, like the obsessive ritualistic fixity…”49 Straus also points to asymmetry, immobility, and

49 Joseph Straus, “Representing the Extraordinary Body: Musical Modernism’s Aesthetics of Disability” in The Oxford Handbook of Music and Disability Studies, ed. Blake Howe, Stephanie Jensen-Moulton, Neil Lerner, and

260 simplification as countering normative musical embodiment, tropes that recur throughout

Kefka’s musical themes.

Kefka’s initial leitmotif encapsulates his character and his story arc—beginning as clownish frippery but ending in catastrophic bombast (see Example 5.2).50 The theme hints at internal divisions by pairing incongruous elements and using rhythmic instability as a metaphor for disordered thinking. The opening pizzicato strings coupled with the oboe timbre gives a mischievous effect, as though Kefka sneaks up to us on tiptoe. A snare roll at measure ten clarifies the square, march-like 2/4-meter and introduces Kefka’s profession as a general in Gestahl’s army. At measure 18, Kefka’s theme introduces a harp playing the initial pizzicato theme in broken octaves, adding a little more rhythmic interest and an imitative echo as a result of the figuration. Already, Uematsu has introduced some musical incongruity—a harp seems out of place in a march, countering the militaristic vibe of the snare. The harp tends to represent dreaming, visions, and magic in movies and television; a cultural musical code that Uematsu seems to draw on in the FFVI soundscape to represent

Kefka’s elaborate, delusional flights of fancy. Another possibility is a link to the image of a cherub with a small harp—harps associated with angels and heaven.51 This is a thread that

Joseph N. Straus, 729-755 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016), 740; 746; the irony here is that, in Straus’s chapter, “…the nonnormative bodily conditions of splinteredness, immobility, and simplification may be heard to be valorized. In Stravinsky’s quartet, and in many of his works, we find a musical body that is disabled in appearance (fragmented, splintered, distorted, deformed), in functionality (paralyzed, limping, stuttering), and in affect (fragmented, emotionally labile, clinging doggedly and ritualistically to sameness and repetition). And yet in their musical context, these qualities are felt as attractive and desirable, within a radically expanded understanding of what might constitute the aesthetically beautiful.” 50 Track titles taken from Kefka’s Domain (U.S.); for the Japanese Final Fantasy VI Original Sound Version, this track is called 魔導士ケフカ Madōshi Kefuka or “Sorcerer Kefka.” 51 A lot of the literature on the connection between harps and religious affect (or harps and magic) focuses on media set in the medieval era. See John Haines, Music in Films on the Middle Ages: Authenticity vs. Fantasy. (New York and London: Routledge, 2014); Isabella van Elferen, “Fantasy Music: Epic Soundtracks, Magical Instruments, Musical Metaphysics,” Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts, 24.1 (2013), 4-24; Karen Cook, “Gaming

261 becomes important later, as Kefka begins to gather his power and fashion himself into the anti-God. He inhabits the form of Lucifer in the final battle, with purple-hued skin and dark wings, and the music incorporates tubular bells and pipe organ—reinforcing a religious affect, but implying a more somber, formal rite than the harp does here. The introductory five-note climbing figure appears in several places throughout FFVI; in “Returners,” (which plays in the rebel base), and “Under Martial Law” (which plays in cities occupied by the

Empire; see the English Horn line at m. 9 of Example 5.3). A variation on the figure with a dotted-rhythm leap of the perfect fifth appears in “The Gestahl Empire,” and in “Troops

March On,” (a variation of “Under Martial Law” that plays in the Imperial Base; see

Example 5.4). This gesture (in both guises) appears to be a game-specific motive representing militarism, lending thematic unity and clarity to the score.

the Medievalist World in Harry Potter,” in The Oxford Hanbook of Medievalism in Music, ed. Kirsten Yri and Stephen Meyer (Oxford: Oxford University Press, forthcoming 2019). See also the “Flashback Effects” and “Dream Sequence” entries on TV Tropes; http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/FlashbackEffects; http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/DreamSequence; both suggest that dream sequences combine harps with descending whole tone scales and large amounts of reverb to mirror blurred or dreamy visuals, borrowing from the sound world of impressionist composers like Claude Debussy.

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Example 5.2. Nobuo Uematsu, FFVI (Square, 1994), “Kefka,” mm. 1-13.

Example 5.3. Nobuo Uematsu, FFVI (Square, 1994), “Under Martial Law,” mm. 1-10.

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Example 5.4. Nobuo Uematsu, FFVI (Square, 1994), “Troops March On,” mm. 7-9.

Measure 26 of Kefka’s theme begins a B section (see Example 5.5). The meter and rhythm are quite square, with cello emphasis on the downbeats providing a slow-moving bass line, and a sense that the theme is plodding, regular, and predictable. And yet, the theme will soon contradict this assumption and throw the listener off-kilter, giving a taste of

Kefka’s unpredictable nature. First of all, this section only creates a 16-measure period—it feels to the listener like it should be twice as long, because the oboe line does not resolve the way one might expect it to.

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Example 5.5. Nobuo Uematsu, FFVI (Square, 1994), “Kefka,” mm. 24-37.

Instead, there is an abrupt change of meter and bombastic change in instrumentation at m.

42; an interjection of one measure of 4/4 and then back to 2/4, giving a halting sensation by temporarily lengthening the beat (see Example 5.6). At this moment, many of the channels introduce brass and new percussion in a sudden, insistent, declarative motive. These two measures interrupt the musical line, an intrusion that before a more elaborate, expansive version of the B section at m. 45 retaining this bolder instrumentation.52

52 Poundie Burstein, “Les chansons des fous,” 194; Poundie Burstein suggests that representing or depicting madness “at arms length” involves “odd moments” of compositions being “separated from the more staid passages by being segregated within distinct sections. In such a scenario, it would be as though the strange passages were being winked at, while the compositional voice behind the music stands apart, at a safe distance from the oddities.”

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Example 5.6. Nobuo Uematsu, FFVI (Square, 1994), “Kefka,” mm. 38-46.

SPC7 alternates between fanciful harp glissandi and machine-gun like sixteenth note rolls in the snare, while SPC6 (Timpani) and SPC8 (Cymbal) provide crashing hits on each downbeat, adding to the sense of bombast. The section increases the theme’s ornamental flair and sense of grandeur and heft. The harp remains a strange, dreamlike insertion in this context—a potential musical clue to Kefka’s eventual desire to reshape the world in his own flamboyantly nihilistic image.

This second B section presents a complete 32-bar period—if the first attempt felt a little incomplete, this one expands on that tentative theme with a more “suitable” instrumentation for Kefka. If the leitmotif is an extension of his character, then it is as though he did not approve of the first version of the B section and insisted on more grandeur with the dramatic interjection at m. 42. There is a similar interjection at m. 77, with

266 more brass doubling. This time, it feels much less abrupt—not only is it a better fit for the existing texture, but it is also a more satisfying way to close off the period. Measure 80 presents a new, sneaky theme with the same mischievous quality from the beginning, like a child mimicking creeping up behind somebody. Violin, cello, and horn climb up to the concluding motive in staccato bursts. Though the texture is still homophonic, this whole section feels like a departure from the sweeping B section. Measure 90 is the fullest, most lush texture of the piece so far (see Example 5.7). Instead of the staccato or plucked quarter notes in 2/4, the inner voices comprise expansive half note chords climbing up in register in all of the instruments (potentially mimicking Kefka’s rise to power), before closing the loop with a quirky final flute gesture, a sweetly birdlike tag in 4/4 that leads back to the simplicity of the opening oboe and pizzicato string texture.

Example 5.7. Nobuo Uematsu, FFVI (Square, 1994), “Kefka,” mm. 88-100.

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Kefka’s leitmotif introduces every element of his character at the first meeting in the desert—(a) his mischievousness that later turns to sinister mirth (shown in the overarching structure and progression of the leitmotif); (b) his military vocation (in the use of the military march topic and instrumentation; (c) his obsession with power conveyed with dynamic brass and percussion, and the gradual expansion of the musical forces in the texture; (d) his delusional flights of fancy conveyed with the flourishing harp gestures; (e) his instability in the form of the metrical shifts and the uneven periodic structure; (f) the religious connotations of the harp in conflict with the military trope as foreshadowing for his destruction of the empire and pursuit of his final form; and (g) the sense of operatic grandeur and bombast that underscores the entire game and adds to the sense of terrifying spectacle as Kefka succeeds in destroying the world and following his path to oblivion.

The simple rising gestures—such as those at measure 80 of Kefka’s leitmotif and the climbing half notes at measure 90 towards the end of the theme—recur throughout FFVI.

This theme beginning in measure 80 appears to be a reworking and expansion of the material from “Opening Theme #2”—a fateful rising three-note motive (see Example 5.8).

Opening Theme #2 appears after the title screen, in the opening cinematic that gives the backstory of the War of the Magi and the rising imperial power. This rising gesture appears throughout FFVI (for example, in the “Metamorphosis” and “Catastrophe” cues).53 It could be considered one of the central motives of the game, but what does it represent, exactly? It

53 “Catastrophe” is in the same key as “Opening Theme #2” and contains an almost identical introduction. Yet Catastrophe is more densely textured and more expansive, creating the sense that the encounter on the Floating Continent will be the climax of the game. However, it is one of the most significant plot twists in video game history—the cataclysmic battle never takes place. Kefka mutinously assassinates the Emperor and rearranges the face of the planet. The party has to witness the triumph of the “bad guy” and spend the second half of the game in a ruined world, growing strong enough to reclaim power and restore balance.

268 is not associated with any one particular character, but it does seem to represent magic more generally—it appears at moments where major power is unleashed.54 The Tubular bells used in the SPC4 channel of “Opening Theme #2” also recur throughout the most fateful music in the game. They carry an association with the sound of distant church bells tolling for a somber religious rite, calling to mind, for example, the fateful fifth movement of Berlioz’s

Symphonie Fantastique. This twisted religious trope is a major theme in the game—religion as conflated with the notion of power—and as the Empire and Kefka reach for greater power in the form of magic, they tangle with forces far beyond human control.55 The appearance of the Tubular bell foreshadows Kefka’s eventual transformation in an anti-Godlike figure in the final battle.

54 This is not to say that the motive never appears in a character leitmotif. Terra’s theme (which is, incidentally, the world map theme for the game) incorporates the motive in its opening gesture. This makes sense, as Terra was born with magical powers; she is the result of a union between an Esper and a Human. Whereas Gestahl and Kefka are seeking to artificially infuse knights with magic obtained from Magicite (the crystalline remains of former Espers), Terra comes by her power naturally, and so her theme synthesizes the aural symbol for magic into the structure of her theme. However, it is significant to note the destabilizing effect of using a character’s leitmotif as the world map theme—this use means that the music no longer “belongs” solely to Terra in the mind of the player, and so it takes on more generic associations with exploration. 55 Emperor Gestahl’s leitmotif also utilizes tubular bells. This connects Kefka’s theme to Gestahl’s beyond the military topic, and at the most basic level conflates (or juxtaposes) religious power with magical power. Gestahl’s theme also begins with an inversion of the rising “magic” motive. Whether meant to foreshadow the fall of the Emperor mid-game, or merely meant to suggest a perversion of magical power, the relationship between these motives is significant. As Kefka progresses in his nihilistic quest, the militarism of the Imperial themes gives way to more overt religious tropes.

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Example 5.8. Nobuo Uematsu, FFVI (Square, 1994), “Opening Theme #2,” mm. 1-16.

Uematsu ultimately fulfills the narrative foreshadowing of his initial leitmotif, bringing together all of the elements of Kefka’s characterization, recontextualizing earlier

270 leitmotifs, and expanding on or adding new layers to earlier allusions and cultural musical codes. The five movements of Dancing Mad represent a culmination of all of these elements cited above, along with even deeper quotation and reinterpretation of earlier leitmotifs from the initial cinematics, those associated with the Empire and with concepts of magic and power, and music of random encounters and boss battles. There is even a brief quotation of the D minor Toccata and Fugue, BWV 565 in the quasi-fugue presented in “Dancing Mad Part

3,” and an arguable allusion to “Also Sprach Zarathustra,” in “Dancing Mad Part 4,” reprising a gesture from the opening of the game. And, if all of these technical and semiotic fireworks were not enough, Uematsu uses Kefka’s initial leitmotif as a kind of cantus firmus underneath rolling 17th century-style organ figuration, before launching into a metrically- complex, progressive rock-inspired final movement to bring the suite to a close for the apocalyptic showdown.

The Dancing Mad Suite

“Dancing Mad Part 1” begins with the kind of incessant, pulsating energy any player would expect at a climactic showdown—it has all of the force of a demon rising up out of hell to greet the band of heroes, complete with a demonic breath sound effect in the fourth

SPC channel against the rising gesture seen so frequently throughout the game. The opening of this five-part suite also reprises the melodic material of “Opening Theme #2,” bringing full circle the theme from the opening cinematic about mankind’s lust for power they do not fully understand. “Dancing Mad Part 1” is replete with tubular bells, cymbal, and timpani, but replaces the strings and bass with ponderous organ. The movement also adds a new flurry of activity from a saw synth with heavy reverb in SPC6. This is a culmination of every

271 other statement—adding weight and finality befitting the final reckoning this battle represents. The rising figures from mm. 1-20 have always represented unfurling, or evil unleashed, rising up to confront the player (as seen in “Opening Theme #2,”

“Metamorphosis,” and “Catastrophe”), and the demonic breath added here only adds to the apocalyptic tone (see Example 5.9).

Example 5.9. Nobuo Uematsu, FFVI (Square, 1994), “Dancing Mad Part 1,” mm. 18-27.

As for Kefka’s characterization in particular, “Dancing Mad Part 1” represents the culmination of the delusional flights of fancy and the sense of operatic grandeur. After a long, dramatic, slow introduction, a bombastic shift in texture at m. 43 suggests a “classic” video game boss theme—an active rolling drum pattern, the addition of tenor voices (SPC3) to a soprano operatic voice, and active 16th note passagework in the organ (SPC1) answered by insistent synth bass, matching the speed and energy but remaining static on a low C.

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Toward the end of the loop, Uematsu inserts a fanciful, virtuosic flute filigree line in m. 47, and an SPC1 organ line based on a prominent string line taken from the iconic playable in- game opera sequence—this passage is one of the most grandiose in the entire game, drawing a parallel between the spectacle of the opera and the spectacle of Kefka’s rise to power (see

Examples 5.10 and 5.11).56

56 Title taken from the Final Fantasy VI Original Sound Version album, the first official soundtrack of the game released in Japan. Nobuo Uematsu, “婚礼のワルツ～決闘 (Konrei no Warutsu ~ Kettō)/Wedding Waltz: Duel,” track 9 of disc 2 on Final Fantasy VI Original Sound Version, March 25 1994, CD.

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Example 5.10. Nobuo Uematsu, FFVI (Square, 1994), “Dancing Mad Part 1,” mm. 47-48.

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Example 5.11. Nobuo Uematsu, FFVI (Square, 1994), “The Wedding Waltz—Duel (Part 4),” mm. 47-49.

“Dancing Mad Part 2,” is the most unnerving and erratic of the five movements.

Most of this movement is obsessively repetitive and static, adding layers to the texture without any true development (see Example 5.12). The additions simply reinforce the forward momentum, but the drive does not appear to go anywhere—perhaps just a death wish or drive toward nothing. Even the final cadence refuses the listener any true resolution back to the start of the loop. Of course, this obsessiveness could be indicative of certain symptoms of Kefka’s purported psychosis, but it also represents the culmination of his nihilism—he gathers power by collecting Espers, but his ultimate wish is to use that power to obliterate all of existence; his obsessive repetition in the game is meant to lead to nothingness in the end, as it does in the music.

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Example 5.12. Nobuo Uematsu, FFVI (Square, 1994), “Dancing Mad Part 2,” mm. 1-7.

Measure 41 breaks from the incessant opening sections and presents something akin to a freeform organ toccata—Uematsu even programs in a wild rubato at the beginning to suggest a hesitant start (see Example 5.13). The opening pattern is a riff on the violin theme from “The Wedding Waltz (Part 4)” from the opera, which appeared in “Dancing Mad Part

1” as well. After a brief moment of wandering, this movement presents a “failed fugue;” it just cannot seem to take off from the initial subject (at the tempo marking of 100 at m. 49).

The rapid change between florid sixteenths and leaping eighths makes this movement feel hesitant, disconnected, random, and confusing, and the copious chromaticism adds a second layer of melodic and harmonic instability. Measure 53 just sort of runs out of steam and gives up—yet the strange, incomplete final gesture is a little reminiscent of a motive from the start of the game—which itself calls to mind “Also Sprach Zarathustra” in its bombastic descending half-step motion—a two-note descent that does not lead anywhere. This entire

276 section is stilted, overly formal, and surprising after the redundant repetition of the rest of the movement—another depiction of Kefka’s mutable mind.

Example 5.13. Nobuo Uematsu, FFVI (Square, 1994), “Dancing Mad Part 2,” mm. 41-54.

“Dancing Mad Part 2” is chaotic and unsettled. A 2009 blog post by SWE3tMadness describes the movement this way, with observations that confirm the image of Kefka as mentally ill:

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In short, Kefka seemed harmless at first, because for all his insane anger and curses, you thought that he was just another lackey of the Empire…However, as the game continues, instead of making him less intimidating, his nuttiness makes him even scarier as his behavior becomes even more erratic and malevolent…He’s a villain because it’s fun, and this movement takes a sharp turn into a sinister, disjointedly dissonant tune to signify the further descent into madness that ultimate power has brought him.57

I quote SWE3tMadness here because his florid descriptions are proof that another person (a fan and devoted player) hears Kefka’s themes as I do—as carefully crafted depictions of his insanity and overall character arc. The last two measures feel abrupt—they do not even transition well back into the obsessive opening motive of the loop. It is an unfinished thought, but not in the traditional sense of how a loop should connect back to the beginning; for example, ending on a dominant so that the loop can present a resolution back to the tonic. This movement represents Kefka’s instability as well as his desire for obliteration.

“Dancing Mad Part 3” serves as a culmination of the religious topic and a representation of Kefka’s attainment of so-called divinity; the movement implies the sound world of the seventeenth century in its spinning, variegated organ figuration and imitative textures. Uematsu only uses six of the eight sound channels, and most of them are given over to the organ, except for the somber tubular bells in SPC5 (though the channel later transitions to organ like the rest). The opening gesture is ominous—low D-flat pedal tone in the organ that fail to imply a key (see Example 5.14). Then, suddenly, in the third measure, a fugal melody begins in major—a surprise after all of the doomed, fateful, minor-keyed

57 SWE3tMadness, “Final Fantasy VI’s Dancing Mad: A Critical Analysis,” Destructoid, December 15, 2009. https://www.destructoid.com/final-fantasy-vi-s-dancing-mad-a-critical-analysis-157570.phtml

278 material that has been a constant companion through the second half of the game in the

World of Ruin. SPC2 even answers the major-hued fugue subject. The angular figuration— mechanical, stepwise, ascending—feels like setting clockwork in motion, devoid of emotion.

The theme reaches ever upward—just like Kefka does as he tries to remake himself into an anti-God.

Example 5.14. Nobuo Uematsu, FFVI (Square, 1994), “Dancing Mad Part 3,” mm. 1-8.

What is most interesting in this movement is the use of Kefka’s leitmotif as a cantus firmus in the bass; first in major, and then in minor, underneath the rolling 17th century figuration (see

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Example 5.15). This moment is the most salient moment synthesizing Kefka’s initial leitmotif into the final suite.

Example 5.15. Nobuo Uematsu, FFVI (Square, 1994), “Dancing Mad Part 3,” mm. 9-15.

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There is even a fleeting allusion to the D minor Toccata and Fugue, BWV 565 (popularly attributed to J.S. Bach), adding to an already active tapestry of intertextual references to music heard elsewhere throughout the game (see Example 5.16).58

Example 5.16. Nobuo Uematsu, FFVI (Square, 1994), “Dancing Mad Part 3,” mm. 25-26.

SWE3tMadness describes this movement as “…an evocative virtuoso performance that hides several layers of meaning…a glorious hymn of praise.”59 The movement also creates a rare moment of respite in this suite, a contrasting mood that serves as a transitional moment from the top of Kefka’s tower of twisted gods to his final form of the mad anti-God.

“Dancing Mad Part 4” is simply an introduction to the final form of Kefka, bringing the game full circle by repeating the opening gesture of the game—the theme that plays over the title screen with the ominous dark purple and black clouds and lightning when the player turns the game on (see Example 5.17). Every time a player restarts the SNES, this theme recurs, and so it is one of the most-heard tracks in the game. And yet it reappears verbatim in the second to last part of the final boss fight—coming full circle with the musical material.

58 For more on the use of BWV 565 in video games, as well as a discussion about the work’s authenticity as debated in the scholarship, see Dana Plank, “From the Concert Hall to the Console: The 8-bit Translation of BWV 565,” BACH: Journal of the Riemenschneider Bach Institute (forthcoming, 2019). 59 SWE3tMadness, “Final Fantasy VI’s Dancing Mad: A Critical Analysis.” James Deaville, “Sounds of Mind: Music and Madness in the Popular Imagination,” in The Oxford Handbook of Music and Disability Studies, ed. Blake Howe, Stephanie Jensen-Moulton, Neil Lerner, and Joseph N. Straus (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016); Deaville’s chapter demonstrates the power and persistence of the association between musical creativity or virtuosity and genius or madness.

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Unlike “Dancing Mad Part 1,” which reworked the material from “Opening Theme #2,” this is exactly the same track. “Opening Theme #1” keeps adding fourths to the sustained pitches—rising through six of the eight SPC channels on organ before breaking the tension at m. 7 and adding soprano and tenor voices to add a sense of the operatic grandeur to the epic, religious tone of the organ. While I mentioned “Also Sprach Zarathustra” motives before, in “Dancing Mad Part 2,” this track is extremely reminiscent of Strauss’s dramatic introduction—the slow whole notes leading to a huge descending semitone gesture. All that is missing is the timpani. “Dancing Mad Part 4” plays at the exact moment of transition to

Kefka’s final form—he descends out of the top of the screen between the two half-step descent figures as a literal bogeyman, taking the form of Lucifer as a symbol of his supposed omnipotence.

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Example 5.17. Nobuo Uematsu, FFVI (Square, 1994), “Opening #1/Dancing Mad Part 4.”

“Dancing Mad Part 5” is a wild departure from the first four movements—but it also represents the most “boss-like” of any of the previous brushes with monstrosity. While in some ways, this music seems out of character, it presents many of the same elements of

Kefka’s insanity—this is the full flood of his madness when the levees have given way, the

“all hell breaks loose” moment of the game. It is the most metrically-unstable of any track in the entire game. Other tracks use complex meters, such as “The Unforgiven,” the music scoring Cyan’s grief-fueled rampage when he tries to take on an entire army base of imperial soldiers by himself after losing his entire family in the poisoning of Doma castle (see

Example 5.18). The barrage of percussion—such as the incessant snare in SPC5 and the

283 frequent cymbal crashes in SPC8—reflect the violence of the scene, and the violin line in

SPC1 seems to imply a flurry of activity, the uncontrollable rage that drives the character’s ill-advised assault.

Example 5.18. Nobuo Uematsu, FFVI (Square, 1994), “The Unforgiven,” mm. 5-6.

However, no other track shifts meters as frequently and frenetically as “Dancing

Mad Part 5.” We could call this track a presentation of a video game boss battle topic— while the concept of video game topic theory is still quite new, scholars tend to agree that music for climactic battles in games are quite distinct and instantly recognized by the seasoned gamer.60 This final form is the long-awaited final “boss battle” topic the player

60 See Iain Heart, “Meaningful Play: Performativity, Interactivity and Semiotics in Video Game Music.” Musicology Australia 36, no. 2 (2014), 273–290; Sean Atkinson and William Ayers have also given several papers attempting to develop a topic theory of video games.

284 expects—a flurry of fast, high-energy rhythmic activity, heavy percussion and an active bass line to serve as a culmination of at least fifty of hours of play. As SWE3tMadness writes:

The rest of the song has been absurdly epic, and the player or listener assumes that the final final movement will be the coup de grace, and eagerly awaits the conclusion of this auditory masterpiece as Kefka delivers his final words…And then the percussion kicks in. No more orchestration, no more pseudo-Latin chanting, and the once-proud church organ has been replaced by a smaller, dinky reed organ…61

“Dancing Mad Part 5” mostly uses Kefka’s initial leitmotif as inspiration, but it also quotes the Opening Theme, Catastrophe, and The Fierce Battle (the boss theme throughout the game). This theme serves as the culmination of several of the threads introduced in the initial

Kefka leitmotif—though the sense of bombast and grandeur transfers from the operatic to the rock operatic. The metrical shifts suggesting instability are so frequent that it is difficult to establish a comfortable, consistent sense of meter in the entire track. Note, for example, the way Uematsu destabilizes the gesture in mm. 44-45 by presenting it in 3/4 and then immediately in 7/8 (see Example 5.19; m. 43 is also a re-working of the “interjection” from the original leitmotif at mm. 42-44).

61 SWE3tMadness, “Final Fantasy VI’s Dancing Mad: A Critical Analysis.” He continues: “His final theme, the leitmotif that is supposed to represent what he stands for, stands for nothing more than destructive power and his own ego. All his HATE against the ‘chapters from a self-help booklet’ cannot save him now. And he knows it. After throwing the biggest temper tantrum of his life, the song abruptly shifts again. But instead of anger, hatred, or even fear of his impending doom, the music becomes sad. I said earlier that Kefka was not sympathetic. I retract that statement in light of this final coda. He’s spent the entire game ‘building a monument to nonexistence,’ but now that he’s facing it himself…he has no rage left. Only acceptance. He says nothing as he fades away in death, as there is nothing left to say. His whole purpose in life was to create destruction and chaos, so being utterly destroyed himself seems a fitting end.”

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Example 5.19. Nobuo Uematsu, FFVI (Square, 1994), “Dancing Mad Part 5,” mm. 43-45.

This final movement seems to confirm Uematsu’s assertion that he always wished to play in a prog rock band, with the instrumentation and the uneven and rapidly-changing meters.62 There is even a brief interjection of Kefka’s leitmotif, almost like inserting a musical version of his nefarious laugh interrupting the theme (see mm. 57-58 in Example

5.20).

62 Nobuo Uematsu, “Final Fantasy Composer on the Pleasures of Prog and Abbey Road,” interview by Anthony John Agnello, March 5, 2015. https://www.engadget.com/2015/03/05/final-fantasy-composer- interview/; in this particular interview, when asked why he loves prog rock from the 1970s and 1970s, Uematsu responds simply: “I like progressive rock because anything goes.”

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Example 5.20. Nobuo Uematsu, FFVI (Square, 1994), “Dancing Mad Part 5,” mm. 53-62.

Then, at the end of the cue, after a slow organ interlude, Kefka’s laugh does appear in its original form in SPC2 right before the end of the loop. These two moments bring back the

287 initial mischievousness of the original leitmotif and place it in a new context—the listener recalls prior experiences with Kefka’s theme and disturbing laughter through the game in these two moments.

The scoring of this final fight puts this “last laugh” in a new light. Only one of the original character traits disappears in the Dancing Mad Suite: the explicit military topics are missing, but even this omission is fitting for the character. After destroying the world halfway through the game, Kefka appears to disband the Empire entirely; relying on his

“light of judgment” in his tower and the ancient beasts that his meddling unleashed to wipe humanity from the face of the planet. Therefore, the topic becomes subsumed by other elements as it no longer applies to the character—the religious connotations of the organ become much more prominent as Kefka presents himself in his final, perversely divine forms, and the final fight shows us the greatest, densest, and grandest musical forces and textures of the entire game. In the five movements of Dancing Mad, we hear Kefka’s power, his instability and destabilizing thought patterns, his belief that he is the anti-creator. All of these themes remain consistent in Kefka’s characterization throughout the game and in

Uematsu’s sweeping scoring of his character development.

The Complicit Player

While mental disability can and does involve the anatomy and chemistry of the brain, it is also socially-constructed, ill defined, and largely invisible. Media represent some of the most potent sites of engagement with the meanings of disability.63 Snyder and Mitchell

63 Tobin Siebers, Disability Aesthetics (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2010); “It is as if the phobias, inhibitions, defensive reactions, and avoidance patterns that spring up to meet any formal instance of disability, whether organic, aesthetic, or architectural, represent collective versions of what are normally thought to be individual defense mechanisms. These group inhibitions preserve the self-image of the

288 suggested in Narrative Prosthesis that the unknowability of disability demands narration; likewise, the invisibility of mental disability demands explication, some form of narrative reassurance to render the invisible visible for the purpose of ameliorating fears about the inability to reliably identify cognitive and emotional difference in the real world. As Tobin

Siebers writes in “Disability and the Theory of Complex Embodiment”:

…identifiability is tied powerfully to the representation of difference. In cases where an existing minority group is not easily identified and those in power want to isolate the group, techniques will be used to produce identifiability…It is not the fact of physical difference that matters, then, but the representation attached to difference— what makes the difference identifiable. Representation is the difference that makes a difference.64

Representation mediates the meanings of mental disability, allowing individuals to learn how their culture defines, identifies, or interacts with difference. However, the process itself—of rendering invisible illness visible in order to alleviate anxieties about non-normative minds— becomes invisible over time, rendered habitual and natural to the audience. This more insidious form of invisibility has the effect of reifying particular meanings about mental disability so that they appear as foregone conclusions in a narrative. This second process of rendering invisible is a form of erasure, leaving harm and stigma in its wake.

Lerner and Straus suggest the immediacy and potency of musical representation:

“Music can represent mental states directly, including those classified as illnesses or disabilities, without the mediation of language.”65 Kefka’s leitmotifs may not convey mental disability purely without language, as the game script espouses this pseudo-diagnosis

community, its ego function as it were, by starting to banish distressing emotional impulses, visceral signs of anxiety, and threats of injury or pain, amounting to the equivalent of a collective flight-reflex in the presence of painful stimuli. 64 Tobin Siebers, “Complex Embodiment,” 323. 65 Lerner and Straus, Sounding Off, 5.

289 constantly, but it does draw on certain common musical codes and establish and thwart player expectations about the musical progression of the leitmotifs. Blog posts cited earlier about Kefka are remarkably consistent in their language, and all of them cite the character’s memorable themes as encouraging or reinforcing certain interpretations. A lack of general knowledge, familiarity, and transparency surrounding mental disability leads to harmful representations in the media, and only serves to foment and intensify stigma and to prevent help-seeking behaviors and treatment adherence rates for those with serious mental disability.

As Maputo and Rouner suggest, highly-immersive media that present themes of mental disability have a powerful effect on stigmatizing or social distancing behavior, replicating tired tropes and normalizing exclusion and distrust.66 They write:

The result of being transported into a story—the plot, characters, and setting— leaves viewers more susceptible to beliefs and attitude change, as the transported state weakens their ability to counter argue, or challenge persuasive message content that may be imbedded in entertainment media…Even fiction, though not literally real, is believed frequently to represent and reflect the way events occur and the way people behave.67

As we can easily imagine, this study has implications for the role of gaming in perpetuating these stereotypes about mental disability—games engender active involvement and allow players to respond to these embedded narratives, to experience them, to actively construct strategies based on encounters with difference. Interactivity engenders transportation and

66 Nicole Maputo and Donna Rouner, “Narrative Processing of Entertainment Media and Mental Illness Stigma.” Health Communication 26 (2011), 595-604. 67 Maputo and Rouner, “Narrative Processing,” 596.

290 identification and suggests the potential to persuade players of the truth of the in-game lived experience.68

Behaving as if we are someone else are vital to socialization and can serve developmental, educational, creative, and cathartic functions for players, particularly in childhood.69 Gerald Voorhees has described Final Fantasy games in particular as “toys that allow players to experiment with different responses to cultural difference.”70 Voorhees draws on the work of Kenneth Burke’s notion of literature as “equipment for living,” and

“proverbs writ large” that can “name typical recurrent situations.”71 Voorhees argues that procedural representations (the gameplay and ruleset itself, rather than the visual or narrative elements) are similar to proverbs in that they can help to provide “…representative anecdotes of common social experiences.”72 Thinking through this issue gets to the heart of the issue of representation and identification.

Persuasive and engaging narratives cannot replace real-life experiences, however;

Link and Cullen and Corrigan et al. found that familiarity with mental disability in the real world (or even with more realistic portrayals of mental disability) could counteract the effects of negative perceptions perpetuated by the media, and lead to the rejection of stigmatizing attitudes.73 Further, as Rival, Chung, and Dhungana write,

68 Maputo and Rouner, “Narrative Processing,” 597. 69 Andrew Burn, “Role-Playing,” in The Routledge Companion to Video Game Studies, ed. Mark J.P. Wolf and Bernard Perron, 241-245 (New York and London: Routledge Taylor & Francis Group, 2014); 241. 70 Gerald Voorhees, "The Character of Difference: Procedurality, Rhetoric, and Roleplaying Games.” Game Studies: The International Journal of Computer Game Research 9, no. 2 (2009). 71 Kenneth Burke, Philosophy of Literary Form (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1968/1941); 254-256. 72 Voorhees, "Procedurality, Rhetoric, and Roleplaying Games.” 73 Bruce G. Link and Francis T. Cullen, “Contact with the Mentally Ill and Perceptions of How Dangerous They Are.” Journal of Health and Social Behavior, 27 (1986), 289–302; Patrick W. Corrigan, Amy Green, Robert

291

Media bring information about the outside world into people’s homes, communities, and networks, but this incoming information does not fall into a social vacuum. Rather, much like light that bends according to the density of the medium through which it travels, mediated messages are subject to interpretive refraction when they encounter environments that vary in beliefs, values, and social contexts.74

These narratives are only taken as natural, truthful, or unproblematic if the player has only been exposed to similar messages about the meanings of mental disability; Corrigan et al. suggested that 90% of the participants in their study were exposed to mental disability through film rather than through direct contact or a personal relationship. It is therefore imperative to present alternatives to these reductive and harmful tropes, to render them less pervasive and persuasive by saturating the public media discourse with more realistic and empathetic portrayals. We will explore transportation theory and persuasion further in the next chapter; however, it is important to mention it now, to contemplate the complicity of the player in the processes of identification of mental disability, replication and reification of these tropes, and the maintenance of social distancing behaviors and societal stigma in light of intense exposure to (and interaction with) harmful media representations.

The healthy body and sound mind represent an achievable constant with sufficient skill; objective measures of health or sanity represent one of the most common gameplay mechanics, rendering disability into a consequence—an object of anxiety and fear. Games often exploit this fear for both ludic and narrative purposes: giving players goals and motivations. In a sense, you cannot beat Final Fantasy VI without at least a tacit acceptance

Lundin, Mary Ann Kubiak and David L. Penn, “Familiarity with and Social Distance from People Who Have Serious Mental Illness.” Psychiatric Services 52 (2001), 953-958. 74 Rajiv N. Rival, Adrienne H. Chung, and Nimesh Dhungana, "Media as Educator, Media as Disruptor: Conceptualizing the Role of Social Context in Media Effects.” Journal of Communication 65 (2015), 863-887; 864.

292 of Kefka’s insanity, modeled for you throughout the game’s music and narrative.75 None of this is necessarily insidious, but it warrants thoughtful engagement and critique—because these mechanics are so common, we accept them without question. And in that space, where we accept the tenets of the narrative, we may also normalize and perpetuate harmful (if tacit) beliefs about mental disability that can seep into our perceptions of and reactions to these conditions in the real world. I am not here to argue that Kefka is sane—but his musical and narrative characterization relies on connecting his supposed condition to monstrosity, to a lack of humanity, and, ultimately, to the fear, distrust, or even hatred. A player who views him as broken and defective could unconsciously translate that unease into outright discriminatory attitudes, affecting those they encounter in the real world. That this process escapes our awareness shows how deeply embedded these tropes are in our ludic consciousness—a latent frightful energy beneath the surface of all that we play.

75 Cheng, Sound Play, 45; I am reminded of William Cheng’s discussion of detonating the nuclear warhead in Fallout 3: “Since pressing the E key would lead my character to press the Big Red Button in the gameworld, these gestures had an eerie, mimetic link. Most of the time when players press a computer key or a controller button, it causes avatars to perform overt simulated actions—a jump, a roundhouse kick, a flashy spell...In the case of this nuclear detonator, the potential for amplification lay not just in my actions but in my character’s as well. With my avatar poised to press a button, the simulated deed could be almost too close for comfort. Given our kinesthetic bond, the labor would be identical. So whose finger was it anyway?”

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Chapter 6. Epilogue: Incorporation and Opportunity

When I tell others about what I do, I often hear one of two responses. The first is to ask “Oh, so are you going to be a music therapist?” The second is to forward along links to articles about medical researchers using games as preliminary interventions for any number of different conditions, often with overblown headlines suggesting that doctors will soon write prescriptions for games rather than pharmaceuticals. For many, the notion of bringing together bodies, games, and sound evokes paternalistic care, not critical engagement. It is instructive to me that the study of disability, games, and music links so naturally for others to medical models and therapies, that most do not think of the consequences of representation—indeed, do not even perceive representation in game texts as manifestations of our reductivist cultural discourse. In this concluding section, I explore the implications of this oversight, the real-world consequences of disability representation in gaming, and my vision of how the medium could grow and change.

Music therapy has a complicated relationship to disability studies. Viewed as a bastion of the medical model and of normalizing discourse, disability theorists have been rightfully wary of a field that has on occasion used coercive interventions and behavioral therapies that reinforce compliance rather than competency.1 Giorgos Tsiris and other

1 Stefan Sunandan Honisch, “Music… to Cure or Disable”: “Therapy for Whom?” Voices: A World Forum for Music Therapy 14, no. 3 (2014). https://voices.no/index.php/voices/article/view/793/658; ; “Activists and scholars…have had little time for practice-oriented disciplines which aimed to bring the disabled body in line with the social, cultural, educational norms of bodily comportment in the ambient society.” Dave Headlam,

294 practitioners have suggested that this claim generalizes a field with a diversity of approaches, methods, and practices, and that the right models can enable rather than further disable subjects, forging relationships rather than power dynamics.2 Stefan Sunandan Honisch suggests reframing the field as a “reciprocal encounter in which diagnoses and intervention are replaced by a spirit of collaborative learning.”3 Licia Carlson discusses music therapy as a site of mutual learning, development, and even flourishing, suggesting that “Imagining disability in musical terms may affirm that that which is beyond language is not something to be feared or rejected; rather it is something to be embraced and valued.”4 Although disability scholars have critiqued the use of “cure narratives” in medical practice that seek to remediate or eradicate difference, the field has never been hostile to the powerful effects of various therapeutic interventions.5 As Samantha Bassler writes, “Why would someone with chronic illness, such as extreme fatigue, pain, anxiety, or depression, want to continue living with these constant invisible signifiers of difference and sources of discomfort?…If music therapy can ameliorate such conditions, or offer even a short respite from these chronic ailments,

“Learning to Hear Autistically,” in Sounding Off: Theorizing Disability in Music, ed. Neil Lerner and Joseph N. Straus (New York and London: Routledge), 109; “autism is viewed as a medical pathology, which is the prevalent view, it follows that music therapy plays a large role in its treatment. Indeed, music therapy is well established as an aid in learning, communicating, socializing, and controlling autistic behaviors.” 2 Giorgos Tsiris, "Voices from the 'ghetto': Music therapy perspectives on disability and music (A response to Joseph Straus's book Extraordinary Measures: Disability in Music),” international Journal of Community Music, 6.3 (2013): 333-343; 338. 3 Honisch, “Therapy for Whom?”; “Disability Studies perspective on music therapy would understand music’s function as a reciprocal exchange founded on the belief that intervention, amelioration, and cure are antithetical to the social model of disability. It is not merely that the therapist intervenes musically in the life of a client in order to change behaviors, symptoms, and bodily performances that fall outside the limitations on human experience imposed by medical norms, but that the individual and shared experiences of music within the therapeutic enterprise, considered in relation to the counter-normative critiques of Disability Studies, hold the possibility of transforming the therapeutic relationship into a performative rather than medicalized space.” 4 Licia Carlson, “Musical Becoming: Intellectual Disability and the Transformative Power of Music,” in Foundations of Disability Studies, ed. Matthew Wappett and Katrina Arndt, 83-104 (New York, N.Y.: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 89. 5 Bassler, “’But You Don’t Look Sick.’ ”

295 why not accept such relief?"6 Music therapy, these writers all argue, has the power to recast hierarchical or imbalanced relationships as more egalitarian and to create affirmational spaces that explore and celebrate difference.

Though disability studies scholars remain somewhat skeptical of this possibility for reciprocal exchange within a medicalized context, the dialogue between the disciplines remains open. These scholarly conversations thus represent an important nexus of theory and praxis that have the potential to transform lived experience; helping practitioners to create, advocate for, and adopt new models and methods to remove barriers. That music is a vital component of opening this dialogue is important to emphasize: an affirmational model of medicine may result not from appeals of disability scholars to general practitioners, but to those that use music as medium, message, and medicine. Moving forward, I believe it is essential to cultivate relationships across disciplinary divides (to medicine, education, and institutional and public policy), in order to keep foregrounding these types of conversations with those that have so much influence on the daily lived experience of impairment. In this way, I can continue to cultivate my own advocacy and contribute to the change I would like to see, in the pursuit of a more just and inclusive society.

As the field of music therapy seeks these kinds of transformations, it has the power to reshape not only its own practitioners, but also other fields that engage with human variety and provide sites of learning and growth. Although there is no formal field of video game therapy, research on the use of video games as interventions and treatments for conditions ranging from dyslexia to post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) suggests the

6 Bassler, “’But You Don’t Look Sick.’ ”

296 power that the medium has to reshape human beings across many domains. Video game therapy might well become a distinct field in the future; but the results of this growing body of research already suggest new tools and approaches that could influence the practice of medicine in a range of diverse specialties. For example, there is a substantial literature focusing on the use of exercise videogames (such as those released on the Wii and Kinect, consoles with motion detection capabilities) to gamify exercise, improve adherence to recommended fitness regimens, and lower the risk of cardiovascular disease in adults.7

Games show promise in physical therapy as well, increasing balance and improving postural control.8 A great deal of the extant literature concerns “brain-training” interventions; ways in which video games can cause positive structural brain changes (in regions responsible for strategic planning, memory formation, fine motor, skills, and spatial orientation), forge new neural pathways, aid in skill acquisition, and improve cognitive functioning and result in volumetric increases in gray matter.9 While some studies create specially-designed games for the clinical research setting, results are also promising for more naturalistic engagement in

7 See Wei Peng, Julia C. Crouse, and Jih-Hsuan Lin, “Using Active Video Games for Physical Activity Promotion: A Systematic Review of the Current State of Research,” Health Education & Behavior 40, no. 2 (2013), 171-192; Carina S. González, Nazaret Gómez, Vicente Navarro, Mariana Cairós, Carmela Quirce, Pedro Toledo, Norberto Marreo-Gordillo et al., “Learning Healthy Lifestyles Through Active Videogames, Motor Games and the Gamification of Educational Activities.” Computers in Human Behavior 55, part A (2016), 529- 551. 8 Keith Lohse, Navid Shirzad, Alida Verster, Nicola Hodges, and H.F. Mchiel Van der Loos, “Video Games and Rehabilitation: Using Design Principles to Enhance Engagement in Physical Therapy” Journal of Neurologic Physical Therapy 37, no. 4 (2013), 166-175; Amanda E. Staiano and Rachel Flynn, “Therapeutic Uses of Active Videogames: A Systematic Review” Games for Health Journal 3, no. 6 (2014), 351-365. 9 For example, see Jyoti Mishra, Daphne Bavelier, and Adam Gazzaley, “How to Assess Gaming-Induced Benefits on Attention and Working Memory,” Games for Health 1, no. 3 (2012), 192-198; Jyoti Mishra, Joaquin A. Anguerra, and Adam Gazzaley, “Video Games for Neuro-Cognitive Optimization,” Neuroview 90, no. 2 (2016), 214-218; Simone Kühn, Tobias Gleich, Robert Christian Lorenz, Ulman Lindenberger, and Jeurgen Gallant, "Playing Super Mario induces structural brain plasticity: gray matter changes resulting from training with a commercial video game.” Molecular Psychiatry 19 (2014): 265-271. doi:10.1038/mp.2013.120

297 play, and more studies are utilizing traditional commercial games in this capacity.10 For example, Matthew Dye et al. suggest the use of games from popular franchises such as God of

War, Halo, Unreal Tournament, Grand Theft Auto, and Call of Duty as “training regimens” to increase sensory processing.11

One of the largest bodies of literature concerns the use of video games in psychiatric and psychological settings (in both group therapy and individual sessions), in combination with cognitive behavioral therapy or other methods.12 For example, researchers have explored the use of videogames in group therapy settings after traumatic brain injury to help restore self-awareness and social cues.13 Some have promoted the use of games coupled with traditional methods of cognitive behavioral therapy for bulimia nervosa.14 Others have explored the use of video games to help with anxiety disorders and depression, suggesting how games can develop attentional processes and improve executive function.15 Several

10 Michelle Colder Carras, Antonius J. Van Rooij, Donna Spruijt-Metz, Joseph Kvedar, Mark D. Griffiths, Yorghos Carabas, and Alain Labrique, “Commercial Video Games as Therapy: A New Research Agenda to Unlock the Potential of a Global Pastime,” Frontiers in Psychology 8 (2017), 300. 11 Matthew W.G. Dye, C. Shawn Green, Daphne Bavelier. “Increasing Speed of Processing with Action Video Games.” Current Directions in Psychological Science 18.6 (December 2009), 321-326. 12 Theresa M. Fleming, Lynda Bavin, Karolina Stasiak, Eve Hermansson-Webb, Sally N. Merry, Colleen Cheek, Mathijs Lucassen, et al. “Serious Games and Gamification for Mental Health: Current Status and Promising Directions” Frontiers in Psychiatry 10 (2017), https://doi.org/10.3389/fp-syt.2016.00215 13 Roberto Llorens, Enrique Noé, Joan Ferri, and Mariano Alcańiz, “Videogame-based Group Therapy to Improve Self-Awareness and Social Skills After Traumatic Brain Injury,” Journal of Neuroengineering and Rehabilitation 12 (2015), 37. 14 Emily A. Holmes, Ella L. James, Thomas Coode-Bate, and Catherine Deeprose, “Can Playing the Computer Game ‘Tetris’ Reduce the Build-Up of Flashbacks for Trauma? A Proposal from Cognitive Science,” PLOS One, (2009), https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0004153; Fernando Fernandez-Aranda, Susana Jimenez- Murcia, Juan J. Santamaría, Cristina Ginger-Bartolomé, Gemma Mestre-Bach, Roser Granero, Isabel Sánchez, et al. “The Use of Videogames as Complementary Therapeutic Tool for Cognitive Behavioral Therapy in Bulimia Nervosa Patients” Cyberpsychology, Behavior, and Social Networking 18, no. 12 (2015), https//doi.org/10.1089/cyber.2015.0265; 15 Jason S. Moser, Tim P. Moran, and Andrew B. Leber. “Manipulating attention to non-emotional distractors influences state anxiety: a proof of concept study in low- and high-anxious college students.” Behavior Therapy (2015); doi:10.1016/j.beth.2015.07.001; Isabella Granic, Adam Lobel, and Rutger C.M.E. Engels “The benefits of playing video games.” The American Psychologist 69, no. 1 (2013), 1935-990x; Veronica Montani, Michele De

298 studies have even suggested the use of mobile games as self-help, to reach patients who are unable to seek help for mental disability due to perceived stigma.16

Virtual reality (VR) games in particular are showing promise. Research suggests that

VR might serve to treat amblyopia (lazy eye) by stimulating the eye and helping to eliminate interocular suppression signals.17 VR also shows promise in pain management; demonstrating analgesic properties that can be used independently or in combination with opioids.18 Games may even serve as noninvasive treatment for PTSD—the level of mental engagement in complex gameplay tasks is cited as a potential disruptor to the formation of memory engrams from traumatic experience (sometimes even referred to as “cognitive vaccination”), and VR in particular may serve as a particularly-potent form of exposure therapy for veterans.19 The literature is shockingly broad—it seems as though there is no domain of physical, mental, cognitive, social, or emotional functioning where video games

Filippo De Grazia, and Marco Zorzi, “A New Adaptive Videogame for Training Attention and Executive Functions: Design Principles and Initial Validation” Frontiers in Psychology 5 (2014) 409. 16 Merry, S. N., K. Stasiak, and M. Sheperd. “The effectiveness of SPARX, a computerized self-help intervention for adolescents seeking help for depression: Randomised controlled non-interiority trial.” BMJ (Clinical Research Ed.), 344 (2012), 1756-1833. 17 Peter Žlak, Anders Holm, Juraj Halička, Peter Mojžiš and David P. Pińero, “Amblyopia Treatment of Adults with Dichoptic Training Using the Virtual Reality Oculus Rift Head Mounted Display: Preliminary Results,” BMC Opthalmology 17 (2017), 105. 18 Debashish A. Das, Karen A. Grimmer, Anthony L. Sparnon, Sarah E. McRae, and Bruce H. Thomas, “The Efficacy of Playing a Virtual Reality Game in Modulating Pain for Children with Acute Brain Injuries: A Randomized Controlled Trial” BMC Pediatrics 5 (2005), 1; Jeffret I. Gold, Katherine A. Belmont, and David Alan Thomas, “The Neurobiology of Virtual Reality Pain Attenuation,” CyberPsychology & Behavior 10, no. 4 (2007), 536-544; Hunter G. Hoffman, Todd Richards, Trevor van Oostrom, Barbara A. Coda, Mark P. Jensen, David K. Blough, and Sam R. Sharar, “The Analgesic Effects of Opioids and Immersive Reality Distraction: Evidence from Subjective and Functional Brain Imaging Assessments.” Anesthesia and Analgesia 105, no. 6 (2008), 1776-1783. 19 Thomas D. Parsons and Albert A. Rizzo, “Affective Outcomes of Virtual Reality Exposure Therapy for Anxiety and Specific Phobias: A Meta-Analysis,” Experimental Psychiatry 39, no. 3 (2008), 250-261; J. Gayle Beck, Sarah A. Palyo, Eliot H. Winer, and Brad E. Schwagler, “Virtual Reality Exposure Therapy for PTSD Symptoms After a Road Accident: An Uncontrolled Case Series” Behavior Therapy 38, no. 1 (2007), 39-48; Albert Rizzo, Greg Reger, Greg Gahm, JoAnn Difede, and Barbara O. Rothbaum, “Virtual Reality Exposure Therapy for Combat-Related PTSD” in Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder: Basic Science and Clinical Practice, ed. Priyattam J. Shiromani, Terence M. Keane, and Joseph E. LeDoux, 375-399 (New York: Humana, 2009).

299 do not have potential applications. As McKenzie Wark suggests, “Play becomes everything to which it was once opposed. It is work, it is serious; it is morality, it is necessity.”20 It would seem now that play is also rehabilitation, intervention, therapy, and even medication.

In pursuing this line of scholarship, I feel a responsibility to contribute to these conversations, to participate and to find applications for my research beyond academia. This occurs even at the most fundamental, local level as I attempt to examine my own language for ableist shorthand slang and replace those words with more inclusive alternatives. I have opportunities to reflect upon phrases in common usage—such as “that’s crazy!” or “that was lame”—and model ways of conveying my surprised or underwhelmed sentiments without those terms. I have opportunities to share my work with dozens of students and loved ones, and to convey why the language we use and the attitudes we hold truly matter in an era of virtuality, depersonalized online interactions, and seeming political futility. I take inspiration from others in the field of music and disability studies who disclose their own experiences with disability and provide compelling examples of trust, empathetic scholarship, and personal advocacy both within their academic institutions and local communities.

I initially conceived of an entire chapter that explored these real-world applications of video games on bodies—the kinds of medical research that would seem to remove games from the realm of the virtual and show their effects on lived experience. Yet, I am not convinced that this argument is solely the province of medical literatures, as if representation is too abstract and inconsequential to matter outside of the moment of play. The previous chapters have already demonstrated myriad ways in which video games and their sounds

20 Wark, Gamer Theory, 011.

300 inflect and influence real bodies through the complicated process of incorporation.21 The medical literatures merely confirm what is already clear from the analysis of game sound and representation, exploring the mechanisms that explain these powerful effects. Representation is no less grounded, objective, and consequential, and it has dramatic impacts on lived experience, shaping our narratives of who we are and how relate to our own bodies and the bodies of others. Repetition and remediation continually reinforce these messages; as Siebers writes, “In short, what happens vividly and repeatedly determines the collective imagination of an existence lived in common, defining its symbols, affects, and organization.”22

Prolonged and repeated engagement with media has distinct consequences for the formation of attitudes about bodily difference.

The medium of the video game allows the construction of a world where it is possible to remain perfect, pure, whole—so long as one plays the game well. As William

Cheng writes,

As with the most vexing human quandaries, these concerns boil down to questions of ludic, aural, verbal, bodily, interpersonal, and hermeneutic control—its pleasures and virtues, its delusions and grievances. When negotiating agencies of gameplay, sound plays persistently with the experiential continuities, tensions, and fractures between the real and the virtual.23

What a powerful fantasy: there is so much anxiety surrounding the body in the real world, and the game allows players the kind of certainty of control that they cannot have in the physical realm. When the player experiences incorporation, the avatar becomes a virtual manifestation of Leder’s dys-appearing body, fluid and natural until the player notices

21 Wark, Gamer Theory, 225; “Games are our contemporaries, the form in which the present can be felt and, in being felt, thought through.” 22 Siebers, Disability Aesthetics, 111. 23 Cheng, Sound Play, 171.

301 something wrong with it—until a sound signals damage or precariousness that the player must attend to.24 Games and their sounds thus instill a desire for perfection, allowing the player infinite opportunities to replay and refine their techniques; indeed, this repetition is central to the pleasure of play.25 The existence of virtuosic professional players such as those in the speedrunning community demonstrates the collective impulse toward total control, the ultimate mastery of the rules of the system so as to discover the shortest possible route to completing a game.26 And yet, this drive is present at the individual level, as a player winces, restarts, and attempts each jump or shot again.

McKenzie Wark writes, “Whether gamespace is more real or not than some other world is not the question; that even in its unreality it may have real effects on other worlds is.”27 Games intervene in player’s lives, remediating and replicating discourse, reifying, repeating, and sustaining the disablist paradigm in ways that can limit the range of available narratives by continually perpetuating fearful and inaccurate stereotypes about different ways of being in the world. Gamers seem to take a great deal of this tacit representation at

“interface value” (as Turkle has described it), but earlier chapters have shown the influence of game sound on cognition and physiology, on emotion and incorporation, and on attitude.

Game sound is rarely subtle, but its influence is marked and measurable. Can the game sounds themselves influence players to adopt ableist attitudes? After all, games represent a number of ideologies to the player beyond ableism, such as capitalism, imperialism,

24 Leder, The Absent Body. 25 Christopher Hanson, “Repetition,” in The Routledge Companion to Video Game Studies, ed. Mark J.P. Wolf and Bernard Perron, 204-210 (New York and London: Routledge Taylor & Francis Group, 2014), 207. 26 World records on some of the most popular games, such as Super Mario Bros. (Nintendo, 1985) are often broken by millisecond increments. 27 Wark, Gamer Theory, 020.

302 militarism, racism, and sexism.28 Gonzalo Frasca suggests that every game or simulation replicates ideology by virtue of what has been included or excluded from the construction of the game world, an assertion echoed by Gerald Voorhees in his analysis of the representation of difference in role-playing games.29 As Roger Moseley writes, “…binary code is not ideologically neutral: for human purposes it is modulated into audible, visible, and haptic stimuli that, in pointing beyond themselves, are perceived as mimetic rather than

(or as well as) simulational.”30 However, rather than merely depicting the discourses of the real world to passive observers, games allow players to experience and live those ideologies, and potentially adopt them as their own.

Immersion and incorporation, or transportation into the game narrative, deeply influences the ability of the game to persuade players that these systems are natural or reflective of a kind of cultural truth.31 Melanie Green and Timothy Brock describe transportation explicitly as a mechanism to influence belief; games draw a player’s attentional focus and absorption in the narrative and gameplay that allows media to shape or change existing attitudes.32 Russell Fazio and Mark Zanna have shown how direct experience helps to form a person’s attitudes, and Alice Eagly and Shelly Chaiken have suggested that

28 Turkle, Life on the Screen, 23; Mark Hayse, “Ideology,” in The Routledge Companion to Video Game Studies, ed. Mark J.P. Wolf and Bernard Perron (New York and London: Routledge Taylor & Francis Group, 2014), 445. 29 Gonzalo Frasca “Simulation Versus Narrative: Introduction to Ludology,” in The Video game Theory Reader, ed. Mark J.P. Wolf and Bernard Perron, 221-236 (New York: Routledge, 2003). Gerald Voorhees, "The Character of Difference: Procedurality, Rhetoric, and Roleplaying Games.” Game Studies: The International Journal of Computer Game Research, 9.2 (2009). 30 Moseley, “Music, Visual Culture, and Digital Games,” 377. 31 Green, Melanie C. and Timothy C. Brock. "The Role of Transportation in the Persuasiveness of Public Narratives.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. Vol. 79, No. 5 (2000), 701-721. 32 Green and Brock, “Persuasiveness of Public Narratives,” 701.

303 enjoyment and preference for a media object can actually change beliefs.33 The ability of games to mimic experience through incorporation—making the game world feel real to the player through the body of the avatar—has the effect of distancing the player from other schemas and experiences that may help them to evaluate or critique the messaging of the game.34 And, as we have seen, game sound is central to the process of immersion, a central site of incorporation.

Jesper Juul suggests that games have a unique power over players due to the relationship of play to failure and repetition. Although most people try to avoid unpleasant experiences, they actively seek them out in video games; a conflict between desires to avoid failure and to learn how to experience and overcome it.35 Juul suggests that failure has positive and productive aspects, as well: “Failure then has the very concrete positive effect of making us see new details and depth in the game that we are playing.”36 Failure and repetition allow for a broad range of embodied experiences through the avatar, and even the most seasoned gamer will likely experience moments of impairment, anxiety, vulnerability, strategy, control, competence, and overcoming. As Juul continues: “Video games are for me a space of reflection, a constant measuring of my abilities, a mirror in which I can see my everyday behavior reflected, amplified, distorted, and revealed, a place where I deal with failure and learn how to rise to a challenge.”37

33 Russell H. Fazio and Mark P. Zanna, “Direct Experience and Attitude-Behavior Consistency,” in Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, ed. L. Berkowitz, 161-202 (San Diego, CA: Academia Press, 1981); Alice H. Eagly and Shelly Chaiken, The Psychology of Attitudes (Fort Worth, TX: Harcourt, Brace, & Janovich, 1993). 34 Green and Brock, “Persuasiveness of Public Narratives,” 702; “…for fictional or narrative communications, attachment to a protagonist may be an important determinant of the persuasiveness of a story.” 35 Juul, The Art of Failure, 49. 36 Juul, The Art of Failure, 59. 37 Juul, The Art of Failure, 24.

304

That games use the body of the avatar as a metric of player skill is not, itself, a problematic flaw. This is a nearly-ubiquitous game mechanic because our identification with the virtual body and our incorporation into it is so powerful—it helps to create the vivid virtual worlds we crave, and this relationship can form regardless of the graphical realism of the game space. Incorporation has the possibility to extend bodies rather than erase them in the process of creating hybrid identity; to echo Thomas Foster: “…what looks like an

‘erasure’ of the relevance of bodies might actually be an opportunity to reimagine the relation between body and mind or social identity.”38 I view the future of video games as an opportunity to create a more inclusive world, through the powers of incorporation.

Increasing-nuanced portrayals of non-normative identities allows them to become less stigmatized, marginalized and Othered by society over time. Exploring our reductive past— outlining problematic over-simplification in our conventional approaches—has the potential to open minds to allow new voices to enter the medium and is a first step to enacting true change and rendering the multiplicity of disabled experiences.

As Wark suggests, “The real violence of gamespace is its dicing of everything analog into the digital, cutting continuums into bits.”39 Elsewhere throughout this dissertation, I have suggested the issue of reductionist binaries, the collapsing of a nuanced spectrum of lived experience to either/or states. The use of an avatar’s quantified lifeforce as the central game mechanic has continuously reified these binaries of health and hurt; how might

38 Thomas Foster, “ ‘The Postproduction of the Human Heart’: Desire, Identification, and Virtual Embodiment in Feminist Narratives of Cyberspace,” in Reload: Rethinking Women + Cyberculture, ed. Mary Flanagan and Austin Booth, 469-504 (Cambridge and London: The MIT Press, 2002), 471; See also Allucquère Rosanne Stone, The War of Desire and Technology at the Close of the Mechanical Age. Cambridge and London: MIT Press, 1995. 39 Wark, Gamer Theory, 023.

305 designers open up their worlds and break from this paradigm? Representation of bodies in games have the power to expose us to different modes and abilities; suggesting an opportunity to create new experiences, explorations of empathetic and affirmational embodiment through the development of new gameplay mechanics and their representation in sound. Instead of merely taking damage and healing it, a player might instead experience opportunities to negotiate different bodies and invent new strategies for engaging with the challenges of the world—finding affordances where before they only experienced limitation.

This discovery of alternative methods could be foregrounded and emphasized as one of the central mechanics, if the developers were able to treat game mechanics like game narratives, with branching paths. This would increase replay value as well, and could be marketed as one of the pleasures of the experience, allowing players to empathetically inhabit bodies and build a relationship to difference through discovery.

In future iterations of this work, I believe I have a lot of ground I can begin to cover.

I plan to expand my case studies to explore modern gaming, moving beyond the early icons to see how these stereotypes relating to dis/ability continue to operate in the industry today.

Rather than viewing the 8- and 16-bit titles as historical relics, rendered obsolete by increasingly-sympathetic and more realistic depictions of lived experience, I hope to bring those representational strategies into conversation with modern examples of the very same mechanics and conventions, to show both how little has changed and what indie titles suggest for the future of game development grappling with the topic of bodily variation.

Several games from the past decade have used impairment as a central theme informing representation, narrative, and gameplay; for example, To the Moon (Freebird Games, 2011)

306 features a central female character with Asperger syndrome, and her musical leitmotif represents some of the symptoms of the disorder to the player before the character is diagnosed in adulthood.40 Titles such as Depression Quest (Zoë Quinn, 2013), Neverending

Nightmares (Infinitap Games, 2014), and Actual Sunlight (Will O’Neill, 2015) use depression as a central theme, limiting player access and agency in an attempt to help players to identify with experiences of helplessness, inaction, and irrational choice. Likewise, That Dragon, Cancer

(Numinous Games, 2014), an autobiographical game about the process of losing a young son to terminal cancer, also removes the player’s ability to influence certain outcomes, in order to convey parental helplessness in the face of the disease. Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice

(Ninja Theory, 2017) features a protagonist experiencing auditory and visual hallucinations resulting from a schizoaffective disorder and PTSD; developers partnered with neuroscientists, mental health practitioners, and those who experience these disorders firsthand, in order to accurately represent psychotic episodes in the game. There is much to say about the sound design of these games and how they support these mechanics and narratives. Do these games and their sounds succeed in fostering empathy, or merely exploit disability and reduce it to an interesting commodity that can set a game apart in the market and increase profit for the developer?

By recasting the relationship between impairment and play, games might build experiences that accommodate difference or demonstrate strategies of moving and being. If, as Juul suggests, “We should care enough about winning to put in sufficient effort, but we

40 For example, one common symptom of Asperger syndrome is obsessive tendencies, depicted to the player through the use of incessant repetition of a short melodic motive. The track also lacks strong contrasts in melody, phrasing, dynamics, meter, etc., representing the character’s dislike of change and unpredictability.

307 should see learning, rather than winning, as the ultimate goal,” then games hold potential to become an art of difference through incorporation instead of an art of failure.41 For all of the theory in disability studies that suggests a desire to distance oneself from nonnormative bodies or reject thoughts about human vulnerability, gamers actively engage with representations of impairment and difference every time they turn on the console. Each encounter represents an opportunity, and game developers can either continue to replicate tacit anxieties or challenge players to consider new modes of being. Bodies in play, incorporated with the bodies of the avatars through sound and action, represent opportunities to conceive of difference in new ways through exposure and experience.

This potential for games requires play with form and with content—in rewriting conventional game mechanics as well as in the representational strategies of graphics and sound that draw salience from reliance on structures embedded and inductively learned through exposure to media. The notion of affirmational game design requires identification and exposure of the existing paradigm in order to figure out how to transcend it and write new, influential models of play. In order to break barriers, to innovate, we first need to recognize our entrenched patterns. Outlining representation—and the tacit assumptions underlying our perception of that representation as “natural”—is a key first step in this process.

Having set out a first attempt at this form of analysis and critique, my role now is to listen, to amplify, and to collaborate, using my agency and voice to advocate for the removal of disablist attitudes. I want to be a part of a world that is more inclusive (inviting society to

41 Juul, The Art of Failure, 49.

308 change, to welcome and celebrate difference) rather than merely integrated—placing the onus of change on the disabled to attempt to normalize as a precondition for so-called

“inclusion.” What would happen if our society fully recognized and validated human variation? What if we cultivated rather than reduced this rich distinctiveness through games and sound? How would the public landscape change if the widest possible diversity of human forms, functions and behaviors were not only fully accommodated, but represented and enacted through bodies in play?

309

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