• Abstract and Figures
• Public Full-text

“Wear People’s Faces”: Fan Discussion and Utilization of the Music in The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask Jeremy Smith University of Toronto April 7, 2015 The Legend of Zelda is one of the most respected and cherished video game series of all time, and its music is beloved by fans worldwide. Aside from their emotional, non-diegetic soundtracks that help create an atmosphere of adventure, Zelda games are known for being some of the first to incorporate interactive, diegetic music-making into their gameplay. The interplay between, and importance of, both diegetic and non-diegetic music is especially evident in the 2000 release, The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask, for the Nintendo 64. Recently, this game has seen a resurgence in popularity, leading to the 2015 release of a remake, The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask 3D, for the Nintendo 3DS. In this paper I show how gamers, and particularly fans of Majora’s Mask, express their fondness for the games’ music in various ways, including: countdown videos of the games’ “best” songs on YouTube, remixes and covers of those same songs, discussion and commenting in online forums and social media, and even one fans’ tribute to the game through the composition of an original opera. The paper proceeds in three sections, the first of which provides a brief overview of the literature on video-game music and on the phenomenon of fandom, then introduces the game of Majora’s Mask and shows how it has had a recent resurgence in popularity. The second section demonstrates how music works in the game, and then presents and analyzes the fan discourse about, and utilization of, the games’ music in the various manners explained above. Finally, the third section analyzes the music of the games’ most popular songs, and their in-game functions, in an attempt to show why the music may have been so positively received. Literature on Video Game Music A multitude of literature in the field of ludology (the study of video games) has emerged in the twenty-first century, with a wide variety of interdisciplinary approaches to studying this socio-cultural phenomenon that is important to many peoples’ everyday lives. Studies of video- game music specifically have largely focused on its physiological and psychological impact on the player.1 For example, Karen Collin’s 2013 book Playing with Sound and Zach Whalen’s article “Play Along – An Approach to Videogame Music” show that the gamer is immersed in a virtual world where music and sounds produce feelings of engagement, accomplishment, and fulfillment as one “reads” through the video game as a “text”.2 The way players interact with the music in games has also been a well-researched topic, especially regarding games in the “music genre” such as Guitar Hero, Rock Band, Dance Dance Revolution, Rhythm Heaven, and Donkey Konga, that were very popular in the first decade of the new millennium.3 Interaction with the music is not only reactive, where the players physical actions directly impact the content of the game, but also proactive, where the music “prompts the players to undertake a specific action when it is played”.4 Other scholars have noted the connection between video game music and film music, including semiotic and semantic functions of particular motives or songs.5 It is through this association that the terms diegetic and non-diegetic are transferred from film studies to video-game studies. This paper contributes (albeit briefly) to scholarship on video-game music using two methods that have been somewhat neglected in the emerging field: musical analysis, and 1 Sylvie Hébert et al., “Physiological stress response to video-game playing: the contribution of built-in music”, Life Sciences 76, 20 (2005), accessed March 14, 2015, doi:10.1016/j.lfs.2004.11.011. 2 Karen Collins, Playing with Sound: a theory of interacting with sound and music in video games (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2013), 39-58. Zach Whalen, “Play Along – An Approach to Videogame Music,” The International Journal of Computer Game Research 4, 1 (2004), accessed February 6, 2015, http://gamestudies.org/0401/whalen/?ref=SeksDE.Com. 3 Melanie Fritsch, “History of Video Game Music”, and Michael Liebe, “Interactivity and Music in Computer Games”, both in Music and Game: Perspectives on a Popular Alliance, ed. Peter Moormann (Wiesbaden: Springer VS, 2013), 31-34, and 41-62. 4 Liebe, “Interactivity and Music in Computer Games,” 47. 5 Willem Strank, “The Legacy of iMuse: Interactive Video Game Music in the 1990s,” in Music and Game: Perspectives on a Popular Alliance, ed. Peter Moormann (Wiesbaden: Springer VS, 2013), 87-88. Zach Whalen, “Play Along – An Approach to Videogame Music”. ethnographic studies of fandom. Some video game music has been analyzed by Whalen and Laroche,6 but a large body of music-analytical literature is absent. In terms of ethnographic research on how video games and their music effect the everyday lives of players, two monographs stand out. First, Garry Crawford’s 2012 book Video Gamers addresses how games are used in the everyday lives of players, and the social and cultural connections that gamers create as a unified “audience”.7 Crawford also looks at fan communities, and the kinds of content that they produce such as game mods, walkthroughs, fan fiction, and art.8 However, his book does not extensively discuss how music plays a role in generating these communities, and how music is (re)-produced by fans (such as remixes and covers). Another book that addresses this aspect more specifically is Playing Along: Digital Games, YouTube, and Virtual Performance, by ethnomusicologist Kiri Miller. In this recent book, Miller uses three ethnographic case studies to show how playing a video game is an experience of community: Playing Along reminds us of the collaborative nature of these practices: that they build on (and build up) relationships among game designers, players, choreographers, dancers, writers, composers, directors, performers, and audiences, as well as marketers, publishers, and other commercial mediators. For instance, Grand Theft Auto is primarily a single- player game, but no one ever plays it alone; each player collaborates with the game designers to turn code into virtual performance, while remaining aware that millions of other players have engaged in the same endeavor. Common experiences of this kind generate “sensational knowledge” that connects dispersed participants, be they video game players, rock drummers, or yoga practitioners.9 Finally, a related book discussing fandom of music in a more general sense is Daniel Cavicchi’s Tramps Like Us: Music and Meaning among Springsteen Fans. Cavicchi’s work 6 Whalen, “Play Along – An Approach to Videogame Music.” Guillaume Laroche, “Analyzing Musical Mario-media: Variations in the Music of Super Mario Video Games” (MA thesis, McGill University, 2012), accessed March 30, 2015, http://digitool.library.mcgill.ca/webclient/StreamGate?folder_id=0&dvs=1428357843948~469. 7 Garry Crawford, Video Gamers (London: Routledge, 2012). 8 Ibid., 15. 9 Kiri Miller, Playing Along: Digital Games, YouTube, and Virtual Performance (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 5. shows how music can be a powerful force for bringing people together, and that fans of a musical artist form tight-knit communities with strong social hierarchies.10 While video games are different in that gamers are fans not specifically of one person or celebrity, but an entire game, series, or company, Tramps Like Us shows how important the cultural phenomenon of fandom is generally. This paper builds on the work of Crawford, Miller, and Cavicchi, exploring how fans of the Zelda game Majora’s Mask show their appreciation for the game’s music in various online media, and through creating new musical content such as an opera. However, in this paper I use the term “fan” loosely, referring not only to individuals who obsess over the game and its contents, but to a wider range of those who like the game for any number of reasons. I will now introduce the game in more detail and show how it has developed a strong fan community, culminating in the 2015 remake for the Nintendo 3DS. The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask is the sixth main installment in The Legend of Zelda series, but only the second to use three-dimensional graphics and gameplay, after The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time.11 Ocarina of Time (which fans refer to as OOT) and Majora’s Mask (referred to as MM), were released for the Nintendo 64 in 1998 and 2000 respectively. Both were extremely popular, and have developed a long-lasting legacy in the video game community. Ocarina of Time in particular has been hailed by many as the best video game of all time, and still to this day has the highest rating (99/100) of any game on the popular website 10 Daniel Cavicchi, Tramps Like Us: Music and Meaning Among Springsteen Fans (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998). 11 The distinction between 2-D and 3-D Zelda games is an important one among fans. Many refer to the former as inferior, or have not played them at all. Metacritic.12 It was on the heels of this unprecedented success that Majora’s Mask was released as a sequel in 2000. Majora’s Mask was also extremely popular, but not quite to the extent of Ocarina of Time. The video game magazine Edge hosted a poll in 2013, to determine the “Top 20 games of our lifetime”, and Ocarina of Time placed first while Majora’s Mask placed nineteenth.13 The number of units sold also shows the immense popularity of these games, with Ocarina of Time being the fourth-best-selling Nintendo 64 game of all time, and Majora’s Mask being the ninth-best-selling.14 Both games have now been re-released on Nintendo’s “virtual console”, and been re-made into new versions for the Nintendo 3DS.

Load more

  46

Copy Link