Music In Video Games: Studying Play

by K.J. Donnelly (Editor), William Gibbons (Editor), Neil Lerner (Editor)

From its earliest days as little more than a series of monophonic outbursts to its current-day scores that can rival major symphonic film scores, video game music has gone through its own particular set of stylistic and functional metamorphoses while both borrowing and recontextualizing the earlier models from which it borrows. With topics ranging from early classics like Donkey Kong and Super Mario Bros. to more recent hits like Plants vs. Zombies , the eleven essays in Music in Video Games draw on the scholarly fields of musicology and music theory, film theory, and game studies, to investigate the history, function, style, and conventions of video game music.

Genres: Music, Video Games

246 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2014

Reviews

[Curmudgeon · Rating 4 out of 5]

The articles are of variable quality, and like all "academic" writing, are prone to overanalysis and general irrelevance, but the transcriptions are nice, as are the connections drawn in some of the articles between music within games, across games, and differences in scoring across media (e.g. film music). You do get the sense that the field is very small, though, given that the same handful of articles seem to be cited by most of the papers.

[David · Rating 3 out of 5]

I'll buy pretty much any book that shows/discusses sheet music from video games. As with most academic compilations, the articles were a mix of hit and miss. I started by reading the bios, and was eager to see what Cook had written, since she "researches medieval and renaissance music theory, notation, and performance". However, half the article was an ivory tower bash-fest against perceived Western classical music elitism. But I did enjoy Lerner's, Reale's, Gibbons's, and Donnelly's contributions.