Conference Agenda

In rhythm games, the sequence of note cues that a player is prompted to read and play during a song is called a chart. As a set of instructions to the player, charts can be thought of as a rhythm game’s musical score, directing not only a player’s inputs but also overall bodily movement. However, I argue that a chart serves a function beyond that of a set of ludic challenges or musical score. To accommodate players of various skill levels, rhythm games will usually provide several charts for one song, each of differing difficulty. Rather than being mere simplifications, a lower difficulty chart is often written in a way that highlights different levels of metric projections as well as different textural layers.

In this paper, I show how rhythm game charts work to direct the player’s ear to attend to various textural and metrical layers in the game’s music, in the process shaping a player’s experience as they perform a track. Charters, those responsible for designing a rhythm game track’s chart, engage in interpretive work as they map music to gameplay in a way that is both intelligible and enjoyable to play. When reading through a chart, a rhythm game player’s success is reliant on their understanding and decoding of these relationships between the chart and music. Therefore, both the act of creating a chart as well as the act of reading a chart are musical analytical acts. The writing and reading of a rhythm game chart is thus a two-step manifestation of vernacular music theory (Lucas 2021).

To demonstrate this facet of rhythm game charting, I compare several charts for the song “Chrono Diver -PENDULUMs-” across various difficulty levels in two different games, Beatmania IIDX and Sound Voltex. Drawing on past literature on rhythm and meter (Hasty 1997, London 2004), virtuosic play (Ayers 2024, Lee 2024), and rhythm games (Miller 2009, Chang 2022, Nguyen 2025, Shultz 2016, O’Meara 2016), I analyze how features of a chart combined with the unique affordances of each game’s control schemes combine to create different musical performance experiences for players.

Derrida's concept of hauntology (1994) pertains to how the past manifests in the present while simultaneously shaping the future. Hauntology is a temporal discrepancy that involves ghosts of the past. These specters, while reminiscent of past elements, anticipate a future that has failed to materialize due to their uncanny persistence. Video game developers have used the concept of the past for many video game stories. Previous scholarship has examined how the past manifests in video games as literal ghosts (Janik 2019), ludic objects (Asling 2020), lost memories and futures (Ford 2021), and themes relating to trauma (Skott and Skott-Bengston 2022). References to the past in video games by these scholars are exclusively linked to visual components, yet the soundscapes that envelop the virtual world are rich in memories from the past. In this paper, I bridge the gap between ludomusicology and hauntology studies by arguing that music is a sonic representation of ghosts, haunting the present, and influencing the future narrative across two video games.

This paper focuses on musical specters in The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild (2017; BotW) and Tears of the Kingdom (2023; TotK). BotW visually and aurally haunts the world of TotK, most notably through the champions Mipha and Sidon and their musical themes. “Mipha’s Theme” is first heard in BotW and musical fragments of her theme can be heard in “Prince Sidon’s Theme,” which serve as an aural signifier of Mipha’s haunting of her brother. These fragments include a prominent semitone motion between 5 and 6 and a descending lamenting bassline. “Mipha’s Theme” presents a chromatic variant of the lament bassline whereas “Prince Sidon’s Theme” has a diatonic bassline over the semitone motion of 5 and 6 in the melody. Mipha, despite being physically absent in TotK due to her unfortunate demise in BotW, is aurally present in “Prince Sidon’s Theme,” and it is her death that haunts and connects the tracks together. Mipha’s fragmented musical quotations haunt both BotW and TotK and yearn to be heard completely once more and to finally be laid to rest.

Recent ludomusicological scholarship has explored how music shapes possibilities for play (Grasso 2024a; Summers 2016; Summers 2021). Julinane Grasso’s spectrum of ludonarrativity positions games between narrative-driven progression and rules-based interpretation (Grasso 2024b), but less attention has been given to how musical parameters, such as tempo, texture, timbre, and rhythmic articulation, shift as soundtracks move from narrative to ludic contexts. William Gibbons (2014) has shown that prolonged absence of non-diegetic music can disrupt immersion and shift narrative perspective, yet the role of music when play is governed by rules rather than story remains underexplored. Drawing on Erick Verran’s (2021) concept of negative affordance, this paper argues that as music becomes less texturally dense and less rhythmically structured, the responsibility of timing musical events shifts from the composer to the player, increasing negative affordance.
Using minigames from Wii Sports Resort (2009) as case studies, this paper maps temporal determinacy across varying degrees of ludonarrativity. Swordplay: Showdown, the most narratively framed, features dense non-diegetic music in 4/4, harmonically static in A minor, with layered drums, brass, and strings that adaptively respond to player health and actions. Temporal determinacy is high: periodicity is composer-imposed, and hypermetric articulation varies across phrase lengths. Swordplay: Duel occupies a middle position, reducing music to a drum groove mixed with environmental sounds. Here, temporal grids remain, but textural saturation and harmonic support are not present, increasing player influence on event timing. Archery represents the most ludic scenario: non-diegetic music is absent, leaving ambient environmental sounds and player-generated arrow releases to define temporal organization. Without composer-imposed metric or harmonic cues, players assume responsibility for articulating musical time, creating heightened negative affordance.

Across these examples, reductions in structured rhythm and textural saturation progressively increase negative affordance. By tracing these musical changes along the ludonarrative spectrum, this paper demonstrates that silence and textural sparsity in ludic contexts do not signify loss but rather enable focused, rule-aligned action. The findings suggest that in games, reductions in musical determinacy can function as a design resource, evolving player experience and agency through temporal control.