Conference Agenda

Video games have been considered to be unadaptable due to a perceived lack of interactivity in the “passive” medium of film. Markus Schulzke (2013) asserts that a successful cinematic adaptation of a video game depends on a seamless transition between two types of engagement — from participatory to interpretive. In film, the control of narrative flow and character development is possessed by the author, and the audience’s interactive responsibilities solely constitute analysis and fandom-based textual poaching practices. I argue, however, that participatory engagement can be reproduced in adaptations of games through musical interaction.

Turnabout: An Ace Attorney Musical is an animated musical film adaptation of Capcom’s popular visual novel Ace Attorney. It was produced by fans without input from the developer; as such, direct quotations of Masakazu Sugimori’s original score for the game are altered to avoid potential copyright infringement. Nevertheless, I contend these musical references are tools to emulate the experience of gameplay. Although they cannot directly control story progression as they would in a game, I position the audience as an active player in an otherwise passive medium by means of participatory listening practices. To demonstrate this, I concentrate on the musical’s allusions to two tracks — "Cross Examination - Moderato 2001" and "Naruhodo Ryuichi - Objection! 2001" — as they are integral to the game’s ludic structure.The sonic intertextuality between game and adaptation mimic Ace Attorney’s core mechanic of puzzle solving: viewers must decipher rearrangements of Sugimori’s score to determine musical relationality and predict narrative development.

Diminish is a series of YouTube videos by John “Seirea” Franks that chronicles a man named Will, who plays a dark video game made for him by his dying sister. It’s a part of an internet subculture of storytelling called Unfiction, which leverages the absence of context online to present fictional stories as if they were real. The YouTube channel is real, but the game is not. Despite this, the game exists in-universe, and its minimalist, electronic score functions as a ludomusicological object. It is a cutting-edge and revealing case of “remediation,” as proposed by Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin, where this internet-confined new form of media calls upon the media of film, music, and game to further push the bounds of how artist and audience interact.

Diminish’s narrative style and traumatic themes reveal a novel bridge between ludomusicological research and other forms of artistic analysis. It’s a case study where the link between audience and game is severed, and replaced by a sense of immediacy between audience and player. The music is presented in-story as video game music, but has other narrative implications when only heard via gameplay video. How do disjointed snippets of music “sell” the ethos of a video game, and what does it mean when audiences can derive personal catharsis from music presented this way?

Employing new media theory atop a foundation of ludomusicological aesthetics, I assert that video game-based Unfiction has great potential for expanding how we conceive of ludomusicological transmission.

This presentation examines the music video for “Abigail” by Soccer Mommy as a case study in participatory culture, modding aesthetics, and cross-media creativity. Drawing on the world of Stardew Valley, the video does more than reference a beloved indie game; it performs a form of fan modding through audiovisual translation. By recreating the game’s pixelated environments, character dynamics, and romantic mechanics, particularly the courtship of the character Abigail, the video situates itself within the broader ecology of Stardew fandom, where players routinely reshape the game through mods, fan art, narrative extensions, and social media performance. Rather than functioning as mere adaptation, “Abigail” operates as a playable text: a music video that mimics the logics of questing, gifting, and affective investment central to the game’s design. In doing so, it highlights how indie music and indie game cultures share overlapping aesthetics— lo-fi textures, DIY production values, emotional sincerity, and nostalgic pixel art—while foregrounding fan labor as creative authorship. The video’s meticulous attention to in-game detail signals insider knowledge, aligning artist and audience within a shared participatory community. In this sense, the video makes a case for itself as a form of fan modding: it does not simply depict Stardew Valley but actively reworks its mechanics, aesthetics, and narrative possibilities, translating gameplay into music video form as though the artist were installing an affective, audiovisual mod onto the game’s world. “Abigail” demonstrates how music video can operate as a modding practice: an extension, remix, and affectionate reprogramming of a digital world.

The “Do Re Mi” filter on TikTok requires a user to produce certain pitches in order to fit a floating ball through a series of holes, labeled with the solfège syllables corresponding to a C-major scale (fixed do.) Some people use this filter to show off existing vocal skills, while others have a harder time with the minigame. The latter result in hilarious videos where users search for the correct pitch through trial and error (singing random pitches) or slowly bend a note until it works (or they run out of breath), and often devolving into shouting in frustration before having to vocally reign oneself in to complete the challenge. The parameters of the minigame make users without a trained ear get creative in order to convince the filter they have found the right pitch (or circumvent the rules altogether). This paper explores how this minigame filter manipulates users with seemingly no musical training into accidentally producing vocal techniques like improvised melisma, operatic vibrato, or impassioned belting. An added layer of ludomusical interaction with these videos is the retroactive instrumental accompaniment created by other TikTok/YouTube users. Such accompaniment frames viral attempts at the filter as if a purposeful melody moving through various keys in a rhythmic fashion, taking advantage of the sense of musical teleology provided by the ascending-major scale pattern asked for by the filter, often with the insertion of musical memes along the way. The layered play/replay here constructs largely “unsuccessful” gameplay into impressive musical performances.

This paper addresses a trend in online entertainment manifest in the past decade in which popular live streamers or gameplay commentators play through video games intended for child audiences. Reasons for this emergent practice have varied, but most hold an implicit comedic premise, often arising from juxtaposing the game’s overall aesthetic with its gameplay or with the player’s commentary. For example, playthroughs of Piglet’s Pig Game (2003), Peppa Pig: World Adventures (2023) or Bluey: The Videogame (2023) often involve players and their audiences pointing out their ostensibly “low” or “unnatural” musical complexity and quality. I propose that beneath comedic playthroughs of children’s games lies a larger tendency for adult audiences to presume children’s musical play-aesthetics to be incomplete, unsophisticated, or unserious. Such presumptions may be used to reaffirm the separation of adult from child, but they also open potential connections between the two positionalities (Halberstam 2020). Adults may employ humor whether to criticize a children’s game that fails to address an adult audience (Wall 1991), or to offer as a tender/protective response towards what seems “cute” and therefore powerless (Ngai 2012). Both possible reactions establish “joking relations,” which encompass an “authority of censorship” to exert a “moral surveillance” (Mauss 2013) between adult-child kinships. Considering music and humor as methods in which we may connect child and adult perspectives allows us to expand on the important work of celebrating aesthetics of failure (Halberstam 2020) and promote the study of video game music intended for repeatedly marginalized child audiences.

Shows based on video games such as The Last of Us, Fallout, and Arcane have recently emerged as a rapidly expanding popular media genre. Where the former two examples relied on compiled scores and recycled game music to construct their soundtracks, Riot Games continued its longtime trend of blending newly composed music with preexisting material from their IPs to progress their worlds’ narrative arcs and financial models for engagement. Individual singles from the soundtrack, often with accompanying music videos, not only promoted Arcane but a galaxy of Riot games (League of Legends, Legends of Runeterra, Teamfight Tactics, Wild Rift, and Valorant) to establish Arcane as the new cross-universe canon direction for the company. Arcane blended character themes from Riot’s flagship game League of Legends (LoL) with commissioned pop songs and orchestral underscoring to create a largely original score that furthered preexisting ludic narratives. Thus, music was used to foreshadow story beats, highlight pivotal characters, and tease upcoming events for LoL’s world. Further music videos released after the close of the show used Arcane’s aural and visual aesthetics to further this initiative, tying up loose ends from the show, progressing LoL’s narrative, and pushing a new financial model for cosmetics. This paper draws on works by Andra Ivănescu, Lucija Dudkina, Miguel Arturo Serrano Madrona, Claudia Gorbman, and Lucia Škripcová to examine the effectiveness of musical narrative in Arcane and consequent affects for the progression of formerly static game narratives.

Through a combination of cutscenes and gameplay, The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom (2023) immerses players in themes of hope and loss even before the title card appears. Players witness Link lose his right arm and Princess Zelda disappear into a deep crevasse before Rauru, the Sage of Light, offers renewed hope. Between beginning the game and seeing the title card, various sonic environments establish the atmosphere and mood of the experience to come.

This lightning talk analyzes the audiovisual environment in the scene described above—a ten-minute excerpt consisting of two non-interactive cutscenes and a brief period of gameplay from the opening sequence of Tears of the Kingdom—to illustrate how music, or lack thereof, establishes a narrative and mood within cinematic and ludic contexts. Drawing upon KC Collins’s (2013) concepts of audiovisual and kinesonic congruence, I explore how sound and visuals interact to shape and establish narrative atmospheres. Further, I borrow from Claudia Gorbman’s (1987) theories of film music to investigate music’s “suturing” function to connect or bridge cutscenes to gameplay. Finally, Giles Hooper’s (2018) work on cutscene music provides the analytical framework for my scene analysis. I conclude the talk by discussing how this excerpt functions as a cinematic medium within a ludic context and how it supports Hooper’s (2018) assertion that cutscenes contribute to a game’s immersive effect. This ten-minute excerpt immediately preceding Tears of the Kingdom’s title card presents the dichotomy of light and dark, hope and loss, supported by its sonic environment.

Originally conceived by Japanese game producer ZUN as a series of low-budget independent shooting games, Touhou Project series has generated one of the most prolific music-centred ecosystems in contemporary Japanese otaku culture, wherein the motif-driven, loop-based compositions exhibit minimal synchronic integration with gameplay mechanics. These melodies, functioning as compositional blueprints, have catalysed over two decades of large-scale derivative music production, circulation, and ritualized performance across the community of its enthusiasts.

This process intertwined with the interplay between music and on-screen visuals. The visual motifs like colour schemes of the bullet patterns, character design, and stage imagery in gameplay that synchronized to musical cues establish indexical relations between sound and sight that later inform fan creations, later become templates for community reinterpretation in animation, rhythm videos, and online performance, making the original music’s affective power inseparable from on-screen patterning.

In other words, Touhou relocates the primary site of ludic experience from in-game interaction to extradiegetic peer production. Drawing on paratext theory, I propose that Touhou’s derivative music creations has effectively displaced the original game text as the franchise’s operative centre. The primary “play” of Touhou thus unfolds through collective make-believe enacted in music-making, visual-supporting, and character-centred devotion. Structurally enabled by the Japanese subcultural Dōjin system, this ecosystem transforms accessible melodic prototypes into a digitally mediated folk tradition sustained by communal variation and affective anchoring. Existed beyond diegesis, this ecosystem demonstrates how game music can function as an engine for post-game ritual, identity formation, and decentralized cultural continuity.