Nostalgia and Videogame Music: A Primer of Case Studies, Theories, and Analyses for the Player-Academic , edited by Can Aksoy, Sarah Pozderac-Chenevey, and Vincent E. Rone
2024; University of California Press; Volume: 77; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1525/jams.2024.77.1.226
ISSN1547-3848
Autores Tópico(s)Cinema and Media Studies
ResumoSony makes news with the latest version of its iconic Walkman. Top Gun, Indiana Jones, and Ghostbusters are top-grossing movies in theaters. Those who prefer TV might tune into thrilling new episodes of Magnum, P.I., laugh along with the antics of Night Court, or watch Captain Picard and his crew save the universe yet again in Star Trek. Mullets are a distressingly trendy hairstyle. It seems that, in the 2020s, everything 1980s is new again. As millennials reluctantly enter middle age, cultural nostalgia for the mid-century nuclear family is giving way to recollections of latchkey adolescence rooted in a popular culture where "family" means the Mario Bros. more than the Brady Bunch.Video games are fundamental to this impulse, both as vehicles for evoking nostalgia and as objects of nostalgic reflection. Consider, for example, the centrality of 1980s gaming culture in nostalgic fiction like Ernest Cline's Ready Player One (2011) or Jason Rekulak's The Impossible Fortress (2017). The explosion of on-demand media access through streaming technology has only enhanced our ability to revel endlessly in the past. Just as streaming video providers like YouTube and Netflix allow us to travel down rabbit holes of 1980s TV commercials and binge every episode of Murder, She Wrote (1984–96), computer- and console-based distribution platforms have dramatically increased access to older games. Yet nostalgia is not limited to the "classics." Games can and do evoke nostalgia for eras long before their own creation. Nostalgia is a fundamental tenet of so-called "retrogames," for example: new games designed in historical styles. Nox Archaist (2020), one among many retrogames of recent years, is available on modern PCs and Macs, but it was designed for (and written entirely on) original Apple II hardware from around 1980.In video games, as in other media, music and sound are frequent catalysts for moments of nostalgic reflection. These moments may be triggered in an almost infinite number of ways, with results ranging from the highly personal to the culturally ingrained. Hearing a familiar theme might spark a specific personal recollection of playing a game as a child, for instance, while an evocation of mid-century US popular music might trigger a cultural nostalgia for an imagined, simpler past.While individual scholars have already begun to explore nostalgia's musical manifestations in games, Nostalgia and Videogame Music: A Primer of Case Studies, Theories, and Analyses for the Player-Academic presents an ambitious collection focused entirely on wrangling with this topic. As the subtitle notes, the volume encompasses contributions ranging from hermeneutic analyses of specific titles to attempts at theoretical models of gaming/player nostalgia. The case studies focus on well-worn titles that will be familiar from other ludomusicological studies (the Final Fantasy and Legend of Zelda series, for example, both feature prominently in several chapters), an approach with both advantages and disadvantages.If this collection of "case studies, theories, and analyses" seems a little structurally unkempt at times, so too is its subject matter. The intersection of games, music, and nostalgia is a messy space. As Jessica Kizzire notes in her contribution, "Nostalgia is multifarious; it can be a feeling, an emotion, a sense of cultural awareness, an act of memory, or a vehicle of ideology" (p. 209). And while the framework outlined in Svetlana Boym's pioneering The Future of Nostalgia provides this volume's authors with a theoretical through line, they approach their subjects with a laudable variety of methodologies and aims.1The introduction by coeditor Vincent E. Rone helpfully establishes some of the threads running throughout the book's chapters. The opening chapter, "A Player's Guide to the Psychology of Nostalgia and Videogame Music" (coauthored by Rone and Michael Vitalino), reads, to some extent, as an elaboration of the introduction, and it offers the closest thing in the book to an overarching "theory" of nostalgia in game music. After this overview, the structure loosens, opening to contributions that take the central themes in a variety of directions. The editors divide the book into four parts: "Articulating Nostalgia and Videogame Music," "Objectifying Nostalgia and Videogame Music," "Subjectifying Nostalgia and Videogame Music," and "Confronting Nostalgia and Videogame Music." These categories ultimately seem more artificially imposed than organic; indeed, some of the closest connections appear between contributions in different sections. At the same time, some clear themes do emerge. Several chapters (Diaz-Gasca, Hunt, Nunes), for example, engage with what Sebastian Diaz-Gasca calls the "paraludical consumption" of game music—that is, the music's extended life outside video games, most notably in the proliferation of popular concert series. Other chapters (Wissner, Waxman, Sextro, Ferguson and Laws-Nicola) examine games primarily through the lens of musical parody or nostalgia for other televisual media, from television shows, to film, to music videos.The notion of a coherent, well-edited collection exploring game music through a shared methodological lens would have seemed unlikely even a decade ago, and the very existence of Nostalgia and Videogame Music is a gratifying testament to ludomusicology's continued maturation as a subfield. That said, I cannot entirely overlook a few areas of concern. Some chapters suffer from a surprising lack of engagement with secondary literature in the field, for example—particularly the wealth of literature on nostalgia in Western art music and popular musics. Similarly, the volume's unacknowledged focus on North American and (to a lesser extent) Japanese games risks universalizing a particular (Western) experience of both nostalgia and video games. In fairness, these challenges are not unique to this collection, but reflect larger trends within (ludo)musicology.As a final thought, among the most notable features of this collection is its avowed readership: the "player-academic." Nostalgia and Videogame Music is at its most successful when it strips away the veneer of academic objectivity to reflect on how the act of scholarship engages with, and is in turn complicated by, nostalgia for the object(s) of study. What impact does nostalgia exert on the explicit and implicit value judgments that permeate our research, and how do we balance our roles as scholars and as fans? Although this book is not alone in asking such questions, such self-awareness remains distressingly uncommon in music studies. In this respect more than any other, Nostalgia and Videogame Music offers a valuable model for future (ludo)musicological scholarship.
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