Making the Virtual Actual: a research model to understand music of contemporary open-world video games

Abstract

The global video game industry has in part achieved its ubiquitous cultural influence through the creation of increasingly realistic gameworlds. Of these, contemporary open-world games offer vast internal environments presenting complex narrative constructs and ever-higher production values, including music content. Research into these games has typically ranged from their characteristic technical design and storytelling attributes, to ethnographic studies of their gameworlds, through to commercially based evaluations of the games’ soundtrack content. Breaking new ground by merging these disparate lines of enquiry into a cohesive whole, the purpose of this study is to examine the music of open-world game soundscapes as sociocultural artefacts. This study seeks to offer a foundation for explaining the musical functions causal to the popularity of these games according to a research model that determines and separates the constitutive musical components of a gameworld’s soundscape into diegetic categories. These components are examined according to a tripartite model with a methodological basis in game music design principles, adopting a gameworld as a virtual ethnography fieldsite, and studies of game music in culture. This study takes Grand Theft Auto V as its focus in demonstrating an application of the proposed model. As an open-world game grossing more than any other form of media and featuring more musical content than any previous title of its series, it is shown that the proposed model does greater intellectual justice to the technical, aesthetic, and sociocultural sophistication of this artefact. The development and application of the proposed research model enables a shift of analytical approach in ludomusicology from an outside-in perspective to one of an inside-out nature. In addition to its application to other games, the offered model affords theorists and game designers a valuable analytical and conceptual tool to see the virtual music of a game as anchored in the actual world.