Sound Play: Video Games and the Musical Imagination by William Cheng (review)

William Cheng’s Sound Play interrogates the relationship between video games, their music, and their sounds, examining how “players of games oscillate between being in and out of control, playing and being played, and acting and being acted upon by the game’s barrage of audiovisual stimuli” (p. 9). This book presents important arguments regarding game sound as a social device, and is, moreover, a pleasant read, personable, and suffused with clever, and often poignant, puns (of which the book’s title is only one). Cheng’s text is extensively researched and intelligently conceived, addressing some of the more current and charged concerns regarding game culture and player agency. Over the course of five case studies, focusing on the video games Fallout 3 (2008), Final Fantasy VI (1994), Silent Hill (1999), The Lord of the Rings Online (2007), and Team Fortress 2 (2007), Cheng addresses violence, nostalgia, horror, authenticity, and gender politics. He extends a growing field defined by such scholars as Karen Collins (Game Sound: An Introduction to the History, Theory, and Practice of Video Game Music and Sound Design [Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008]), Kiri Miller (Playing Along: Digital Games, YouTube, and Virtual Performance [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012]), and K. J. Donnelly, William Gibbons, and Neil Lerner (Music in Video Games: Studying Play [New York: Routledge, 2014]). Cheng builds on this foundation by casting a wide theoretical net and engaging in ethnography, demonstrating a keen ear for the musical sensitivity and values demonstrated by designers and gamers alike.

Sound Play combines a number of methodologies, including analyses of narrative, music, and game structure. Of particular note is Cheng’s commitment to ethnographic research, making use of participant observation, various forms of interview, research in online forums, analysis of gamer videos posted to YouTube, and descriptions of live performances of game music. Theoretically, he draws from multiple fields, including scholarship on video game history and theory, video game music, and technology and culture, as well as genre theory, gender and queer theory, and sound studies (including voice and noise studies). His footnotes include many pointers to research in parallel subjects, including actor-–network theory, music as torture, patternicity, virtuosity, authenticity, posthumanism, gender masquerading and “coming out” online, and speech as act. Most of the research for this book was completed as part of Cheng’s Ph.D. dissertation at Harvard University (2012); the book, in fact, draws extensively from this document. One significant and beneficial addition, however, is Sound Play’s chapter on Final Fantasy VI, which allows Cheng to explore nostalgia, a central topic in research on video game communities.

After an introduction that discusses player agency and interrogates the notion of the real–virtual divide, Sound Play charges out of the gate with a particularly contentious issue: violence in video games. Focusing on Fallout 3, which uses a post-apocalyptic society and ruined landscape as the basis of its narrative, chapter 1, “A Tune at the End of the World,” challenges the presumed agency the player is given over the game’s music as well as the ways in which this music, in turn, affects the player’s control over the entire game. Cheng identifies the three radio channels from which players can choose and describes their constitutive styles. Most significantly, Cheng notes that the radio stations’ repetitiveness seems particularly suited to a postapocalyptic world; very few new musical pieces, and certainly no new musical styles, arise from a society decimated by tragedy. Cheng reads this in light of Theodor Adorno’s edict that “to write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric” (p. 26)—in Fallout 3, creativity after extreme violence is unthinkable. Cheng contends that the music produced by these radio stations, when heard alongside the acts of violence perpetrated by the game and its players, creates a sense of contextual dissonance that can...