Sound Play

Video games open portals to fantastical worlds where imaginative play and enchantment prevail. These virtual settings afford us considerable freedom to act out with relative impunity. Or do they? Sound Play explores the aesthetic ethical and sociopolitical stakes of people''s creative engagements with gaming''s audio phenomena-from sonorous violence to synthesized operas from democratic music-making to vocal sexual harassment. William Cheng shows how video games empower their designers composers players critics and scholars to tinker (often transgressively) with practices and discourses of music noise speech and silence. Faced with collisions between utopian and alarmist stereotypes of video games Sound Play synthesizes insights across musicology sociology anthropology communications literary theory philosophy and additional disciplines. With case studies spanning Final Fantasy VI Silent Hill Fallout 3 The Lord of the Rings Online and Team Fortress 2 this book insists that what we do in there-in the safe sound spaces of games-can ultimately teach us a great deal about who we are and what we value (musically culturally humanly) out here.Foreword by Richard Leppert Video Games Live cover image printed with permission from Tommy Tallarico