Playing Through Music History: The Contextualizing Function of Western Historical Music in Fantasy Role-Playing Video Games
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| Publicado en: | ProQuest Dissertations and Theses (2025) |
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ProQuest Dissertations & Theses
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| Acceso en línea: | Citation/Abstract Full Text - PDF |
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| Resumen: | This thesis focuses on the presence of Western historical music in contemporary video games. Through a combination of music-theoretical analysis, iconography, and Peircean semiotics, the author demonstrates that the nondiegetic soundtracks of fantasy role-playing video games utilize elements of major style periods in music history—including the Middle Ages, Renaissance, Baroque, and Classical eras—to enhance existing representations of time and place in their visual environments. This phenomenon is particularly apparent in three games, which serve as case studies: Baldur’s Gate 3 (2023), The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild (2017), and Elden Ring (2022). Ultimately, the project contributes research to both ludomusicology and historical musicology, as it reveals that historical music serves an essential contextualizing function in role-playing video games and, by extension, that those same games can be sites of productive discussions about archetypal genres and styes from a wide range of periods throughout Western music history. |
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| ISBN: | 9798280709911 |
| Fuente: | ProQuest Dissertations & Theses Global |