Review: Sound Play: Video Games and the Musical Imagination by William Cheng

Book Review: Sound Play: Video Games and the Musical Imagination. William Cheng. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. 2014. xviii + 240 pp. ISBN: 0199969973

William Cheng’s 2014 Sound Play: Video Games and the Musical Imagination asks us to take seriously the sociopolitical, affective, and ethical implications of video games and their sound worlds. Ethnographically rich and rhetorically playful, Cheng encourages us to imagine how both video games and music “possess transportative powers, ushering us into otherworldly spaces and alternative states of mind” (4) and give rise to imaginative forms of play, performance, and human connection. By focusing on the relationship between players, video games, and game audio, Cheng provides a compelling and evocative narrative that illustrates how an analysis of gameworlds and their soundscapes “urg[es] us to reimagine the limits of our agency, identity, and embodied existence” (4).

Cheng combines his expertise in music with his personal passion for digital games. Theoretically committed to interdisciplinarity, Cheng draws upon a diverse set of literatures including musicology, game studies, film and media studies, anthropology, communication studies, and science of technology studies. Methodologically, Cheng analyzes game audio across a diverse set of sites, including video games themselves, YouTube, online chat forums, popular gaming journals, and live game concerts. Ethnographic in approach and method, Sound Play uses hermeneutic analysis, participant observation, and qualitative player-interviews in order to explore “how game creators, composers, and players employ (or otherwise come into contact with) music, noise, voice, and silence in ways that purposefully or inadvertently challenge social rules, cultural conventions, technical limitations, aesthetic norms, and ethical codes” (5). The first three chapters of the text focus solely on single-player games (Fallout 3 [2008], Final Fantasy VI [1994], and Silent Hill [1999]), while the fourth and fifth chapters examine game sound in two online multiplayer games (Lord of the Rings Online [2007] and Team Fortress 2 [2007]). To supplement the in-game screenshots Cheng provides, an open-access accompaniment website provides the reader with audio representations of his data in later chapters as a sonic glimpse into the gameworlds Cheng analyzes. It is ultimately Cheng’s goal to analyze the social implications of games and game audio to constitute, reflect, refute, and reimagine our sociopolitical worlds.

One of Sound Play’s greatest strengths is its ability to typify the work of ethnographies of technology in blurring and challenging the boundaries of socio-technological dichotomies—utopia/dystopia, play/avatar, human/machine, authenticity/artificiality, and music/noise, to name a few. One that Cheng devotes particular attention to throughout the text is the real/virtual binary. Cheng provides multiple examples of how “game audio shuffles players between real and virtual registers of aural, visual, psychological, tactile, and aesthetic engagement” (13). In Chapter 1 (“A Tune at the End of the World”), Cheng explores the complex relationship between game music, violence, apocalypse, and player agency. Since Fallout 3 allows players to toggle between fictional radio stations to hear classical 18^th– to 20^th-century music often—associated battle, militarism, and war—Cheng argues that the game’s songlist contributes to players’ justifications of in-game acts of violence in this fictional post-apocalyptic world. In one game magazine, one player states, “Something about marching music makes me wanna shoot someone…I’m not violent…really.” Through this examination of violence and game music, Cheng argues that “[i]nquiries along these lines stand to yield insights into our habits, ethics, and ways of living in worlds both real and virtual.” Chapter 4 (“Role-Playing Toward a Virtual Musical Democracy”) is centered on the democratizing possibilities of music in the massively multiplayer online game, Lord of the Rings Online. In the game, players have the option to perform music manually in real time by mapping musical notes onto the keyboard or by using pre-recorded material they’ve created or found online. While some players view the ability to use pre-recorded material as the possibility to role-play musical virtuosity, others criticize this practice by claiming it as inauthentic and offensive to those with “real” musical talent and skill. These debates and controversies extend to questions of cohabitation and “griefing” (deliberate acts committed to agitate or offend others) in virtual worlds, in which players can play music to disrupt social settings. Cheng offers a balanced utopian and dystopian framework that neither romanticizes nor demonizes virtual worlds for their possibilities for social interaction; rather, Cheng’s problematization of the real/virtual binary challenges simplistic narratives of democracy, authenticity, and technological transformation. Sound Play contributes to the literature in both game studies and social studies of technology that seek to reframe the connections between and across the real and the virtual. In this way, Cheng points more intimately to how “what happens in gameworlds rarely stays in gameworlds—that the sounds and simulations of games can resonate well beyond the glowing screen” (14).

While not an explicit focus of the text, Sound Play insightfully engages in conversations around the affective elements and possibilities of games. In Chapter 2 (“How Celes Sang”), Cheng examines how Final Fantasy VI’s limited game audio technologies provide opportunities for nostalgia-driven, digitally mediated community. Players find the aesthetic constraints nostalgic and unforgettable, and they discuss their own remembrance and affective connection to Final Fantasy VI through YouTube videos and comments as a form of community building. In Chapter 3 (“Dead Ringers”), Cheng examines how horror games “destabilize a player’s sense of control” through the use of terrifying noises, unreliable game mechanics, and unnerving virtual environments. Specifically, Silent Hill’s ability to bleed into reality disorients the player through blurring which sounds seem to come from the game and which come from the player’s living room. This brings a sense of life and atmosphere to the games, and as a popular genre horror games strike a balance between pleasure and terror for the player. Cheng writes, “Imagination of things coming to life, of course, is the very stuff of video games—a medium that lets us displace authority onto virtual characters, to experience conflicting sensations of being in and out of control, and to inhabit spaces where nothing stays dead for too long” (112). Games and their resonant worlds thus evoke emotions and feelings out of us; they move us in unexpected and surprising ways that might be unique to the medium.

Critically interrogating the concept of agency is another element of Sound Play. Questions of agency in relationship to technology are common throughout science and technology studies. Do technologies and technical systems have agency? Heavily tied to the politics of the real/virtual and the affective elements of games, Cheng writes, “What role-play affords is not the facile transcendence of corporeal existence, but rather effortful renegotiations of this existence’s material contingencies and experiential boundaries. As freeing as gaming can be, it seldom entails the straightforward possession of agency of some boundless capacity for action. In the same way that musicians…might feel as though they are getting lost in, giving over to, or being swept up by the performance and instrument at hand, so 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” (9). In the first chapter, Cheng provides an excellent example from his own gameplay experience, an autoethnographic scene where he is given the opportunity to blow up Megaton, a town in Fallout 3, with an atomic bomb. He is initially hesitant to do so, when John Philip Sousa’s classic piece “The Stars and Stripes Forever” comes over the radio. As the song climaxes and comes to a close, Cheng and his character “with a single stroke of the finger…turned the meager lives of Megaton to dust” (46). He reflects on this moment, suspecting that it is because of the serendipity of a theatrical and cinematic display that he chooses to obey the game’s call press the “Big Red Button” of the atomic bomb. He ultimately concludes, however, that he can’t quite push blame to the game, and rather the choice to detonate the bomb should be seen as a negotiation of his own player agency and the game’s designed incentives to push the button.

While Sound Play covers a lot of ground in the five case studies it presents, its conceptualization about “the soundness of play” (6) remains somewhat surface-level. For example, in Chapter 5 (“The Wizard, the Troll, and the Fortress”) Cheng focuses on how the multiplayer Team Fortress 2 reifies ideologies about women in games through sexist language both in the game dialogues and in players’ “trolling” (displaying controversial stances of behaviors in online contexts) and harassment of women in the voice chat. While Cheng illustrates how the game space of Team Fortress 2 normalizes sexist discourses, he falls short in critically advocating how it is these discourses have real material effects on these women gamers. The trolling, he says, “poses a nuisance rather than a real threat” (157-8). Despite not commenting on ways communities might change this behavior or how players might open up dialogues for cultural transformation, he does concede that “[w]hat griefing and trolling point up, nevertheless, is a troubling diptych informed by (a) how games facilitate harassment and (b) how harassment….too often gets passed off as just a game” (158).

In the Epilogue, Cheng articulates three considerations for the sociopolitical stakes of sound and play in games. Firstly, he asserts that how we approach characters—human-controlled or AI—may shed light on how we approach people in the real world and sociocultural transformation more broadly. Secondly, he argues that how we listen to music in real and virtual worlds may inform the care with which we listen to one another. Lastly, he claims that how we relate to sound in general, “how we use, abuse, preserve, manipulate, aestheticize, exploit, perceive, heed, ignore, share, sell, consume, study, and talk about it” (173), may clue us into how we should treat other human beings in daily life. He concludes that “If there’s the slightest truth to any of these analogies, then students of music and games have important roles to play indeed” (173). Since games have historically been relegated to the margins of academic inquiry, Cheng affirms and justifies games as legitimate objects of study in academia. “Ivory towers, 8-bit castles: they stand on common ground, and there’s reason to knock on both their doors” (16). Sound Play is productive in its critical insights to digital games and their social, affective, political, and aesthetic possibilities to shape and alter human social life.