NACVGM 2020 – Stand by Me: Sounds of Queer Utopias and Homosexual Panic in Final Fantasy XV
When Final Fantasy XV was released in 2016, the JRPG highlighted several new features for the series including both open-world game play and an all-male central cast. The director Hajime Tabata...
NACVGM 2020 – Queer Aesthetics and Game Music, or, Has Video Game Music Always Been Queer?
Research concerning game music and identity has included discussions of gender (Austin, 2018), class (Ivănescu, 2018) and disability (Plank, 2018). This paper addresses issues of queer sexuality. ...
NACVGM 2020 – Musically Queering Love in the Monstrous World of Undertale
Standard, objective-based gameplay reminds the player of their shortcomings with unsympathetic “game over” screens before giving them the options to try again or quit. However, Undertale (2015)...
NACVGM 2020 – Interpreting the Music of (8-)Bit Brigade: Speed Runs and Speed Metal
8-bit Nintendo music, with its driving rhythms and readily identifiable thematic characters, lends itself nicely for adaptation into a metal musical milieu. And that borrowing, when paired with the...
This presentation discusses fan adaptations of music from The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask, arguing that they maintain the semiotic meaning of the games’ original music while changing some...
In the early 1980s, the Atari corporation collaborated with several major studios to create games based on popular franchises, resulting in both commercial successes (like Star Wars, 1983) and...
