Also, pre-existing music from a specific time period is recontextualized in the futuristic post-apocalypse, establishing a temporal Other through temporal displacement. In these games, the eclectic musical approach aims to evoke an ambiguity and originality achieved through digital production using synthetic and instrumental sounds found in sound library software. In this work, I analyze the musical approaches in three post-apocalyptic videogames, Borderlands, Bastion, and Fallout 3. Videogames allow players to explore this new identity as an expressly interactive and immersive medium, while eclectic digital music embodies and communicates this identity within the medium in ways that it cannot in others. Familiar signs are mixed with the unfamiliar to create something new, a unique post-apocalyptic Other as the decontextualization, recontextualization, and resignification of sound breed new possibilities for identity. The post-apocalypse is a narrative context that focuses on the destruction and rebirth of civilization, society, and culture. Here, music plays an important role in terms of environmental storytelling, both as semiotic shorthand, and as a reflection of the affordances available to the inhabitants of the city. This article draws connections between these two underexplored areas and analyses the musical characterisation of class in the 1994 cyberpunk adventure game, which takes places largely in a literally stratified metropolis where the three levels of the city act as representations of the three social classes.

Furthermore, the relationship between video game music and socio-cultural aspects of video game studies is also rarely examined beyond issues of race, ethnicity, and cultural appropriation. While issues of representation have been studied extensively within game studies (gender representation in particular), the representation of class remains an underexplored area. This article proposes Revolution Software's Beneath a Steel Sky (1994) as a starting point for the analysis of the relationship between music and social class in video games.

Download beyond steel sky review