There was also no other scholarly writing about game sound available that I could find at the time. There wasn’t the fan community online in those days, no collected archives of material, and very little information. The web was still much in its infancy and getting information for the research was difficult. Looking back, when I first started research for Game Sound in 2002, it was a very different world in which to write the book. ![]() ![]() In a recent article, Collins reflected on the obstacles that she herself had to overcome in the early years of the twenty-first century when she began her research for Game Sound, considered to be the first academic monograph dedicated to the theory, history, and practice of music and sound design in video games: 4 Added to this were the difficulties that any researcher who wanted to work on digital products had to face in a radically different context from the one that we are in today. 3 Karen Collins, one of the pioneers of ludomusicology, remembers that in the inaugural academic articles dedicated to the study of video game music, published in the first years of the twenty-first century, it seemed necessary to always include a preamble to justify, with facts and figures, the relevance of the video game industry in terms of economic value, demographics, and cultural impact. When in 1999 Matthew Belinkie wrote his seminal historical overview on the music of video game products, he saw it necessary to begin by claiming the seriousness of an object of investigation that, until then, had been considered a simple complement to an ordinary juvenile entertainment product in fact, the very title of his article alluded to the value of video games as an object of study (“Video Game Music: Not Just Kid Stuff”). Trying to break into a new field of research, such as the study of video game music, meant meeting the challenge that the recognition and consideration of the academic community entailed. 2 The first works investigating video game music can also be framed within this context of searching for academic independence from the start, they declared it necessary to develop specific tools for the study of a new form of sonic expression, one that cannot be explained solely through the analysis of written musical notation or its phonographic reproduction. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, a new autonomous discipline began to be visible with its broader focus, ludology, or game studies, is gradually becoming more established, thanks to the appearance of publications, research groups, and academic events focused on analyzing specific problems in studying video games and other ludic products. ![]() Academic interest in digital games began in the last decades of the twentieth century, first within the fields of anthropology and cultural studies and much later as part of work on multimediality and hypertextuality. The creation and development of a research area that would permit the examination of video games in their specificity was the primary objective of the first theorists that dedicated themselves to the study of video game products. Music and Video Games: In Search of Academic Recognition To conclude, I briefly reflect on the values that the study of music in video games can contribute to the renewal and enrichment of the academic discourse of musicology by dismantling the barriers between the real and the virtual. I study the unique creation of meaning in video game music through the lens of ludomusical literacy in several specific examples, then analyze the importance of using new methodologies, sources, and conceptual tools-like immersion, performativity, and particular forms of diegesis-when properly assessing musical video game products. ![]() The second part is a critical summary, with personal contributions, of some approaches that have begun to consolidate as research areas in ludomusicology and that indicate the need to model new research paradigms for analyzing the music of digital ludic products. In the first, the origins of ludomusicology are contextualized within the framework of interest in video games as an object of study that emerged at the beginning of the present century, and the problems that it has faced from the start with being recognized and valued within professional and academic worlds. This article aims to describe the current situation and some of the main lines of work in video game music studies, a continuously developing field of investigation which, to date, has received limited consideration in Hispanophone academic circles.
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