4 - Case Study: Film Music vs. Video-Game Music: The Case of Silent Hill

Summary

The central question of this chapter can be stated simply: how do we as critics and students of media understand the relationship between sound and image as it occurs in the video-game environment? A well-established body of literature exists analysing the role film music plays in cinematic storytelling, but the problem of game music – as well as, for that matter, the ontology of the game image itself – presents a surprising number of challenges for the would-be analyst. At first glance, the crucial problem seems to centre on the fact that a game is played rather than viewed, and the difference that interactivity makes in the player's relationship to the work in question would seem to provide a logical starting point for analysis. The problem, however, is that interactivity as such is notoriously difficult to define, and drawing conclusions about the expressive content of a work based on this approach rapidly advances towards the tautological. In cinema, the equivalent approach might hold that studying film music must begin with understanding the audience as opposed to situating music within the semiotic apparatus of the film itself, and it is not clear which approach is the most productive. In any case, applying either an audience-oriented or film-oriented approach requires certain ontological assumptions about the relationship between the constituent parts of the media event. Specifically, creating predictive or general rules about how music in film can express meaning or emotion requires a stable configuration of the components being analysed, and in turning the same analysis to video games where this configuration is constantly changing, it becomes clear that new strategies must be adopted.