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  • Chapter 42 - The Wagnerian Erotics of Video Game Music

  • from VI - Reception
  • Edited by David Trippett, University of Cambridge
  • Book:
    Wagner in Context
    Published online:
    14 March 2024
    Print publication:
    14 March 2024, pp 421-431

  • Summary

    This chapter argues that Wagner’s Schopenhauerian understanding of music reveals important aspects of video game music, particularly its erotic dimensions. Armed with, on the one hand, a Wagnerian-Schopenhauerian understanding of music, erotics, and metaphysics, and on the other Kulezic-Wilson’s erotics of cinematic listening, the chapter proposes a Wagnerian erotics of game music on three counts. First, music is an element of the video game medium that dissolves hard boundaries of a single ‘self’ of the player’s identity and takes players ‘out of themselves’. Secondly, games give musical voice to the will, and chart our interaction with it. Finally, games often use musical structures that arrest any broader sense of development, creating a temporal suspension and denial of the will that Wagner sought to reflect in his musical fabric. This chapter concludes with a brief case study that identifies these three elements – identity, the will, and temporality – in The Dig (1995).