Anachronic Sonorities of Technoculture in Digital Games

Abstract

The preliminary effort of this article consists in questioning some issues with the currently developed researches on the sound of digital games, in order to retrieve an approach capable of articulating communication, memory and culture, as a way to situate these extensively disseminated contemporary artefacts in a wider technocultural frame of reference. In order to achieve this goal, we propose a partial revision of prominent works dealing with the sonorities of digital games, contrasting them through the theoretical-methodological contributions of Walter Benjamin’s philosophy of the history and Media Archaeology. With this approach, which has important ethical-political consequences for the research in progress, we are able to reformulate questions being asked about the sounds of digital games, taking them instead as compelling objects for inquiries regarding our contemporary technoculture and a memory of media that surpasses them.