Unlimited Replays: Video Games and Classical Music by William Gibbons

Abstract

Reviewed by: Unlimited Replays: Video Games and Classical Music by William Gibbons Julianne Grasso Unlimited Replays: Video Games and Classical Music. By William Gibbons. (Oxford Music/Media Series.) New York: Oxford University Press, 2018. [xii, 196 p. ISBN 9780190265250 (hardcover), $99; ISBN 9780190265267 (paperback), $29.95; ISBN 9780190265304 (Oxford Scholarship Online).] Figures, tables, bibliography, index. If you assume that video games are no place for the likes of Ludwig van Beethoven or Johann Sebastian Bach, you'd be right—and wrong. In Unlimited Replays: Video Games and Classical Music, William Gibbons explores how art and entertainment collide, blurring boundaries that otherwise seem clear. We learn not only that classical music can be found in many video games but also that the industry of classical music has increasingly looked to games and "gamification" to attract new audiences. And those are just two of many intersections of video games and classical music in this richly multifaceted volume. Gibbons, a musicologist, has written previously on French opera and historicity in Building the Operatic Museum: Eighteenth-Century Opera in Fin-de-Siècle Paris (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2013). In several ways, Unlimited Replays is a similar book about music and historicity, but it is situated in the very time and place it aims to capture. Gibbons is already well published on the topic of video-game music (the study of which is often referred to as ludomusicology). Prior to Unlimited Replays, he coedited a volume of essays with K. J. Donnelly and Neil Lerner (Music in Video Games: Studying Play [New York: Routledge, 2014]). Forthcoming is another collection coedited with Steven Reale (Music in the Role-Playing Game: Heroes & Harmonies [New York: Routledge, 2019]). As a relatively young area in a quickly evolving industry, the study of music in video games nonetheless exists primarily in unpublished work. Gibbons draws on scholarly and journalistic articles but also frequently cites unpublished conference papers. Drawing on the most recent research is a boon to the book, to be sure, but it is also an indicator of Gibbons's scholarly inclusivity; rarely do bibliographies in musicology include work by graduate students, journalists, and bloggers alongside publications from established academic presses. In eleven brief but brimming chapters, Gibbons weaves a variety of cases, each clearly and concisely outlined to focus on how classical music (or simply the notion of classical music) is incorporated and interpreted in video games and beyond. Gibbons frequently draws on such intersections in other media— particularly film—to establish a precedent [End Page 306] for this practice, giving insightful historical context. At stake are questions about the highbrow and lowbrow dichotomy straddled by classical music in video games, the potential for games as art, and the nature of art in multimedia writ large. Chapter 1 establishes the assumed incompatibilities between video games and classical music, which are as much sociocultural as they are formal or technical. Classical music is commonly understood as a civilized art, while video games are slick entertainment for mass consumption. Nonetheless, Gibbons points out that these sharp definitions are inherently fluid, the boundaries made unclear by categories like "popular" classical music and the relatively new "artgame" genre of serious games (p. 16). With this rather shaky conceptual ground established, Gibbons guides the reader adeptly through cases that further problematize the high/low cultural strata. Chapter 2 considers the meanings game designers might draw from classical music. Here, Gibbons focuses on the use of classical music in games to signify real time/place associations. Punch Out!! (1987), for instance, draws on a notion of "Germanness" from Richard Wagner's music to introduce a German character. Of course, we're still on shaky ground—Gibbons notes that game designers often rely on a rather loose understanding of music history that is not particularly accurate or precise. (Hearing Bach to signify the medieval, for instance, might actually work well for a player accustomed to such anachronisms in other media.) Chapter 3 is a closer study of BioShock Infinite (2013), notable for its rather complex intertextuality between music and the game's metaphysical narrative. Gibbons discusses how classical music— and "classic" popular music—can be read as subtle commentary on the timetraveling...