Playing with Music History

This chapter traces how classical music works can create a sense of time and place in video games. Beginning with a case study of how music establishes the eighteenth-century setting of Assassin’s Creed III , it then explores both how games build on frameworks of musical signification established in early cinema. It identifies games, such as Punch-Out!! , which use classical works to indicate a specific nation, as well as those that do the same for chronological setting, such as Versailles 1685 . The chapter culminates in a study of games in which the music is misleading, suggesting the “wrong” time or place.

Art · Art history · Creed · Literature · Musical · Visual arts · Digital Games and Media · Digital Humanities and Scholarship · Folklore, Mythology, and Literature Studies · Philosophy