The Ludomusicology Research Group: Reflections on Our First Decade

The 2012 RMA Study Day was envisaged as a one-off event to jump-start these lofty goals by providing an opportunity to share our ideas and make lasting connections with like-minded researchers. The day was well attended, and the high-quality contributions alongside keynote addresses from Isabella van Elferen and Anahid Kassabian inspired future events at Liverpool and then Chichester, and it quickly became evident that there was demand for an annual event. The duration of the conference increased to three days, and the number of attendees from all corners of the globe has grown significantly over the years, and especially as we were forced to move the conference to an online-only format for 2020 and 2021.

From the very start, at the 2012 event we were able to reach out to industry professionals like Jonathan Williams and Rich Aitken at Nimrod Productions. We have subsequently benefited from an amazing array of keynote speakers and dedicated practitioner sessions with a diverse range of composers and audio professionals. The invited keynote speakers are listed alphabetically here (Table 1), and while the magic and impact of these sessions is somewhat lost in the translation to this format, the names trigger many standout memories and formative experiences for me. Indeed, all four of us in the Ludo group have felt so deeply honored and privileged to have benefitted from exposure to the work and guidance of all these people, not to mention the many other significant contributions to the field that have been shared at a Ludo conference.

These memories, alongside numerous other speakers, sessions, and especially social events—like a Guitar Hero competition at Ludo2013, the evening concert at the Michael Tippett Centre during Ludo2017, Ludo2018’s Pac-Man and pizza evening, or our now-infamous homemade pub quizzes—have coalesced into the broader fabric of this vibrant academic community. Diversity and inclusion are easy buzzwords to reference, and I’m acutely aware of both my own privileges and the responsibilities that come with my current roles. I also maintain that my own successes have come in no small part from being surrounded by great people—Melanie, Michiel, and Tim foremost among them—but more than this: it has been a fundamental part of my own personal development to listen and learn from the diverse voices at the Ludo conferences. On a personal note, I really want to take this opportunity to thank everybody who has submitted an abstract, delivered a paper, asked a question, called out false or problematic assumptions, or simply conversed with me in the coffee break: you really have challenged me as an individual to listen more, to think more, and, in short, to be both a better academic and person.

I can report that over the years the Ludo group has witnessed an increasing diversity of materials and speakers. Increasingly, valuable contributions are made from people who do not necessarily identify academia as their day job. There is always more still to do. We believe that as issues of identity, race, gender, disability, and sexuality are more regularly the topic of conversation in the papers themselves, there is a powerful amplification of consciousness and understanding across the community. We are proud to receive consistent feedback that we’re a supportive, welcoming community, and as we continue to ask more of each other academically and hold each other to higher expectations, our goal at Ludo is to ensure this is achieved in a supportive way. That’s why both words of the phrase academic community are important.

By building the website and social media channels to promote the conference, over the years we have developed the apparatus to help connect people and to share ideas. We have published over twenty guest contributions on the Ludo blog—which has predominantly showcased guest speakers rather than our own research—including conference reviews, analytical pieces on games, interviews, and most recently a series of articles on the state of research in various countries and regions around the world. Michiel has for many years taken the lead in managing an ever-growing bibliography, which is now housed on the SSSMG website (https://www.sssmg.org/wp/bibliography/) and has grown to almost 600 entries.

Our edited volume, Ludomusicology: Approaches to Video Game Music (2016, Equinox),⁴ originated primarily from papers given at our inaugural conference and reflects the variety of approaches to the study of game music. Through the various ways our contributors pioneered conceptualizing and analyzing game music, we attempted to draw out critical issues including the distinction between gameplay and music play, how notions of diegesis are complicated by video game interactivity, the importance of cinema aesthetics in game music, the technicalities of game music production, and the relationships between game music and art music traditions. Again, the aim was always to strive for accessibility while remaining theoretically substantial.

More recently, we launched a book series with Intellect Academic Publishing: Studies in Game Sound and Music.⁵ The first entry in the series is penned by our very own Tim Summers and offers a comprehensive and in-depth companion to the music and sound of a single video game, The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time.⁶ We have an exciting pipeline of more academic peer-reviewed monographs and edited collections for the series. As always, we’re striving to engage game audio practitioners and researchers from a range of disciplines, including anthropology, computer science, media studies, psychology, sociology, and sound studies, as well as musicology.

The conferences also provided the source for the double special issue on video game music and sound that we guest edited for The Soundtrack (vol. 8, no. 1–2) in 2015. This editing experience was invaluable. As early as Ludo2014, we convened a special session to gain input from a wide range of scholars on the question “What Would a Game Music/Sound Journal Look Like?” That discussion with colleagues from the North American Conference on Video Game Music (NACVGM, https://vgmconference.weebly.com/), and many others, led to the establishment of the Society for the Study of Sound and Music in Games (SSSMG, http://www.sssmg.org/). The Society was in no small part formed with the objective of launching this journal, the Journal of Sound and Music in Games (JSMG), which published its first volume in 2020 with the University of California Press.

Across all these areas of activity, it has been really pleasing to see a coherent corpus of knowledge developing, but we’re also very aware of issues around canonicity of authors, subjects, and games. While to some extent these seem like common growing pains of any field of research, it’s been critical to the Ludo group that we don’t establish exclusionary systems of study and academic culture. Of course, SSSMG too has an increasingly important role to play to ensure accessibility, diversity, and inclusion, and we are working hard—and listening carefully to the community—on what a sustainable, accessible, and inclusive future might look like. In particular, we aspire to better support students, early-career researchers, and independent scholars.

From the perspective of the Ludomusicology Research Group, it’s been very exciting to be part of the rapid growth and interest in game music. Through the conferences and our publishing activities, we have seen a gradual shift from more general topics on video game music writ large—akin to the scope of our own doctoral work—to more specific topics like chiptune, medievalism, and specific sociocultural issues. As we provide themes in our calls for papers each year (which are intended as prompts and jumping-off points to attract diverse and interesting submissions) and as we subsequently attempt to collate the conference programs into coherent sessions, perhaps we can even start talking about the emergence of subfields within the broader discipline. This may be an interesting marker for the maturity of video game music studies.

We are on a continuing mission for further interdisciplinarity and are making inroads to allied subjects and methods. In recent years we have enjoyed increasing engagement with scholars in other parts of the world, especially with creators and game traditions beyond Europe, Japan, and the US. We try to remain vigilant against unhelpful wall-building and gatekeeping, which also means maintaining awareness of our own responsibilities as curators of research. And we continue to welcome feedback (positive and recommendations for improvements) from across this remarkable academic community. As Tim so eloquently concluded in a recent Ludo team meeting, we will, “as with the games we study, keep thinking, listening, and playing.”