Playing the Sound of Silence: Immersion, Loneliness, and Analysis of Multimodal Intertextuality in 21st Century Video Game Music

This thesis seeks to investigate how music helps the player be immersed in video games. I do this through a multimodal and intertextual analysis, where I consider gameplay, visuals, sound design and music. The goal is to uncover what connotations and associations I bring in to the experience that influences the creating of meaning in the music. I use a methodology built on the emerging musicological sub-discipline ludomusicology, popular musicology and game studies, which give me a holistic approach for the hermeneutics of the video game music. I have used the lens of loneliness to give myself a framework to work within. For this thesis I have separated loneliness into three different categories: solitude, loneliness and isolation. I do this to better explore different facets of the experience of being alone in a video game, and how the music affects that experience specifically. This main part of this thesis is split into three chapters related to discussion around my interpretations. I examine The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild (2017), No Man’s Sky (2016) and Bloodborne (2015)