Press C→ to Play the Ocarina: Rhetoric and Game Music

The purpose of this chapter is to investigate the intersection where digital media studies meet rhetoric and rhetoric is re-introduced to musicology. In the recent academic excitement surrounding game studies, the music of games has been overshadowed. The author would like to call attention to the significance of game music and to consider a rhetorical method to approaching it that calls upon a rekindling of the history of coupling rhetoric with music. The author builds on this history by suggesting the foundation of a rhetorical framework for understanding the argumentative power of video game songs. He then moves to offer an approach for evaluating the ethos of game music that consists of assessing worlds and how they are carried through, and by, music. While 17th century baroque composers thought music to be fundamentally an issue of affections-and especially played off of emotional binaries such as joy/sadness as a rhetorical approach-the author hope to here revive this lost art of applying rhetoric to music through broadening the discussion beyond the matter of human emotion. This rhetorical approach allows the individual a framework with which to evaluate the ethos of game music as it now appears through numerous mobile operating systems, online environments, and as remediated forms manifesting in/as cultural artifacts. As games become ubiquitous, so do their songs