From the Abstract: https://bit.ly/2Xq78Kv Jordan Sam (University of California, Los Angeles) Stand by Me: Sounds of Queer Utopias and Homosexual Panic in Final Fantasy XV When Final Fantasy XV was released in 2016, the JRPG highlighted several new features for the series including both open-world game play and an all-male central cast. The director Hajime Tabata promised the game’s characters would be more approachable by showing “what boys do when girls aren’t around.” Within the U.S. reception-news articles and tumblr pages documented a proliferation of gay fan art and theories, and Internet forums depicted an anxiety among gamers as to whether or not cast was gay. Locating my paper within this reception, I’ll argue the soundscape works with narrative and gameplay elements to reinforce the Sedgwickian notion of ’homosociality’ and the consequent ‘homosexual panic’. The theme song, a cover of “Stand by Me” by Florence and the Machine, through cultural coding evokes a queer sentimentality, while the non-diegetic music depict tropes of cowboy independence. These elements combine with gameplay to emphasize the player’s affordances and freedom to explore homosocial relations within the open-world environment. But a disjunction, a shift towards linear gameplay in the second half, punctuates both the fracturing of the party and the emergence of the feminine influence. Combining the representation with the structural illustrates notions of queer temporality and queer space (Bonnie Ruberg). And recreates what literary critic Leslie Fiedler viewed, as the freedom and openness represented by male homosocial/homoerotic bonding, and the threat of the domestic female-dominated society. In turn, making the game a site for sexism, homosociality, and queer fan reclamation within the gaming community.

Have you ever wanted to see unannounced games that were shelved during development, or early prototype incarnations of some of your favorite released games? This is the panel for you! Come and watch Supergiant’s Amir Rao, Double Fine’s Brad Muir, Twisted Pixel’s Dan Teasdale and PopCap’s Sylvain Dubrofsky show off some prototypes and cancelled games that you never had a chance to play. Special thanks to Michael Richardson for recording this back in the day.

Really, it's all downhill from here. Seven and Brian Hough, hosts of the ill-humored World of Warcraft podcast, Raid Warning, step out from behind their avatars for their first ever live broadcast show. Expect the latest in WoW community news, prizes, and Cataclysm information while the hosts and their guests attempt to do what their fans have requested: be funny live. Special thanks to Blubrry for preserving this podcast

From the Abstract: https://bit.ly/2Xq78Kv Karen Cook (University of Hartford) Jun Chikuma’s Soundtrack for Faxanadu (1987) Faxanadu is an action-adventure role-playing game released by Hudson Soft in 1987. It was well received, ranking #6 in Nintendo Power’s top 30 games, but was soon forgotten (except by its die-hard fans) until its port to the Wii virtual console in 2010. Its soundtrack was composed by Jun Chikuma, whose work for the Bomberman series often appears in “hidden video game music gems” lists but, like Faxanadu itself, has also been overlooked. In this presentation, I discuss how Chikuma’s soundtrack both aligns with and pivots away from then-burgeoning sonic expectations for action RPGs, and video games writ large. (Gibbons & Reale 2019) Like other contemporary composers, she utilizes familiar fantasy and medievalist musical tropes. (Cook 2019) But she makes heavier use of mode mixture and chromatic melodies, and she avoids stasis in looped themes by layering new melodic or contrapuntal material. More usual are her treatments of triangle channel, which occasionally has the melody, and the noise channel, which contains a surprising variety of rhythmic patterns and fills. Whereas an RPG town theme is often simple, calm, pastoral, and melodic, Chikuma’s is syncopated, angular, and energetic. (Gibbons 2017) Lastly, her final boss theme inverts musical material heard earlier in the game, shaping the soundtrack into a giant arch form. Her soundtrack is thus not only a fascinating case study in its own right, but also an alternative approach to scoring video games at a time when recognizable game music tropes were beginning to coalesce. (Plank 2019)