Playing a video game is a very communicative activity. Set aside the ideas that communication only happens between humans and that communication only happens with words. We communicate with animals, machines and the built environment all the time, conveying our needs, aspirations, designs and emotions as we live in and shape our world. We do the same when we play video games, inhabiting a virtual space and forging our path through it. Understanding how we communicate with a video game, and how a video game communicates with us, helps us understand the fundamental elements of the video game text (like graphics, sound, narrative and music) and how they fit together. It also helps us to be able to shape and direct those communications, if we are in the business of constructing or composing for video games.

When studying a video game’s musical soundtrack, how do we account for the experience of hearing the music while playing the game? Let us pretend for a moment that a recording of Bastion (2011) is not from a game at all, but a clip from perhaps a cartoon series or an animated film.1 We would immediately be struck by the peculiar camera angle. At first, when ‘The Kid’ is lying in bed, what we see could be an establishing shot of some sort (see Figure 10.1). The high-angle long shot captures the isolated mote of land that The Kid finds himself on through a contrast in focus between the bright and colourful ruins and the blurry ground far beneath him. As soon as he gets up and starts running, however, the camera starts tracking him, maintaining the isometric angle (from 0:02 in the clip). While tracking shots of characters are not uncommon in cinema, this particular angle is unusual, as is the rigidity with which the camera follows The Kid. Whereas the rigidity is reminiscent of the iconic tricycle shots from The Shining (1980), the angle is more similar to crane shots in Westerns like High Noon (1952). It would seem easy to argue that the high angle and the camera distance render The Kid diminutive and vulnerable, but David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson warn against interpreting such aspects of cinematography in absolute terms.

The significance of video game music does not end when we turn off the console, shut down the PC or leave the arcade. It has an extended life far beyond the boundaries of the game itself. Perhaps the most obvious way that video game music is encountered outside the game is through recordings and performances of game music.

The poems of Catullus were rediscovered around 1300. Manuscript copies were made throughout the fourteenth century, but circulated little, though it appears that Petrarch had access to the text around the middle of the century, and it has sometimes been supposed that he owned a copy of it. Then, in the last quarter of the century, the Florentine humanist Coluccio Salutati had transcribed for him a new complete manuscript, descended at third hand from the original (V), and itself now known as R; and back to this copy most of the proliferating manuscripts of the fifteenth century can be traced. The rebirth of Catullus, therefore, coincides with the ‘Renaissance’ itself: a point to which the looming presence, in traditional accounts, of Petrarch near the beginning of both processes – the assimilation of Catullus and the larger ‘revival of antiquity’ – lends emphasis.

Chapter 7 of The Cambridge Companion to Sappho considers the generic identity of Sappho’s poetry, noting the elusiveness of this idea in many of her fragments and proposing a new approach to the question.

Contemporary audiovisual objects unify sound and moving image in our heads via the screen and speakers/headphones. The synchronization of these two channels remains one of the defining aspects of contemporary culture. Video games follow their own particular form of synchronization, where not only sound and image, but also player input form a close unity.1 This synchronization unifies the illusion of movement in time and space, and cements it to the crucial interactive dimension of gaming. In most cases, the game software’s ‘music engine’ assembles the whole, fastening sound to the rest of the game, allowing skilled players to synchronize themselves and become ‘in tune’ with the game’s merged audio and video. This constitutes the critical ‘triple lock’ of player input with audio and video that defines much gameplay in digital games.

Chapter 19 of The Cambridge Companion to Sappho takes the narrative into the culture of fifth and fourth-centry Greece, showing Sappho’s immense and varied significance, made e.g. into a typical figure of fun on the comic stage, but also Plato’s praeceptor amoris in the Phaedrus.

Nearly two decades into the twenty-first century, it has become a cliché to emphasize the economic power of the video games industry. The phrase ‘Video games are big business’, or some variation thereof, has been a staple of writing on the topic for decades, with early iterations lauding the commercial successes of arcades,1 later iterations citing it as motivation for the academic study of games2 and more recent versions citing the staggering billions in income they have generated, which has formed the basis of several transnational empires.3

Ludomusicologists generally agree that cinema and television represent the nearest siblings to video games, and so therefore adopt many methodologies familiar to film music scholarship in their work. For example, the influential concepts of diegetic and non-diegetic, which respectively describe sounds that exist either within or outside a narrative frame,1 feature prominently in many accounts of game audio, and represent one axis of Karen Collins’s model for the uses of game audio, the other being dynamic and non-dynamic, where dynamic audio can be further subcategorized as adaptive or interactive.2 Ludomusicologists generally also agree that the interactive nature of video games marks its primary distinction from other forms of multimedia, and so a fundamental point of entry into studying game audio is to examine how composers and sound designers create scores and soundtracks that can adapt to indeterminate player actions.

From the invocation to Aphrodite in fr. 1, the gods are a constant force in the world evoked in Sappho’s poetry. Chapter 15 of The Cambridge Companion to Sappho examines cultic and religious presences from a literary point of view.

The desire to situate Catullus and his poems at the tumultuous midpoint of first-century bc Rome is both hard to resist and hard to satisfy. The basic problem can be glimpsed through a confrontation of two scholarly positions represented in a collection of influential papers on Catullus.

Chapter 28 of The Cambridge Companion to Sappho examines the Anglophone receptions of Sappho’s poetry in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, examining figures such as Harriette Andreadis, Margaret Goldsmith, Lawrence Durrell, Peter Green, Denys Page, Erica Jong, Michael Field (Katharine Bradley/Edith Cooper), Richard Aldington, Ezra Pound, H.D., Mary Barnard,Jeannette Winterson, Judy Grahn, Anne Carson, Josephine Balmer, and Diane Rayor.

Catullus features heavily in Chapter 21 of The Cambridge Companion to Sappho, but he is by no means the only Roman literary figure to have found in Sappho an important predecessor. Ovid, Horace, and others give powerful evidence of her influence in Latin literature.

The influence of games, and their music, extends well beyond the boundaries of the game texts. Outside of Jesper Juul’s ‘magic circle’, the imagined space in which the rules of the game apply and play occurs, are worlds of meaning, consumption and community that reflect and serve to transmit our own lived experience with the medium.1 This chapter investigates game music removed from context of the video games that contain it, instead focusing on the role of game music in the context of wider culture. As part of that exploration, this chapter marks how the availability of communication and audio production tools from the year 2000 to the present affords fan communities surrounding game audio an ever-increasing potential for discussing, transmitting, remixing and otherwise exploring the music of the games we play. I say ‘we’ in the inclusive sense intentionally, as an insider of a number of fan groups engaging with game audio. Though this essay attempts to remain relatively detached throughout, I follow scholar Henry Jenkins in describing myself as a fan, and in pointing out that even when writing on subjects that ‘are not explicitly personal, [I] deal with forms of culture that have captured my imagination and sparked my passion’.2

Quot editores, tot Propertii, ‘as many Propertiuses as editors’: Phillimore’s quip aptly describes the current situation in the textual criticism of Propertius, where a conservative editor such as Fedeli and a radical one such as Heyworth present strongly different texts, and arguably different authors with distinct styles. The principal manuscripts of Catullus are far more corrupt, and yet his modern editors have not produced a similar variety of reconstructions. Apart from a few outliers, editions of Catullus from the same period tend to differ only in the treatment of individual textual problems, but the style of the text they present tends to be the same. The editorial vulgate of his poems has evolved markedly during the five centuries since they were first printed, but its development has been linear, although it can be broken down into several fairly distinct phases.