Sounds of Extraction and Collection and Listening to the Pixelated Resources of Stardew Valley and Animal Crossing
First author: GallowayYear: 2024
Abstract
I’m catching bugs and digging up fossils in Animal Crossing and donating them to Blathers at the Natural History Museum on my recently colonized island and extracting rocks and clearing grass for my expansive farm outside Pelican Town in Stardew Valley. Each of these entertaining causal games uses animation, simulation, sound, and music to engage with the actual world issues of resource and cultural extraction, collection, and curation. In this chapter I ask: How is actual world resource and cultural extraction animated, scored, and represented through sound effects and design in games? The “sounds of extraction” and “extractive music” refer to music where compositional and listening practices ambiguously serve as an ecological remedy while also inflicting environmental harm. Grounded in ethnographic approaches to game audio, I sketch out how the sounds of resource use, regeneration, and extraction are encoded in sound and music in the animation of interactive gameplay moments and in cutscenes. These are games where animated representations of actual world environmental issues and human-natural resource relations/power dynamics are played out in an interactive audiovisual environment.Details
Language: EnglishCountry of affiliation: United States
Published in: Music and Sonic Environments in Video Games: Listening to and Performing Ludic Soundscapes
Publication type: Book chapter
Source: https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003275305
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