Video Games Alive

Abstract

Abstract Stefan Greenfield-Casas reviews the growing phenomenon of live concerts of video game music, both offering a typology of these concerts as well as asking if the experience of attending such concerts has an aesthetic effect on the concertgoer’s personal memory of their experience of the game they have played. Greenfield-Casas’s analysis is rooted in the game fans’ experiences, and he constructs a theory of “ludic liveness” to argue that attendance at such concerts provokes experiences of replaying the games—what he calls “replayful listening.” Ultimately, he argues that video game music, remediated through live concerts by way of concert arrangements, becomes ontologically validated in the real world through this process.