![]() Footnote 1 This article aims to begin filling these gaps and drawing some clear connections between class, music, and video games, by looking at Revolution Software’s 1994 Beneath a Steel Sky ( 1994).īeneath a Steel Sky is a cyberpunk point-and-click adventure game developed by the UK Company Revolution Software in 1994. Moreover, the relationship between video game music and socio-cultural aspects of video game studies is also rarely examined beyond issues of race, ethnicity, and cultural appropriation, with some notable exceptions. These elements of subversion can, of course, be found throughout video games, both as emergent gameplay, where players take it upon themselves to critique society by taking advantage of game affordances, but also as embedded narrative and procedural elements.ĭiscussions of social classes and power relations are often implied within these broader conversations, but rarely find themselves at the centre of them. ![]() An example of this is the analysis of Grant Theft Auto: Vice City (2002) offered by Dyer-Whiteford and de Peuter, in which they note that “Vice City’s lead, Tommy Vercetti, is neoliberal theory incarnate: if the most famous line of the eighties film Wall Street is Gordon Gekko’s ‘greed is good,’ then the equivalent for Vice City’s eighties parody is Tommy Vercetti’s statement ‘I work for money.’” (Dyer-Whiteford and de Peuter 2009) Vice City, however, with its satirical tone, acts as both an agent of the hegemony, and its subverter. While most of these critiques have focused specifically on how these relations are reproduced in MMORPGs, where practices like gold farming quite explicitly mirrored real-life power relations, some have also focused on single-player games, particularly their neoliberal affinities. Virtual economies and virtual worlds have been seen to reproduce both real world economic systems and real-world ideologies (Castronova 2005 Rettberg 2008) and subsequently reproducing social strata and power relations. The representation of class, however, remains underexplored, even amongst critiques of video games as agents of capitalism. 2016), and, to a lesser degree, LGBTQ issues (Consalvo 2003 Ruberg and Shaw 2017), and race (Burgess et al. Issues of representation in video games have been important to video game studies for over two decades, largely focussing on gender (Cassell and Jenkins 1998 Dietz 1998 Kafai et al. Here, music plays an important role in terms of environmental storytelling, both as semiotic shorthand, and as a reflection of the affordances available to the inhabitants of the city. This article draws connections between these two underexplored areas and analyses the musical characterisation of class in the 1994 cyberpunk adventure game, which takes places largely in a literally stratified metropolis where the three levels of the city act as representations of the three social classes. Furthermore, the relationship between video game music and socio-cultural aspects of video game studies is also rarely examined beyond issues of race, ethnicity, and cultural appropriation. While other issues of representation have been studied extensively within game studies (gender representation in particular), the representation of class remains an underexplored area. The authors also took care of supporting HDR technology and 4K resolution.This article proposes Revolution Software’s Beneath a Steel Sky (1994) as a starting point for the analysis of the relationship between music and social class in video games. ![]() The graphics are kept in a comic book style, designed by Dave Gibbons. Technical issuesīeyond a Steel Sky departs from the static, two-dimensional boards known from old-school adventures in favor of fully three-dimensional locations where we can freely look around. Advanced NPCs' artificial intelligence allows them to react to the hero's actions, which makes it possible to find unexpected solutions to the game's challenges. Instead of a classic point-n-click adventure, we get an open world that changes with every action of the player. The gameplay in Beyond a Steel Sky is far different from that of Beneath a Steel Sky. Therefore, the authors tried to present this reality in an ambiguous way, showing both good and bad sides of full surveillance. The developers' ambition was to create a modern version of 1984 in the form of an adventure game. Once again, we play as Robert Foster, who after the events from Beneath a Steel Sky must find himself in a world supervised by a vigilant artificial intelligence. The plotīeyond a Steel Sky continues threads of previous production. The title was created by the creators of the original, led by Charls Cecil from Revolution Software studio and cartoonist Dave Gibbons. Beyond a Steel Sky is a full-fledged sequel to the classic 1994 adventure Beneath a Steel Sky.
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