Queering Cloud: Music, Gender and Sexuality in Video Games

Abstract

Listeners use music to construct, organize and shape their gender and sexual identities. This chapter proposes that music can act as a binding agent between player and game, and may encompass the performance of gender and sexuality in games. Games, and game music, allow us to play with the feeling of performing genders and sexualities beyond our everyday lives. The mimetic and motoric properties of music, linking players with avatars, lets us “feel along” with genders and sexualities in games.In Robert Yang’s game Stick Shift (collected as part of Radiator 2), music is used to present and structure a queer sexual experience for players, inviting them to share in the erotic trajectory. In Final Fantasy VII: Remake, players musically adopt and perform different orientations related to gender and sexuality: the hero Cloud’s heterosexual experience is presented visually and musically, so players can listen and feel along with the music as an analogue for his sensations. Later, a sequence uses rhythm-game mechanics and mimetic motor imagery of the music to help us feel along with an intimate queer encounter. Overall, the chapter argues that games can use music (1) as an analogue for sexual encounters, (2) to invoke musical tropes and traditions to explore desire, (3) for gestures that provide a sense of performance and embodiment, (4) as an opportunity to resist essentialist notions of sexuality, and (5) to open out gender depiction beyond heteronormative assumptions