Sounding Out! Podcast #49: Sound and Sexuality in Video Games

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This week’s podcast questions how identity is coded into the battle cries shouted by characters in video games. By exploring the tools that sound studies provides to understand the various dynamics of identity, this podcast aims to provoke a conversation about how identity is encoded within the design of games. The all too invisible intersection between sound, identity, and code reveals the ways that sound can help explain the interior logic of the games and other digital systems. Here, Milena Droumeva and Aaron Trammell discuss how femininity and sexuality have been coded within game sounds and consider the degree to which these repetitive and objectifying tropes can be resisted by players and designers alike.

Milena Droumeva is an Assistant Professor of Communication at Simon Fraser University specializing in mobile technologies, sound studies and multimodal ethnography, with a long-standing interest in game cultures. She has worked extensively in educational research on game-based learning, as well as in interaction design for responsive environments. Milena is a sound studies scholar, a multimodal ethnographer, and a soundwalking enthusiast, published widely in the areas of acoustic ecology, media and game studies, design and technology. You can find her musings on sound and other material goodies at http://natuaural.com.

Aaron Trammell is a Provost Postdoctoral Scholar for Faculty Diversity in Informatics and Digital Knowledge at the Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism at the University of Southern California. He earned his doctorate from the Rutgers University School of Communication and Information in 2015. Aaron’s research is focused on revealing historical connections between games, play, and the United States military-industrial complex. He is interested in how military ideologies become integrated into game design and how these perspectives are negotiated within the imaginations of players. He is the Co-Editor-in-Chief of the journal Analog Game Studies and the Multimedia Editor of Sounding Out!

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Featured image borrowed from Geralt @Pixabay CC BY.

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REWIND! . . .If you liked this post, you may also dig:

Sounding Out! Podcast #29: Game Audio Notes I: Growing Sounds for Sim Cell – Leonard J. Paul

Sounding Out! Podcast #45: Immersion and Synesthesia in Role-Playing Games — Nick Mizer

Video Gaming and the Sonic Feedback of Surveillance – Aaron Trammell