| dc.description.abstract | Film noir is often touted as one of the most amorphous and obscure genres of film by film scholars and music scholars alike, partially due to the subgenres of film accepted as film noir and partially due to the retroactive nature of the genre’s canon formation. Nevertheless, the detective narrative is a pervasive one in film noir, with its use of jazz both as a soundtrack and as diegetic music being one the hallmarks audiences commonly associate with these films. With such a large film selection spanning many subcategories to deal with, discussing how the detective narrative manifests in video games can equally as obscure. This paper analyzes core narrative tropes largely associated with the classic era of film noir from roughly 1941 to 1958 and addresses how these tropes are adapted and transformed by jazz in the detective adventure video game. I analyze key functions of jazz in portraying the soundscape and gameplay indicators—that give the player information—associated with adventure games. To do so, I analyze musicological research and film research on film noir alongside studies on video game sound. In the first section on narrative functions, I address two main tropes associated with film noir and their adaptations to detective adventure games: 1) jazz as/in the city, and 2) jazz and the femme fatale. In the second section on ludic functions, I primarily focus on the concepts of looping, layering, and what I term “plot point chords” to demonstrate how jazz music specifically is mapped to the adventure game format. I also address various shortcomings associated with hardware limitations of early gameplay devices to illustrate a possible origin of the stylistic choices video games use jazz to portray the detective adventure. My findings are primarily achieved through playing four case studies and watching online playthroughs of them. My goal is not to dictate all the commonalities in noir-inspired detective adventure games, but to instead make observations that hopefully lead to a more complete picture of the detective narrative in video games in the future. Doing so will help contribute to figuring out more about how video games use music to achieve goals and how the original implications of film noir are now mapped onto a society with completely different social commentary and context. | |
