Open Collections

Gallagher, Marina Janette

University of British Columbia

The worlds of role-playing video games (RPGs) are comprised of a wide variety of locations, from verdant forests to eerie ruins, and music plays a critical role in determining how players feel about (and in) their surroundings. Ludomusicologists have started to investigate how music influences players’ perceptions of landscapes in video games, but the broader study of how particular types of areas and their music affect players remains relatively unexplored. This dissertation examines pastoral and anti-pastoral landscapes and music in Final Fantasy X, XII, XIII, and XV. Through the analysis of selected areas from the four games and a discussion of the results of an empirical research study, it argues that pastoral and anti-pastoral landscapes employ distinct sets of musical and visual features that elicit emotional responses of relaxation and apprehension, respectively. This study traces the visual characteristics of pastoral forests and fields back to ancient poetry, specifically Theocritus’s Idylls and Virgil’s Eclogues, and contends that these areas foster feelings of peacefulness in players owing to their participation in this broader pastoral tradition. Pastoral music in the four Final Fantasy games similarly puts players at ease by drawing upon elements of the pastoral topic in Western art and film music. Anti-pastoral landscapes, on the other hand, are dark, foreboding locations such as caves, ruins, and tombs that resonate with depictions of the Underworld in Ancient epic as well as the disruptive influence of the City in Virgil’s Eclogues. The visual and musical settings of these areas rely upon horror film and video game conventions to unsettle players. There is also a subset of locations in Final Fantasy X, XII, XIII, and XV that do not belong exclusively to either category. These locations have been designated as ambiguous landscapes. They elicit a more complex emotional response from players by employing visual and musical features that conflict with one another or by incorporating ambiguous elements that blur the distinction between pastoral and anti-pastoral.

Text

2023-10-05

Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International

http://hdl.handle.net/2429/86078

Music - Musicology

University of British Columbia

UBCV

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/