“Life is Strange brought me here”: uma análise sobre o uso dos jogos da série Life is Strange como prescritores musicais

Abstract

Understanding the unclear paths between recording a phonogram and listening to the audience has been an issue that has troubled the music industry since its inception. With the emergence of video games as cultural products, companies in the music sector are getting closer to game developers in an association of their products. This thesis starts from some fundamental questions: Does video games affect our musical tastes? Can we classify them as musical prescribers? If the answers are yes, how do they prescribe the songs? And how does this affect our musical listening? In a context in which the music industry is reorganized after the creative destruction of the late 1990s/early 2000s, such responses are important to think about the strategies that will be taken by companies operating in the music business. To try to answer these questions, we tried to trace the role that music came to occupy throughout the history of video games and visited some theoretical landmarks to observe how the very idea of taste, especially music taste, was treated over the centuries by philosophy, sociology and neuroscience. When considering the changes in musical taste as a result of a successful musical prescription, the transformations proposed by each of these areas will be important for us to discuss this concept, reviewing the traditional agents of musical dissemination and how they acted (and still act today) in building the taste of each listener. Thus, we chose to carry out an autoethnography of the experience of playing the Life is Strange series, which was released between 2015 and 2021 by the French studio Dontnod and distributed by the Japanese publisher Square Enix. By privileging the playing and the perception of how the musics affected the researcher himself instead of the aspects of production and reception studies, the analysis of the subjective elements that act on the issue was prioritized. Being aware of the criticisms that are often directed to this methodology, we try to escape from an essentialist analysis, by presenting a possibility of listening among many others, without pretending to cover all the changes that have arisen in the area of research in music, video games or taste musical. Finally, our objective is to put more elements into a discussion that goes through the commercial function of video game soundtracks, the formation of musical taste for them and the subjective perception of this process.