Music In The Role Playing Game

Music in the Role-Playing Game: Heroes & Harmonies offers the first scholarly approach focusing on music in the broad class of video games known as role-playing games, or RPGs. Known for their narrative sophistication and long playtimes, RPGs have long been celebrated by players for the quality of their cinematic musical scores, which have taken on a life of their own, drawing large audiences to live orchestral performances. The chapters in this volume address the role of music in popular RPGs such as Final Fantasy and World of Warcraft, delving into how music interacts with the gaming environment to shape players’ perceptions and engagement. The contributors apply a range of methodologies to the study of music in this genre, exploring topics such as genre conventions around music, differences between music in Japanese and Western role-playing games, cultural representation, nostalgia, and how music can shape deeply personal game experiences. Music in the Role-Playing Game expands the growing field of studies of music in video games, detailing the considerable role that music plays in this modern storytelling medium, and breaking new ground in considering the role of genre. Combining deep analysis with accessible personal accounts of authors’ experiences as players, it will be of interest to students and scholars of music, gaming, and media studies.

This study takes an analytical approach to the world of role-playing games, providing a theoretical framework for understanding their psychological and sociological functions. Sometimes dismissed as escapist and potentially dangerous, role-playing actually encourages creativity, self-awareness, group cohesion and "out-of-the-box" thinking. The book also offers a detailed participant-observer ethnography on role-playing games, featuring insightful interviews with 19 participants of table-top, live action and virtual games.

MYFAROG (Mythic Fantasy Role-playing Game) (3rd edition) is a fantasy role-playing game, with a setting based on European mythology, religion and fairy tales. The rules are very modular, meaning you can play the game rules light or rules heavy, as you please. The rules are designed to make sense, and to give the players the ability to immerse themselves in Thulê; a highly credible fantasy world similar to Middle-earth and the European Classical Antiquity (some places touching into the Viking Age or the Bronze Age), but yet different. In Thulê, sorcery and the ancient deities are real, and the world is inhabited by not only humans, but also elves, nymphs, dwarves, orcs, gnomes, halflings, ettins and trolls, as well as other creatures. This art-minimalistic 221 page core rule-book (with black-and-white interior) is an all-in-one rule-book, so it contains all the information you need to play the game (and to make your own adventures and campaigns) indefinitely. A digital high resolution map of Thulê can be found here: www.myfarog.org. Because the setting is based on real world locations (Lofoten and Vesteralen in Northern Norway) you can also use online map services, to get highly detailed and realistic maps of the world of Thulê, in any scale you want. NB! You need a set of polyhedral dice to play the game.

From its earliest days as little more than a series of monophonic outbursts to its current-day scores that can rival major symphonic film scores, video game music has gone through its own particular set of stylistic and functional metamorphoses while both borrowing and recontextualizing the earlier models from which it borrows. With topics ranging from early classics like Donkey Kong and Super Mario Bros. to more recent hits like Plants vs. Zombies, the eleven essays in Music in Video Games draw on the scholarly fields of musicology and music theory, film theory, and game studies, to investigate the history, function, style, and conventions of video game music.

When people hear the term "role-playing games," they tend to think of two things: a group of friends sitting around a table playing Dungeons & Dragons or video games with exciting graphics. Between those two, however, exists a third style of gaming. Hundreds of online forums offer gathering places for thousands of players--people who come together to role-play through writing. They create stories by taking turns, describing events through their characters' eyes. Whether it is the arena of the Hunger Games, the epic battles of the Marvel Universe or love stories in a fantasy version of New York, people build their own spaces of words, and inhabit them day after day. But what makes thousands of players, many teenagers among them, voluntarily type up novel-length stories? How do they use the resources of the Internet, gather images, sounds, and video clips to weave them into one coherent narrative? How do they create together through improvisation and negotiation, in ways that connect them to older forms of storytelling? Through observing more than a hundred websites and participating in five of them for a year, the author has created a pilot study that delves into a subculture of unbounded creativity.

This book suggests a variety of new approaches to the study of game music.

The basis for the new Amazon Prime Original Series! Perfect for fans of E.T. and Stranger Things—the first narrative artbook from acclaimed author and artist Simon Stålenhag about a fictionalized suburban town in the 1980s inhabited by fantastic machines and strange, imaginative beasts. In 1954, the Swedish government ordered the construction of the world’s largest particle accelerator. The facility was complete in 1969, located deep below the pastoral countryside of Mälaröarna. The local population called this marvel of technology The Loop. These are its strange tales. From the same author who wrote the imaginative artbook The Electric State, this “haunting,” (The Verge) “sophisticated sci-fi” (The Nerdist) follows the bizarre stories from otherworldly creatures and is a page-turner you won’t be able to put down.