Ressonância tecnocultural: rastros da ambiência contemporânea nas sonoridades dos jogos digitais

Abstract

The research seeks to entangle the aesthetics of digital games, in particular their audible expressions, with an emerging technocultural environment that shapes them. We claim that each technoculture produces what we are calling “resonances”, virtual tendencies that spread culturally, fostering the way we communicate through a memory of sonic and audiovisual codes at each technological stage. We seek to map such resonances from the traces they leave in the sonic expressions of digital games. The perspective on audiovisual communication that we develop throughout the thesis stems from an articulation between memory, technoculture and design, drawing from contemporary media, sound, software and game studies. On empirical ground, the project performs sound analysis procedures on fifteen computer games of different genres and formats, published between 2005 and 2017, and selected from previous exploratory research. We adopt a mixed methodological approach, pivoting around three aspects: the method of intuition, which guides the definition of the research object and the research questions in relation to Henri Bergson's phenomenology; the continuous production of cartographies, which nurtures the production of conceptual maps on the research material. The cartographical exercise is associated with the assembly of constellations, by which we arrange the data based on elective affinities; experimental technical procedures for audiovisual and sound analysis, namely, acousmatic listening, spectromorphological analysis and audiovisual masking. By identifying the resonances of certain tendencies of contemporary technoculture in the sounds of digital games, the research presents four constellations through which they become audible: anthropomorphisms, rhetorical synchronizations, immersibilities, machinic ruins.