Anachronic Sonorities of Technoculture in Digital Games

Abstract

This article offers a preliminary questioning of the extant research on the sound of digital games and situates these extensively disseminated contemporary artefacts in a wider technocultural frame of reference, in order to develop an approach capable of articulating communication, memory, and culture.. To achieve this goal, we propose a partial revision of prominent works dealing with the sonorities of digital games, contrasting them through the theoretical-methodological contributions of Walter Benjamin’s philosophy of history and media archaeology. Through the conceptual approach developed in this article, we are able to reformulate questions being asked about the sounds of digital games, taking them instead as compelling objects for inquiry regarding our contemporary technoculture and a memory of media that surpasses them. Having reconceptualized our research object, we suggest a method for an empirical research still under development.