The Gestural Potential of Music: Identifying Musical Meaning, Engagement and Immersion in Video Game Music

Videogame music engages players, summoning us into virtual worlds and soundscapes, encouraging us to adhere to the ludic parameters and play. This article establishes a new gestural analytical framework tailored to the playful audiovisual individualities of videogame design to reveal how players might become engaged in games. Case studies examined here include Super Mario World (1990) and Super Metroid (1994). I present a new analytical theory, graphically mapping gestures to determine the ways in which videogame music can successfully engage players to feel part of the ludo-narrative journey through a concept I term the ‘gestural potential’ of music.