Meta-music and the sonic storytelling of <i>Baldur’s Gate</i> 3

The video game Baldur’s Gate 3 adapts the fictional setting and rule systems of the classic tabletop roleplaying game Dungeons &amp; Dragons . For most of its branching three-act story, the music of Baldur’s Gate 3 serves the conventional nondiegetic purpose of supporting narrative immersion and communicating key gameplay information to players. However, Baldur’s Gate 3 also employs a range of metareferential musical devices which foreground the artificiality of the medium with varying impacts on the player experience. This article explores how the use of ‘meta-music’ in Baldur’s Gate 3 contributes to its digital representation of the tabletop roleplaying experience while also navigating the anti-illusionistic risks that this entails for immersive storytelling. I begin by reviewing the established relationship between music and immersive storytelling across video games and tabletop roleplaying games (TTRPGs) alike. I next consider the metacommunicative nature of TTRPGs and how this aligns with the unique potentials of metareferential music within interactive contexts. The article then proceeds with a detailed accounting of the diverse meta-musical techniques encountered in Baldur’s Gate 3, from musical easter eggs and transdiegetic leitmotifs to villains who perform their own nondiegetic theme music. I argue that these strategies evoke the aesthetic experience of playing Dungeons &amp; Dragons by eliciting states of heightened meta-awareness and open creative experimentation that characterise TTRPGs. In doing so, the ‘meta-music’ of Baldur’s Gate 3 bridges the extra- and intratextual worlds to support a specific interactional immersion that succeeds, in most cases, to deepen the storytelling experience. I conclude by arguing for further research into player perceptions of metareferential music and considering what the case study of Baldur’s Gate 3 reveals about the study of video game music at large.