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

Abstract Video-game music engages players, summoning us into virtual worlds and soundscapes, and 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 video-game design to reveal how players might become engaged in games. This new methodology maps musical gestures graphically to determine the ways in which video-game music can successfully engage players to feel part of the ludo-narrative journey through a concept I term the ‘gestural potential’ of music. Case studies examined here include Super Mario World (1990) and Super Metroid (1994).