Tuesday 25 September, 2018

Other than the nostalgia rush and the questionable achievement "What are you doing...?", outside of playing the game, I decided to take a listen to the soundtrack on YouTube and again reminded me of the Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain with the vocals being very present in the game. This makes me question, what made the creators decide to use a foreign style of music in a dystopian JRPG. Other games like God Eater, A Post apocalyptic JRPG, uses techno mixed with rock. I believe that the developers of Nier Automata had the intention of creating immersion and aesthetic when in a certain area of the world. I think the idea of immersion was taken from real word examples. For example, the track Memories of Dust, has more of a enhanced North African/ Middle Eastern feel to it when the player travels through the Desert Zone. I think one can see an ethical issue when games take musical influence from other cultures and can question if the developers are fully understanding and researching a cultures' musical instruments and musicality.

Good work Cody! You make 2 unexpected analyses in these gamelogs: 1. The “What are you Doing…?” achievement, and 2. Commentary on the ethics of taking musical influence from cultures outside the game world and the developer’s worlds. Both of these have a meta-commentary with the achievement analysis being about discerning whether the achievement is a cheeky self-awareness or a commentary on perversion and the musical analysis being about whether developers are culturally appropriating/culturally polluting if they take artistic characteristics from other cultures without fully understanding those countries artistic practices. These are some interesting topics to dive deeper into and their ethical significance in the game.