Issues of representation in video games have been important to video game studies for over two decades, largely focussing on gender (Cassell and Jenkins 1998 Dietz 1998 Kafai et al. Here, music plays an important role in terms of environmental storytelling, both as semiotic shorthand, and as a reflection of the affordances available to the inhabitants of the city. This article draws connections between these two underexplored areas and analyses the musical characterisation of class in the 1994 cyberpunk adventure game, which takes places largely in a literally stratified metropolis where the three levels of the city act as representations of the three social classes. Furthermore, the relationship between video game music and socio-cultural aspects of video game studies is also rarely examined beyond issues of race, ethnicity, and cultural appropriation.
While other issues of representation have been studied extensively within game studies (gender representation in particular), the representation of class remains an underexplored area. The setup is simple, though, and should have you playing in no time at all.Īgain, all of this is permanent, so you're in no rush to give Beneath a Steel Sky a whirl, but the fact that it holds up still, even in 2019, means it's definitely worth your attention, especially if you're likely to play its eventual successor.This article proposes Revolution Software’s Beneath a Steel Sky (1994) as a starting point for the analysis of the relationship between music and social class in video games. The easiest way to go about this is to simply GoG and download Beneath a Steel Sky that way, but do keep in mind that you're going to have to run the game via ScummVM due to its age and software incompatibility. This is not a limited-time offer or anything of the type, but it is a great deal if you're interested in playing Beyond a Steel Sky that's coming out this year.
If you want to play Beneath a Steel Sky, boy have we got great news for you: the game can be downloaded at no charge whatsoever, and completely legally, with the permission of the developers, Revolution. It's pretty damn great, and though its visuals are dated, there's much to love here still. Instead, it takes the subject matter of class warfare under British Thatcherism and uses its central premises to tell a wackier, zanier story than we might suspect at first. Beneath a Steel Sky is a very politically-charged game, but it's not dealing with the type of pop-politics we might notice in the media today.
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