Video Games are Total Works of Art

In a pit of personal despair and uncertainty, and at the suggestion of a close friend, I began Will’s Ludomusings in May 2025. In the year since, I’ve read and written so much. Not all of my output has been bangers, but this blog has been an incredible outlet for me to maintain and practice my research chops as I while away the time leading up to graduate school. It really has been and continues to be a fantastic experience keeping this blog and letting the World Wide Web have access to my essay practice. And while meeting or blowing way past my self-imposed deadlines does stress me out a bit, it is a very free feeling to publish articles—be they bangers or stinkers—and express my academic interests. Will’s Ludomusings has been a constant over the turbulent year I’ve had.

For one whole year, this blog has given me the platform to talk about two of my favorite things: music and video games. But why am I so into this field? When I first realized my love for music history and research, I wanted more than anything to be a Tchaikovsky scholar. His music, after all, is among my absolute favorite music in the lowercase “c” classical music repertoire. Working with my undergrad musicology professor to brainstorm graduate writing samples, I pretty quickly came to the realization that the well of Tchaikovsky scholarship had all but run dry. Everything that I had once wanted to say about his music seemed already to have been written.

But then I thought back to an early meeting I had had with my professor when we were discussing possible niches I could take in the field: “What do you think about ludomusicology?” he asked. After I expressed my ignorance of the term, he explained that it was a branch of musicology focused on video game music (VGM). Wanting to seem like I was hip with the musicological elite, I shrugged the idea off. Being so entrenched in the Western musical canon, I had discounted VGM as something worthy of academic attention. But why? Why did I think this when all through high school I had learned music theory from YouTube channels analyzing game scores? Why did I think this when so much of the music that had resonated with me throughout my life was VGM? When the Tchaikovsky trail ran cold, I saw that the ludo well was still very full and found real pleasure poring over research on the music of Super Mario Bros., The Legend of Zelda, and all my favorite games.

Ludomusicology is teeming with potential. For starters, it’s still a relatively young subfield, finding its roots in the mid-2000s1 and only gaining traction in the mid- and late-2010s with an uptick in prestigious publishers and journals printing VGM research,2 as well as the formation of ludomusicology study groups in the American Musicological Society and abroad.

More than this, I would say, is the undeniable richness of the field’s subject matter. I often say that video games are operas that you get to play with. Many media have claimed to be manifestations of Richard Wagner’s ideal Gesamtkunstwerk, a “total work of art” that synthesizes various artforms into an experiential whole. Wagner used the term to push for a radicalization of opera throughout the 19th century. He sought to create in his own operas works of art that incorporate continuous music, poetry, set design, costume design, architectural acoustics, and action not as a combination of distinct components, but as a unified work of art in which these components cannot be meaningfully isolated.

By my estimation, no medium lives up to the idea of the Gesamtkunstwerk as much as video games. Video games bring together narrative, graphic design, music, code, console architecture, controller design, action, voice acting, animation, puzzle design, set design, worldbuilding, and so much more. The network of ways in which music connects with each of these elements is enough to fill volumes of research, but what truly sets video games apart from other media is that they are defined by interactivity. Video games are the only artistic medium that necessitates the involvement of its audience to realize and direct their artistry. A game without a player is no game. As the audience of a video game, a player becomes its co-creator.3 The player is at the same time the director, actor, and audience; the architect, sculptor, and viewer; the composer, musician, and listener. Because of this, game music is not fixed in the same way as an opera or film score; no two performances of a video game and its music are the same. Interaction, the ability for the player to shape the Gesamtkunstwerk, is truly what makes ludomusicology such a rich field of study.