While most of these critiques have focused specifically on how these relations are reproduced in MMORPGs, where practices like gold farming quite explicitly mirrored real-life power relations, some have also focused on single-player games, particularly their neoliberal affinities. Virtual economies and virtual worlds have been seen to reproduce both real world economic systems and real-world ideologies (Castronova 2005 Rettberg 2008) and subsequently reproducing social strata and power relations. The representation of class, however, remains underexplored, even amongst critiques of video games as agents of capitalism. 2016), and, to a lesser degree, LGBTQ issues (Consalvo 2003 Ruberg and Shaw 2017), and race (Burgess et al.

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. 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.

Download beyond the steel sky review