Music and Cats / Book of Abstracts - Catalog - Page 38
Abstracts
Panel 3: Film, Games and Gear
AI
13:55 – 14:10
Sounding Felinity in
Video Games
Chris Hill and Sam Pollacco / University of Birmingham, Royal
Holloway, University of London
The digital age's fascination with cats has long
made itself known in one of its most prominent art
forms: the video game. Cats appear in arcade and
early home console experiences including Mouse
Traps (1981) and 9 Lives (1990); to the growth of
both home and portable consoles with both Big and
Blaze the cats joining the Sonic the Hedgehog cast;
the widespread appeal of Nintendogs + Cats (2011)
for the DS; to the Talking Tom games (2013–) for
mobile devices which copied users' voices in
purportedly cat-like ways; to modern AAA and
indie gaming titles like Kitaria Fables (2021), Stray
(2022), and Little Kitty Big City (2024). With video
games' various featurings of felines comes an
inevitable need to audibly depict cats in games.
This paper explores the many ways cats are
sonically represented in video games. Auditory
depictions of cats in games will be analyzed,
including various methods of feline "beep speech"
—
a
ludomusicological
term
describing
non-spoken auditory representations of speech.
Ways in which cats contribute to non-cat sonic
depictions in games will be investigated; for
example, the Ghast sound effects in Minecraft
(2011).
Musical representations will also be explored,
examining the topics and tropes that indicate
characteristic features often ascribed to cats:
cuteness,
sneakiness,
agility,
laziness,
aloofness. We will be particularly curious
about what, if any, differences are sonically
present
between
anthropomorphic
and
non-anthropomorphic cats. We will also
investigate how such feline characteristics are
sonically ascribed to non-feline subjects.
Through these examples, we aim to explore
the numerous ways in which developers have
communicated felinity to players; exploring
both our relationships to cats as players of
games, and as creators of artworks, in an
internet age where cats remain a fond cultural
touchstone in an otherwise turbulent social
landscape.
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