The Repetition of Video Game Music, its Impact on Video Game Enjoyment, and How Best to Manage it.

Video game music (VGM) has a functional role in video games which can cause it to be looped and repeated as it accompanies the player around the game world. This has an impact on players’ video game enjoyment and engagement when players become overfamiliar with repeating VGM. There have been numerous approaches and techniques implemented in video games to attempt to conceal, reduce, and remove repetition of VGM. However, familiarity through repeated exposure to VGM has a positive functional role for players with regards to player feedback. This constructivist study focuses on the phenomenon of VGM repetition and its impact on the complex concept of video game enjoyment, and gauges how best to manage the phenomenon using various approaches, and techniques, used to conceal, reduce, and remove repetition of VGM. The current study conducted qualitative interviews with actual players who believed that VGM was important to their enjoyment of video games. A codebook was developed from these interviews and used to interpret the data using heuristic inquiry. Findings show that players understand the reasons for VGM repetition and believe that their video game enjoyment is contextually dependent on whether repetition improves their engagement. Players are generally tolerant of VGM repetition but can become overfamiliar with VGM when it repeats, which has an impact on their video game enjoyment. However, players are more appreciative of the functional role that repeating VGM has with regards to feedback as they become more familiar with the repeating VGM. Ultimately a pragmatic worldview is held by the author who believes that this study could be beneficial to other VGM research and the video game industry because it focuses on the perspectives of the players themselves.