On Musescore, one of the largest online sheet music communities, the most-viewed piano pieces based on game music alone, focusing on games like Undertale, Minecraft and Super Mario Bros., rack up millions of views; unlike songs on YouTube or Spotify, these are not meant to be played repeatedly, but fans download the sheet music once to practice and play at home. Re-producing this music for oneself, casually and not for the purpose of sharing the result online, constitutes a particular form of enacting fandom, i.e. connecting both with the games and - particularly in the case of older titles played e.g. during childhood - with earlier moments and memories.

While contemporary video games understandably make for the most popular game music arrangements, Musescore also include tracks from earlier game systems like the Super Nintendo and the Sega Mega Drive or home computers like the Commodore Amiga, the C64 or the MSX system, which was particularly popular in Japan in the 1980s and 90s. Freely available tools like VGMTrans (to extract music from Nintendo DS games), NSF2MIDI (for the Nintendo Sound Format) or SID2MIDI (for Commodore C64 music) make game music arrangement feasible also for people with no training in transcribing by ear; moreover, comprehensive MIDI archives of game music like VGMusic remove the need for transcription altogether and allow for focusing entirely on adapting the music to a specific instrument or instrument configuratio

n. For a few examples of piano arrangements of game music from various time periods (with a focus on ‘historical’ games), see my Musescore set at https://musescore.com/user/17332501/sets/14712323.

Karen Collins, Playing with Sound: A Theory of Interacting with Sound and Music in Video Games (Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 2013)

Melanie Fritsch, “‘It’s a-Me, Mario!’ Playing with Video Game Music,” in Ludomusicology: Approaches to Game Music, eds. Michiel Kamp, Tim Summers, and Mark Sweeney (Sheffield, UK; Bristol, CT: Equinox Publishing, 2016), 92-115.

Jeremy W. Smith “‘Wear People’s Faces’: Semiotic Awareness in Fan Adaptations of the Music from The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask,” Journal of Sound and Music in Games 1, no. 4 (2020): 45–75

These were the leading questions Stefan Werning addressed in an invited guest lecture and corresponding workshop during the inaugural symposium of the newly founded Sonderforschungsbereich (or: Collaborative Research Centre, i.e. CRC) “Silence, Noise and Signal in Language” at the University of Konstanz on May 8^th, 2026.

The presentation first defined games as ‘curated social situations’ to situate the talk alongside other research within the CRC on silence and noise in ‘unmediated’ language settings. Then, it moved on to examples of silence in digital games like Death Stranding, Walden – A Game, Shadow of the Colossus and The Wolf Among Us, drawing on earlier studies that discuss silence as part of close-reading these games. It also introduced other recent examples, e.g. horror games like Don’t Scream, which use a microphone to detect the player’s noise level and linking it to in-game events, which highlight the psycho-physical experience of playing a (digital) game (e.g. as the games themselves utilize jump scares and other tactics to trigger involuntary sounds).

Then, the talk moved on to discuss functions of silence in analogue games, e.g. TTRPGs but also board/card games like Tranquility, The Mind, Magic Maze, Alice is Missing, The Skeletons or The Quiet Year, which shifted the focus from individual to social play situations.

Finally, silence in games was re-framed from a media/ecological perspective, which includes both a focus on ecology (i.e. how silence, in games and beyond, functions as part of climate communication and education) and media ecology, taking into account the increasing abundance of ‘noise’ in contemporary media environments. Here, both silence and noise are understood literally but also metaphorically, with e.g. noise referring to information overflow through AI slop and the general ‘contentification’ of culture, ‘visual noise’ or social media hype being conceptualized as ‘noise’ in economics. From the perspective of climate pedagogy but also cultural scholarship, silence is being increasingly commodified and needs to be ‘reclaimed’ as a parallel to reconnecting with nature more broadly. This final section discussed games like Proteus, Alba: A Wildlife Adventure, silence evoking a sense of natural sublime in Shadow of the Colossus or The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker, and the possibilities of silent protagonists in games like Journey or The Endless Forest to destabilize anthropocentrism.

To conclude, silence/noise are not just parameters of linguistic situations but increasingly recognized as important aspects of our necessarily mediated everyday experiences. As a game mechanic, silence has already been implemented in surprisingly different ways, which reflect the many different manifestations but also interpretations of a seemingly innocuous phenomenon; however, as games like Don’t Scream and Alice is Missing demonstrate, there is also still a lot of unexplored design space, both in digital and analogue games.

The slides for the presentation, which was delivered based on research conducted for the STRATEGIES project can be found here.

In the end, I prepared Be Like a Crow, Octopolis, Growing Thylacine, and Animal Vandals. The latter I ran myself, while the other games were facilitated by Jelmer Groenenboom and Maria Stoicescu—many thanks to both of them. Most of these games ask players to collaboratively build the world together, relieving what, in a more conventional TTRPG, would be the “DM” or “GM” from sole narrative responsibility. This makes the games especially well suited for classroom use, since they require little to no preparation.

Out of the four, I was really blown away by Animal Vandals, by Ieuan San Jose Jones. This game asks you to print out some images of your local neighborhood, or city—grayscale, so it doesn’t break the bank. These images become a canvas onto which the players, taking on the roles of unruly and rebellious animals, perform acts of “symbolic vandalism.” The game deliberately avoids overexplaining what that term means, leaving players themselves—as mice, rats, pigeons, seagulls, dogs, or cats—to debate how best to express their disagreement with cities designed without their interests in mind.

In our game, we started at the shopping mall by shitting in the fountain and causing havoc. Crude but effective. The next jobs, however, were increasingly more ambitious and sophisticated. Players sincerely discussed how they, as urban animals, could articulate their discontent with the anthropocentric logic shaping urban environments, and how those environments might be imagined otherwise.

What makes this game even more classroom-friendly, is its tight pacing. After roughly fifteen minutes of instruction and character creation, players select a shared target—one of the images—and briefly discuss how they want to vandalize the location. Then it is time for action. For one minute (set a timer!) they descend upon the paper armed with pencils, markers, crayons, finger paint, and whatever else is available. When the timer runs out (set a police siren for extra immersion), they must immediately figure out how to vacate the premises.

What we discovered was that, even when players agreed upon a general strategy beforehand, the actual minute of action produced all kinds of divergences. Some improvised. Others elaborated unexpectedly on the original plan. Those differences, in turn, became excellent material for discussion afterward. Is it acceptable to break the windows of a historic building in order to make a point about animal liberation? What happens if somebody gets hurt? Can you communicate efficiently and creatively through acts of destruction and sabotage? And how do these acts stand to be misinterpreted?

What impressed me most about the game was how naturally it opened up these political questions without ever feeling didactic. Rather than presenting players with a predefined moral framework, Animal Vandals creates a playful but surprisingly serious space in which participants can think through questions of multispecies justice, urban design, resistance, and dissent together. For a classroom setting, that balance between accessibility, creativity, and critical reflection is difficult to achieve—and Animal Vandals manages it brilliantly.

Asses.masses is a 7–8 hour videogame performance by Canadians Patrick Blenkarn and Milton Lim, programmed at SPRING Performing Arts Festival in Utrecht. It had been on my radar for months after coming up in my intermediality and media comparison class as an example of the theatricalization of gameplay.

I have a wary relationship with theater. As a fan of role-playing games and a larper to boot, I often find interactive theater leaves me wanting more (“oh, so you can vote on the outcome? such interactivity, much participation…”). But Asses.masses delivers on its promise: it evokes a real sense of collectivity and offers a nuanced exploration of work and the good life — in other words: ASS POWER. Let me set the scene.

An auditorium. We are a herd, 100 strong. After a brief, almost offhand introduction by Blenkarn and Lim, the lights dim except for a spotlight aimed at a lectern holding a wireless controller. The screen zaps to life. Press (X) to continue, it reads. There’s a brief silence until, from among the herd, a young man rises. We all clap. He becomes our representative.

When I used to play videogames with my ex, we would pass the controller back and forth (“You drive the bus,” I’d tell him while I refreshed our drinks). This is also how you play Asses.masses. The player at the dais, hands on the controller, merely executes the will of the people. Sometimes the choice is easy, when the crowd shouts in unison; sometimes it’s put to a quick vote: do we say this or that? Go left or right? Even if you don’t have your hands on the controller, you’re still playing—an affirming experience for a back-seat gamer like me.

What’s more, there are other parts to play. Asses.masses recounts the struggle of a group of donkeys facing automation and the loss of their jobs. In our showing, this cast of quirky characters was performed by us. Without explicit prompting, several audience members claimed characters and read their lines aloud, keeping the dialogue flowing and the audience immersed. (Shout-out to Nice Ass, Kick Ass, Sturdy Ass, and Lidl Ass: you should be voice actors for real.) While the writing is excellent, I can’t emphasize enough how much these strangely disembodied voices, calling out from the darkened stands of the auditorium, brought the characters to life.

Throughout the experience, the cohesion of the herd waxed and waned. At moments — shouting ASS POWER and galloping toward the village to confront the humans with our demands — I felt it strongly. But during the intervals, when food and drinks were served, I felt more set apart. The breaks had no fixed time limit and only ended once we, as a herd, drifted back into the auditorium. This pitted my gaming endurance and hyperfocus against the indulgent, yappy Dutch borrelcultuur. These were the only moments when I wished our herd came with a shepherd who could gently usher everyone back to their seats.

There were also moments when individuals were singled out, for example during the game’s challenging mini-games: a deviously difficult game of Pong, a rhythm game, and several puzzles. In moments like these, the herd closed ranks around the player at the dais and cheered them on until they made it through.

Ultimately, Asses.masses succeeds because it draws on collective gaming practices that feel entirely ordinary. Passing the controller around, arguing over dialogue choices, shouting directions from the sidelines, solving puzzles together—these are habits many players already know by heart. Blenkarn and Lim do not initially frame any of this as anything special. They hand over the reins, with barely any instruction, and allow the audience to fall into familiar rhythms of play. But then, over the course of seven hours, these mundane acts of coordination begin to take on real political and emotional weight. The crowd learns how to deliberate, compromise, encourage, and occasionally fail each other. By the time the game confronts the herd with difficult open-ended questions about labor, reparations, or what kind demands we should make of the future, collective decision-making no longer feels like a gimmick or mechanic. It feels powerful. Asses.masses reveals that there is something genuinely radical in the simple act of figuring things out together.