ABSTRACT
The sense of involvement in encountering natural landscapes can be found in the hilltop experience, as well: it is the player’s interaction with the game world that makes possible the experience of a musical landscape. This chapter argues that Skyrim offers players not just visuals reminiscent of Friedrich’s paintings, but experiences that are in some ways closer to experiences of natural beauty than those afforded by Grieg and Friedrich’s works. The aesthetics of Skyrim’s cues support experiences akin to those of natural landscapes, but, when analyzed independently of their gameplay setting, they can be heard much like the autonomous pieces of music that inspired them. The typical linear and clear verse-chorus setup of Hollywood songs make them more perceptibly dominant than the Klangflache-landscape combination, but that does not mean that the latter is mere background music. In Thomas Clifton’s phenomenology of musical time, musical objects are the same as any kind of object in that they are determined by continuity.
