Dr. Chris Hall is Assistant Professor of English at the University of the Ozarks, and the co-editor, with Steven Kielich, of a volume in progress on the Metal Gear Solid series. He has published previously on Metal Gear Solid as well as on political themes in popular culture and twentieth-century literature. You can find him on X/Twitter at or by email at chall@ozarks.edu.
In the past few years, YouTube has increasingly emerged as a platform for music, particularly because of its unique affordances of both visual and aural immersion. The eternal “Lofi Girl,” for instance, peacefully studying away on an endless feed as comforting hip hop-ish music wafts from the speakers, has become an internet icon. This explosion was especially brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic, during which isolated individuals sought communal belonging and virtual relaxation in the endlessly variable (if ever more commercial-ridden) planes of YouTube’s free content (Gamble). YouTube has emerged as a source of vibes, a site for the extraction of soothing sights and tones in the insatiable hunger for fodder that mitigates the pain of work, study, illness, and loneliness.
Besides the general growth in its musical content, YouTube’s continued emergence as an intermedial platform has also, though more discreetly, enabled its growth as a space for exploring the communal intersection of music and gaming (Freitas, Porfírio, and Durand), one aspect of which has been the proliferation of musical soundscapes culled from video games. Besides the many compilations collecting, say, “Relaxing PS1 Music,” there are plentiful iterations from particular games that include visual captures along with sound from, for instance, various Zelda, Assassin’s Creed, or even Call of Duty games. These videos include no active gameplay; the player lingers at a chosen location, creating an environment for the soundscape. Some of these videos include their game’s soundtrack (often modified or expanded), while many have no music at all, only the background sounds of their scene. These video paratexts, which are both within and without the game they are sourced from, capture gaming’s visual and aural scenery and reconfigure them into extended ambient milieus emerging from game spaces that might otherwise be passed over.
An ambient soundscape from The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild.
In this essay, I build on the analysis of gaming paratexts by scholars such as Steven Harvie and Jan Švelch, especially pursuing Harvie’s injunction to “be mindful of the threshold” between video games and their transmedia offspring by drawing these reinscriptions of game-scenes into this conversation. Many such videos are categorized as ASMR, or autonomous sensory meridian response, which collects videos meant to trigger relaxation, satisfaction, nostalgia, or all of the above. While this generic marker helps somewhat to explain the draw of videos that one would be unlikely to otherwise watch in the usual sense, describing these particular videos as ASMR runs the risk of making them appear to be something totally distinct from their video game source texts. Thinking about these videos not merely as YouTube curiosities or extractions from games that are completely separate experiences, but as ambient paratexts, makes it possible to confront the ways these videos enable fundamentally different perspectives on gaming.
The ambient paratext—an intentionally slippery category that depends heavily on the mechanics of its game and the choices of its YouTube creator—does not simply derive from its source, but informs how that source can be read. Watching and listening to these videos is to radically reconfigure how one experiences a game’s textuality. Many, like this example from Hitman, remove or decenter the usual player avatar. These paratexts thereby complicate how the relationship between sound and video games might be approached, as in Karen Collins’ emphasis on the embodied player’s agency in prompting game sounds (3). The result is a paratext that highlights the paratextuality of gaming itself: within every game might be a series of infinitely iterable scenes that can be extracted and lived in. In this slowing, even cessation, of game time—and the recession of priorities of mission, character, and status—video games are at once at their most and least inclusive, in an experience that envelops, that need not end, that is for anyone, and yet is unplayable.
As I write this, I have open on another screen, as I often do, one of these ambient paratexts—in this case, an hour-long video from Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater. There’s no music, no avatar, only a first-person scene at the ground level providing a nighttime view of the exterior of the Graniny Gorki research outpost in Tselinoyarsk, the Soviet Union. Directly before us is a high fence, followed by patches of grass and the concrete façade of the facility. To the far right a guard patrols within the fenced area, as oblivious as the sleeping dog nearby. Presumably we perceive the scene through the eyes of the game’s protagonist, Naked Snake, lying prone, but we needn’t be aware of this, and Snake provides no signs of his presence. The peaceful scene is backgrounded by the ambient sounds of the southern USSR forest, the constant chirping of bugs punctuated by the faraway cries of nocturnal birds.
Screenshot of an ambient paratext from Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater
This scene, as in many such paratexts, is literally timeless. We see neither how it is entered or exited, and there is no cue of time passing; the sun never rises, the guard never goes to bed. The ambient timelessness carved out within the game’s space in these texts might be thought as the exact inverse of a speedrun. While it is possible to beat the entirety of Metal Gear Solid 3 in little more than an hour, this video stretches the game’s length to theoretical infinity within that time. This is the culmination of slow play, gaming decelerated to the extent that it leaves play behind, transcending platform and genre, dropping many markers with which video games are generally associated and revealing others with which they are not. The ambient paratext sees video games in the process of literally making time as well as space, within the expanding landscape of an artifact that is both involving and passive.
These videos are endlessly variable, from the dynamic plains of Ghost of Tsushima, complete with musical score, to the sterile, eerie basements of Alien Isolation, available in an extended 10 hour take for a whole night’s worth of anxiety. Read as paratexts, these videos unfold an iterability of gaming that is still underappreciated. Speedrunning has capitalized on this in its own way, taking as radically certain the notion that the playing of any game can be varied endlessly in the process of cracking open its progression. The flashy achievement-based priorities of speedrunning, however, have obscured the extent of gaming’s variability in other directions, which the utterly non-goal-oriented ambient paratext fully leans into. Here play can stop, if need be, forever, and the game continues.
And so I focus on the ambient paratext here neither to simply bring to light a unique subfamily of esoteric artifacts derivative of video games, nor to argue that games themselves cannot be understood without reference to these paratexts. There is a certain sense in which this special issue renders video games themselves as paratexts, by making gaming’s primary material a secondary point of analysis, similarly to the way that Mia Consalvo has described Twitch streaming as refocusing on the performer and rendering paratextual the games being played. In my view, the ambient paratext provides a particularly apt case by which we might better understand the larger movement of the paratextual situation, whereby all texts might be thought of as paratextuals and vice versa, through the ubiquitous textuality of a cultural creep that is aesthetic and creative as much as it is economic and entrepreneurial. It is toward similar aims that Jan Švelch has emphasized the quality of “paratextuality” over the category of “paratext,” and that leads Consalvo not to valorize Twitch streamers as being in any way more textually important than the games being streamed, but rather as being a site for positioning her observation that “we need fewer ‘central’ texts and more study of the relatedness, interconnectedness, and contingent nature of many kinds of popular culture texts” (182).
While these moves might seem to risk destabilizing or diluting the concept of a paratext to the extent that it loses its meaning, the opposite is the case. By freeing us from the need to support the fragile notion of definite generic barriers, and from sorting gaming artifacts into their categories (and, inevitably, making hierarchies out of these), thinking about paratextuality as an inevitable aspect of gaming creates an injunction not to draw borders, but rather to analyze the shifting thresholds and groupings of gaming’s marginal and central texts. Paratextuality is enriched in this process, called upon in an unfinishable project of mapping the cultural clusters that video games are and engender.
Because of this, the paratext might be best thought in relation to Jacques Derrida’s broader deconstructionist concept of the parergon—a kind of artistic supplement or frame—a link that has been made by scholars of other kinds of digital paratexts (Desrochers and Apollon). Thinking through parergons and endlessly unspooling, interwoven paratexts does not mean abandoning limits and surrendering to a transcendent, undifferentiated textuality. Instead, it asserts an imperative for continuing to theorize the iterability of texts of all kinds, for exploring how the generic restraints placed upon them in design, scholarship, and play are always escaping and retreating from their supposed boundaries. Derrida writes that how we understand art itself is founded upon a sense of “the limit between the inside and outside of the art object” (45), but that the issue is never really so simple, for as soon as a new object (i.e., a paratext) appears in relation to one that seemed stable and original, the limits of both are thrown into question (63), and the analysis of that relation requires always a great deal of specific and careful reading.
So while Švelch discounts the emphasis on spatiality that emerges in Gérard Genette’s development of the concept of paratexts, paratextuality is always a matter of space and a question of adjacency, even if not necessarily in the sense of physical proximity. In the context of the ambient paratext, for instance, we are in the game—in fact, we might be far deeper within it, more enmeshed in its world, than we ever are when actually playing it. And yet, precisely because of this involvement, we are more than ever beyond the game itself; we might not even be watching the video we have playing before us. Thinking through the gaming paratext, then, is not a matter of sorting out how theory can make connections between things that are games and things that are not but seem related to them; rather it is a matter of sorting out how we might situate ourselves in a critical journey that goes both beyond and within what we think of as “gaming.” This is undoubtedly a spatial matter, though not in any way that could measure meaningful gaps between forms.
The ambient paratext is uniquely well-suited for this, as it is concerned most of all with eking out space within gaming’s artifacts, with opening a game up and showing how it can endlessly be opened up in a way that diffuses into life beyond gameplay. This is precisely what “ambience” means: for something to be ambient or to create ambience, it must be encompassing and create some kind of environment. Taken within the realm of video games, ambience places gaming beside itself; every experience of a game appears as adjacent to endless others, extending even beyond the bounds of form and narrative. In thinking through the ambient paratexts of gaming, we gain a new perspective of how gaming itself suffuses our environment, of how it has become a medium for creating space and texture in the world, a texture we can choose to enter into in various ways, but can never really fully withdraw from.
Works Cited
Collins, Karen. Game Sound: An Introduction to the History, Theory, and Practice of Video Game Music and Sound Design. The MIT Press, 2008.
Consalvo, Mia. “When Paratexts Become Texts: De-Centering the Game-as-Text.” Critical Studies in Media Communication, vol. 34, no. 2, 2017, pp. 177-183,
https://doi.org/10.1080/15295036.2017.1304648.
Derrida, Jacques. “Parergon.” The Truth in Painting, translated by Geoff Bennington and Ian McLeod, The University of Chicago Press, 1987, pp. 15-147.
Desrochers, Nadine, and Daniel Apollon, editors. Examining Paratextual Theory and its Applications in Digital Culture. Information Science Reference, 2014.
Freitas, Joana, João Francisco Porfírio, and Júlia Durand. “Listen, Watch, Play and Relax: YouTube, Video Games and Library Music in Everyday Life During the Pandemic.” Sonic Scope, no. 3, 2021, https://doi.org/10.21428/66f840a4.18b66567.
Gamble, Steven. “Beats to Quarantine to: Lofi Hip Hop Music and Virtual Community During the COVID-19 Pandemic.” Dr Steven Gamble (blog), 31 Aug. 2022, https://stevengamble.com/beats-to-quarantine-to/.
Harvie, Steven. “The Paratext of Video Games.” First Person Scholar, 12 Jul. 2017, http://www.firstpersonscholar.com/the-paratext-of-video-games/.
Švelch, Jan. “Paratextuality in Game Studies: A Theoretical Review and Citation Analysis.” Game Studies, vol. 20, no. 2, 2020, https://gamestudies.org/2002/articles/jan_svelch.