11 Did these accusations impact, in any way, the modders’ relationships with Soule’s music and their own musical productions? While the content on Nexus Mods does not display changing relationships with Soule’s music, content on Reddit provides more insight into this question, and a wider range of perspectives and users’ backgrounds. This article follows up on research conducted until 2017 on the Nexus Mods platform, in which I examined the musical production in the modding community surrounding The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion and The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim this research was published in a previous article.
In this article, I aim to briefly highlight the ways in which the shift in Soule’s career and public figure following these accusations was met by users and modders regarding his music, both in-game and out. This article aims to discuss the possible impacts these accusations had on the relationship between Soule’s music and users in the mods community, including users’ overviews of their own personal affective engagement with the games, thus verifying the deep connection between music, interactivity, authorship and gamer identity. However, these allegations were part of a larger phenomenon of awareness and public exposure of negative and abusive practices in several labor contexts in the video game industry, shedding some light on a much-needed discussion about sexism and mistreatment toward women and nonbinary professionals in these fields and raising some pertinent questions concerning users’ feedback and engagement. Since the data collected in that earlier research was limited to a time span until 2017, the recent developments concerning composer Jeremy Soule weren’t addressed in that earlier setting.
In previous research, I examined this mods community in order to consider music and sound in relation to immersion and modification in Elder Scrolls games. The Elder Scrolls franchise, and in particular Skyrim, is highly recognized for its soundtracks, and this franchise has given rise to the largest mods community to date. From questioning the victims’ credibility to taking a neutral position while waiting for further development, gamers and fans made use of digital platforms to express either concern, astonishment, or doubt these reactions point to the significant symbolic capital that Soule possesses in the context of video game music.
When Jeremy Soule, composer for some of the most well-known video game franchises in the world such as Guild Wars and The Elder Scrolls, was accused of sexual misconduct by women in the gaming industry in 2019, the internet hosted reactions from several fronts.
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