Christopher Bartel

The aesthetics of video games has as much to do with the player as it has to do with the game itself. The aesthetic values that players find in video games depends on the kind of attitude that the player takes toward playing the game. There are three distinct attitudes that players take when they play video games. I call these the goal-seeking attitude, the narrative attitude, and the dollhouse attitude. Each of these attitudes has a distinctive impact on the player’s aesthetic experience. There are certain qualities of games that appeal to one attitude or another, while there are other qualities that can be aesthetically transformed when players take different attitudes toward their play. The aesthetics of video games must account for how the game is crafted alongside the player’s attitude toward their play (2024: 3-4).

Accounts of the ontology of musical works seek to uncover what metaphysically speaking a musical work is and how we should identify instances of musical works. In this article, I examine the curious case of the mash-up and seek to address two questions: are mash-ups musical works in their own right and what is the relationship between the mash-up and its source materials? As mash-ups are part of the broader tradition of rock, I situate this discussion within an ontology of rock as defended by Theodore Gracyk and Stephen Davies and offer some interpretation as to what their positions might be in regard to mash-ups. Finally, I argue that the account of mash-ups that best makes sense of our evaluative practices would hold that they are emergent musical works that are distinct in their own right and yet also happen to be cases of musical works that instantiate parts of other musical works.