Cartographic Sonicity in Virtual Theme Parks: Honkai Star Rail’s Clock Studios
Start Date
1-6-2026 1:00 PM
Description
Theme park soundscapes construct “fictional real worlds” (Lawson 2024) with heightened interactivity, hyperrealism, and complexities beyond film and video games. Ironically, Epic Universe’s Super Nintendo World turns the virtual into reality, while Universal’s app-only augmented reality and Wizarding World activities turn physical park experiences increasingly virtual. Such comingling of the real and virtual become most pertinent when video games recreate theme parks. Therefore, my presentation posits that virtual open-world theme parks can reconstruct and deconstruct the “theme park” concept to distill a set of key definers. The definers also underscore how strategic sonic mapping and simulation of theme park areas, mascots, and branding can compensate for the lack of definers such as physical thrill rides and waiting queues. Clock Studios from the RPG game Honkai: Star Rail is a virtual theme park set in a designed world space (Lukas 2013). Waltz-like main street music (Yee 2025), Roaring Twenties jazz, and realistic soundscapes are mapped onto “Area” music (Camp 2024) for themed restaurants, hotels, shops, attractions, and minigames. In addition to cartographic design, the stylized music also features compounded functions of (ludo)narrative, transmedial, and/or affective purposes, even when the musical content belongs to a fictional game world. Analyzing for these compounded cartographic functions demonstrates how, like physical theme parks, virtual theme park soundscapes can facilitate interactivity, escapism, historicity, and nostalgia grounded in parkgoers’ own realities. And, these functions manifest in real-life park experiences that reconstruct the virtual through app-based experiences, augmented reality, and reconstructions of video game franchises.
Recommended Citation
Nguyen, Clair, "Cartographic Sonicity in Virtual Theme Parks: Honkai Star Rail’s Clock Studios" (2026). Theme Park Music and Sound. 2.
https://stars.library.ucf.edu/tpms/2026/asynchronous/2
Cartographic Sonicity in Virtual Theme Parks: Honkai Star Rail’s Clock Studios
Theme park soundscapes construct “fictional real worlds” (Lawson 2024) with heightened interactivity, hyperrealism, and complexities beyond film and video games. Ironically, Epic Universe’s Super Nintendo World turns the virtual into reality, while Universal’s app-only augmented reality and Wizarding World activities turn physical park experiences increasingly virtual. Such comingling of the real and virtual become most pertinent when video games recreate theme parks. Therefore, my presentation posits that virtual open-world theme parks can reconstruct and deconstruct the “theme park” concept to distill a set of key definers. The definers also underscore how strategic sonic mapping and simulation of theme park areas, mascots, and branding can compensate for the lack of definers such as physical thrill rides and waiting queues. Clock Studios from the RPG game Honkai: Star Rail is a virtual theme park set in a designed world space (Lukas 2013). Waltz-like main street music (Yee 2025), Roaring Twenties jazz, and realistic soundscapes are mapped onto “Area” music (Camp 2024) for themed restaurants, hotels, shops, attractions, and minigames. In addition to cartographic design, the stylized music also features compounded functions of (ludo)narrative, transmedial, and/or affective purposes, even when the musical content belongs to a fictional game world. Analyzing for these compounded cartographic functions demonstrates how, like physical theme parks, virtual theme park soundscapes can facilitate interactivity, escapism, historicity, and nostalgia grounded in parkgoers’ own realities. And, these functions manifest in real-life park experiences that reconstruct the virtual through app-based experiences, augmented reality, and reconstructions of video game franchises.