Game Music and Identity

Terry Eagleton perfectly stated the most fundamental lesson about identity when he penned the line: ‘Nothing ever happens twice, precisely because it has happened once already.’1 In other words, a second iteration of an event is always different to a first occurrence, and changes in context, temporal or spatial, reconfigure the meanings of objects and events. When we posit sameness, even sameness to self, there’s always something we’re missing, some difference we’re failing to account for. Our failure to realize that the secondness of the later happening in Eagleton’s sequence makes it different from the first stands in nicely for all the differences we fail to consider when we experience people or things as possessing identities.