A Combined Model for the Structuring of Computer Game Audio - Game Sound Technology and Player Interaction: Concepts and Developments - page 112

by a highlighted ring. What lies beyond this ring
is not visible. In order to see what is hidden, the
player must enforce ambulatory vision, that is,
move the controlled characters.
In an adventure game such as Legend of Zelda
(Nintendo, 1987), the player's view is locked in
a specific angle heightwise. The player needs to
move the avatar towards the end of the visual field
in order to reveal what lies beyond the framing of
the diegetic environment, that is, she can use snap-
shot vision, aperture vision and ambulatory vision.
In F.E.A.R. (Monolith Productions, 2005), which
is a first-person shooter (FPS), the player, on the
other hand, sees the world through the eyes of the
avatar.An immobile observer, who cannot change
the viewpoint within the game, can only use either
snap shot vision or aperture vision within the visual
field of the computer game environment. A game
such as Myst (Cyan Worlds, 1993) works this way,
as does Pac-Man (Namco, 1980), Space Invaders
(Taito, 1978) and many other early games. Hence
“The single, frozen field of view provides only
impoverished information about the world […]
The evidence suggests that visual awareness is in
fact panoramic and does in fact persist during long
acts of locomotion” (Gibson, 1986, p. 2). All the
games mentioned above have sound to make the
environment more connected to the act of playing
and to achieve a more prominent and lifelike game
environment. The sonic environment of Myst is
quite elaborate for its time, being distributed on
CD-ROM which allows considerably more data
than earlier games. In addition, more data capacity
also meant comparably high audio resolution, that
is, bit depth and sample rate. Pac-Man and Space
Invaders used other kinds of technology in their
original form, relying on the hardware rather than
the software but, when ported to other platforms,
such as consoles and PCs, they were kept quite
close to the original limits soundwise.
If sound integrates us in the environment, as
Ong (1982/90) proposes, and if sound and im-
mersion are also related, we might also employ
different kinds of listening to make the environ-

ment meaningful. As mentioned earlier, Chion
(1994) suggests 3 different listening modes: causal,
semantic and reduced listening. In addition to
these, we suggest the following different kinds of
listening when playing a computer game, which
are analogous to Gibson's 4 kinds of vision:

• Snapshot listening: fixating a point and

then shifting to some other point mo-
mentarily by filtering out all other sound
sources

• Aperture listening: successive scanning

of the audio stimuli

• Ambient listening: increasing the fre-

quency range of the sound by turning the
body towards its source for higher defini-
tion of the sound

• Ambulatory listening: listening by mov-

ing around and using sound as part of the
navigation within the environment.

In order to support the idea of our 4 listening
modes and their relation to Gibson's 4 modes of
seeing, we briefly present a case study called In
the Maze , which was a laboratory-based experi-
ment conducted at the InGaMe Lab at the Uni-
versity of Skövde. This discussion also provides
interesting connections to our combined model
for game audio.
The case study was originally devised to inves-
tigate whether or not sound can be said to align with
Gibson's (1977, 1986) ideas of affordances and,
if so, whether sound stimuli would make certain
locomotive patterns more probable than others.

The affordances of the environment are what it
offers the animal, what it provides or furnishes,
either for good or ill […] I mean by it something
that refers to both the environment and the ani-
mal in a way no existing term does. It implies the
complementary of the animal and the environment.
(Gibson, 1986, p. 127)