An Acoustic Communication Framework for Game Sound - Game Sound Technology and Player Interaction: Concepts and Developments - page 140

VErIsIMILItUDE the player. So already, there is an implication that

the auditeur is also a participant, hearing with
the ears of the character. As Chion (2003) puts
it (in relation to David Lynch's cinematographic
style): “We listen to the characters listening to us
listening to them” (p. 153). In FPS games, this
relationship is even clearer as the soundscape
design is very intentionally oriented towards an
authentic experience of listening with the char-
acter's ears—the acoustic field shifting with the
avatar's movement on screen, the reflections,
sound coloration and directionality of sounds
dynamically and responsively shifting along—a
mode of listening that Grimshaw (2008) defines
as first-person audition (p. 83).
Undoubtedly, one of the most important
predecessors of game sound is sound in cinema.
Expanding the context of significance to other
media forms would include radio (the predecessor
to film) as well as television and a particular genre
of motion picture: cartoons (with their own prede-
cessor, the paper comic). Unlike cinema, however,
where sound's role is highly artistic and affective,
or radio and television, where sound is part of a
programming flow (Truax, 2001, p. 169) sound
in games must aspire to both aesthetic, affective
as well as informational and epistemic functions.
Since games are an interactive medium, these
functions often overlap and are interdependent.
Verisimilitude as a feature of a designed or sup-
porting soundscape can be traced back to the early
days of radio particularly with radio drama (Truax,
2001, p. 170). In the absence of a visual reference
in-house generated sound effects came to play a
central role in creating a realistic environment to
go along with the narrative, thus inadvertently
giving birth to some of the most widespread
conventions of cinema and game sound: notable
examples being fist-fight sounds or walking in
snow sounds, the former being generated as an
artificial exaggeration of what a punch would
sound like, and the latter is easily simulated by
grinding a fist into a bag of rice or peppercorns.
Foley art, which emerged as the mainstream film

If fidelity refers to the faithfulness of sound quality
in computer games, verisimilitude concerns itself
with the experience and nature of truthfulness
and authenticity in a game context, as conveyed
through the game soundscape. In the section above
we used the notion of fidelity to trace the move
from synthetic tones representing real actions to
realistic sound effects attached to character move-
ments that are called up interactively to combine
into a unique and (at least in principle) seamless
flow. Verisimilitude addresses precisely the nature
of this acoustic ecology and its claim to represent
a realistic experience in both temporal and spatial
terms. In its traditional literary/theatrical defini-
tion, verisimilitude reflects the extent to which a
work of fiction exhibits realism or authenticity, or
otherwise conforms to our sense of reality. In film,
the notion of verisimilitude signifies the relative
success of cinematography at creating an immer-
sive, engaging fictional world of hyper-realistic
proportions both in terms of image and sound,
but also of intensity of emotion and experience
(Chion, 1994; Deutch, 2003; Figgis, 2003; Murch,
1995). The core idea in this section is the notion
that game sound has developed historically to
conform to our sense of reality while at the same
time it has constructed a sense of reality, particular
to games, that we now expect.

role in Game sound:
socio-cultural History

Cinematic immersion works by presenting a hyper-
real universe, a larger-than-life movie world with
action and emotion wrought to an exaggeratedly
high intensity. It both summons attention and
diverts attention. Its visual and auditory elements
both attract and construct an experience and work
to divert the audience's attention from realizing
that what they see isn't real . In games, this is even
more the case-by definition games are interactive-
their auditory and visual elements are driven by