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ence to in- or out-of frame sounds leaves the
game soundscape intact as it assumes then that
all sounds are part of the gameworld. Such an
idea fits perfectly with Schafer and Truax's notion
of an acoustic community (1977; 2001): a sonic
locale or context that is formed over time through
a dynamic exchange between sounds, soundscape
and listeners, becoming an ecology of its own that
can be threatened, altered or generally disturbed
by the introduction of new, foreign sounds or the
removal of familiar signals that local inhabitants
(players) depend upon. The question is whether it
is an ecology, where the listener is consumed by
the soundscape in a spectator-based relationship
(Westerkamp, 1990), or if the ecology includes the
player in an (inter)active co-production. Again,
we have to remind ourselves that immersion is a
perception, not a sensation (Grimshaw, 2008, pp.
170-174). The answer is in the ear of the listener
so to speak: While even realistic games represent
only a small portion of the game environment soni-
cally (see Figure 4), they do successfully create
and maintain a sense of immersion, verisimilitude,
and belonging to a gameworld, not to mention
conveying information through sonic signals.
work and design complexity by counting on the fact
that players don't need that much realism—only
enough in order to be hooked . The idea being is, it
is acceptable if a lot of things from the real world
don't necessarily manifest themselves sonically in
the gameworld. Given this, we can now expand
the framework of listening positions from Table
1 to include a pattern of attention to sound that
ignores the otherwise obvious ”loopy”-ness of
sound effects and as such, the predictability of
game soundscapes as a whole. A listening of denial,
or naive listening is perhaps a good term to use. It
is not that players can't, when prompted, identify
the artificial nature of many sonic elements in a
game soundscape, it is that they conditionally and
purposefully ignore it, while instead immersing
themselves in the experience of gameplay. Ide-
als of game sound become less about fidelity of
acoustic sources or of audio quality and more the
verisimilitude of non-engaging engagement with
a holistic, interactive environment.
From the discussion so far, there are a few other
modes of listening that I would like to put forth,
however before I introduce them, it is important
to draw a link between the types of listening fos-
tered by the flow of television and contemporary
radio soundscapes, and those encouraged by the
gameplay experience in general. The emergence
of continuous media such as radio and TV cre-
ated a brand new type of listening experience:
one that Truax calls distracted or media listening
(2001, p. 169). In order to accommodate viewers
tuning in and out of the program and at the same
time attract and keep their attention, TV sound
flow uses a number of attention-management
techniques such as dynamic shift changes and
modular programming structure (Truax, 2001, p.
170). It essentially tells us how to listen. It trains
us to increase or decrease our auditory attention
by use of carefully crafted cues, until they become
second nature. These gestalts of auditory percep-
tion, then, seamlessly integrate cinema and game
sound, carrying the promise of total immersion,
suspension of disbelief and verisimilitude. As a
LIstENING tO GAME sOUND
It follows that the historic shifts of verisimilitude
in game sound have affected the experience of
listening as well. With the socio-cultural baggage
of radio and film sound, listeners are already
conditioned to accept aural objects (Metz, 1985),
internalize them, and think of them as more real
than the real sounds they represent. Further, listen-
ers of game sound have adopted what Colin Ware
(2004) refers to in visual studies as naive physics
of perception —in the aural sense. That is, play-
ers accept and often ignore the clearly artificial
behaviour of looped sound bites, their sometimes
low or unrealistic quality, and their lack of diversity
and complexity (see Figures 3 and 4). What Ware
was trying to get to is that designers often reduce
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