An Acoustic Communication Framework for Game Sound - Game Sound Technology and Player Interaction: Concepts and Developments - page 147

sound functions, foreground, midground and
background sounds; a community that forms over
time and evokes a coherent sense of place in the
gameworld. In this section, I'd like to also bring up
the idea of the acoustic soundscape that is located
outside the gameworld but exists synchronously
to it: the sounds that surround the player in her
physical environment, sounds that may or may not
be related to the gameplay, but are nevertheless
part of the immediate acoustic community that
the player or players are in. Without focusing too
much on the minutiae of less significant sonic
details such as household sounds, context does
offer quite a distinct sense of acoustic community
depending on whether a player is at home alone,
with friends, at an arcade, at a LAN party, or on
a headset with online co-players (see Figure 5). A
Rock Band house party, for example, is a particular
community where the soundmaking of multiple
players and audience members supplies much of
what makes this game's soundscape a great ex-
perience. It is precisely the exclamations of joy,
frustration, encouragement—and not the designed
game sound—that give this acoustic community
both a sense of fidelity and verisimilitude. In

contrast, many RPG, sports or puzzle games that
are played at home, even with company, result
in a much quieter soundscape with sporadic
and minimal interaction. Using Teamspeak or
other voice chat programs for Massively multi-
player online role-playing games (MMORGs) or
multi-player military strategy games results in
yet another acoustic community where players'
voices have to fit seamlessly within the spectral
niche of the game's soundscape without masking
or obliteration: every second counts and a lot of
the designed sonic information is crucial to the
gameplay (see Figure 5). Game expos, conven-
tions and professional game championships are
another quintessential acoustic community of
gaming, filled with PAs (amplified public an-
nouncements), a constant arcade-like hum of
game sounds: the shifting of chairs and mashing of
buttons, whether players are wearing headphones
or not, the murmur and exclamations of crowds.
In fact the arcade environment, as Phillips (2009)
points out, is responsible for some of the early
choices in game sound as each game's signature
soundtrack was designed to attract attention in a
loud and noisy acoustic environment of competing

Figure 5. On the left we see a recording from an arcade ambience: a constant hum of competing, mask-
ing sounds, many of which are already distorted synthetic chiptunes (in the zoom-in section). On the
right we have a Teamspeak-based recording of a World of Warcraft mission: the progression (upper
section) clearly reflects more verbal excitement as the team finally defeats a difficult boss, culminating
into celebratory exclamations.