Listening to Fear - Game Sound Technology and Player Interaction: Concepts and Developments - page 196

gameplay. It will allow me to better illustrate how
the gamer produces meaning of sounds as a means
of completing their main objective: the survival
of their player character.
Arsenault and Perron (2009) defined computer
games as “a chain of reactions” in which “[t]
he [gamer] does not act so much as he reacts to
what the game presents to him, and similarly, the
game reacts to his input” (pp. 119-120) In other
words, the gamer responds to events that were
programmed by a designer (whose job partly
consisted of predicting the gamer's reactions
to the proposed events), and then the game acts
in response to the gamer's input with other pre-
programmed events fitting the new parameters.
According to their gameplay (and gamer-centric
model), the authors explained (a single loop of)
gameplay through four steps in which “the game
always gets the first turn to speak” (Arsenault &
Perron, 2009):

evolution of the gamer's relationship with the
game—is left aside” (Arsenault & Perron, 2009,
p. 115). To correct this failing, Arsenault and Per-
ron proposed a model—the Magic Cycle (Figure
1)—that is based on 3 interconnected spirals: the
heuristic spiral of gameplay, the heuristic spiral
of narrative and the hermeneutic spiral. They also
clarified that: “[t]he relationship to each other is
one of inclusion: the gameplay leads to the unfold-
ing of the narrative, and together the gameplay
and the narrative can make possible some sort of
interpretation” (p. 118). Their model also took
into account the gamer's experience in gaming
and the horizon of expectations of the gamer that
are shaped by their previous knowledge of the
game or sometimes by an introductory cut scene.
While looking at the model, these are respectively
represented by the dotted lines entitled “launch
window” and by the inverted spiral. From this
point the looping process described above will
be “repeated countless numbers of time to make
up the magic cycle” (p. 121) and to represent the
mental image the gamer develops about the game
(represented by the Game′ of the model). This
perpetual process, alongside the implication of
the generic context, will therefore allow for the
mental organisation of sounds towards the gamer
activity inside the game.

• From the game's database, the game's

algorithm draws the 3-D objects and tex-
tures, and plays animations, sound files,
and finds everything else that it needs to
represent the game state

• The game outputs these to the screen,

speakers, or other peripherals. The gamer
uses his perceptual skills (bottom-up) to
see, hear and/or feel what is happening

strUctUrING HOrrOr
cOMPUtEr GAME sOUND

• The gamer analyses the data at hand

through his broader anterior knowledge (in
top-down fashion) of narrative convention,
generic competence, gaming repertoire,
etc. to make a decision

When they are engaged in a horror game, the
exercise of gameplay requires the gamer to some-
what organise sounds according to their gaming
objectives which, in the case of the genre we study
here, mainly revolve around allowing their player
character to survive the horrors of the game. In
order to do so, the gamer tries to answer two basic
questions regarding game sound: 1) From where
does that sound originate? and 2) what is the cause
of that sound? I therefore propose to explore a basic
sound structure that will effectively represent the

• The gamer uses his implementation skills

(such as hand-eye coordination) to react to
the game event, and the game recognizes
this input and factors it into the change of
the game state. (pp. 120-121)

However, as the authors recalled, “the most
obvious flaw of representing gameplay with a
single circle is that the temporal progression—the