Listening to Fear - Game Sound Technology and Player Interaction: Concepts and Developments - page 199

tHE FUNctIONs OF HOrrOr
cOMPUtEr GAME sOUND

zone sounds. These sound cues consist of sounds
“linked to the environment in which the game is
played” (Huiberts & van Tol, 2008, Zone section,
para. 1). While these sounds are often implemented
to generate the ambience of the game, they also
serve as spatial functions and might give certain
information about the game state. In Dead Space ,
these sounds include the rumbling of the ship and
some of the gruesome sounds emitted by the pre-
programmed burst of blood coming out of organic
matter that can be found on the wall and floor.
Game system-generated sounds are by far the
most ambiguous. Jørgensen (2008) defined them
as sounds “generated by the system to provide
information that any [player character] cannot
produce on its own, and carry information directly
connected to game rules and as well as game
and [gamer] state” ( Conclusions and Summary
section, para.3). Horror computer games do not
include many of those sounds. However, a few
examples can be found. The “fuzzing” sound,
accompanied by heart pounding, that is emitted
when an player character is lethally wounded in
Resident Evil 5 could correspond to this descrip-
tion as it is not directly produced by a gamer's
action, it is generated by the system to warn the
gamer that his player character needs immedi-
ate health assistance. While it is not explicitly
mentioned by Jørgensen, I would argue that the
extra-diegetic musical score of the game is also
system generated. While this music often plays an
affective role in the game, it also serves presence
and game state purposes. For instance, in Alone in
the Dark: Inferno (Atari, 2008), the music ramps
up, signalling that enemies are nearby or attack-
ing the player character. It is mostly according
to the relationship between this extra-diegetic
music, the gamer, and the gameworld that this
category of generators will be examined in this
paper. These generators will be used as a structural
basis when studying the creation of horror game
sound strategies.

To reach his objective, the gamers must also gather
information about the game state. To do so, they
must ask themselves what are the functions of
a particular sonic cue and, if the sounds serve
more than one purpose, which function is more
important according to the context?
In computer games, sounds contribute to the
gamer's immersion: they construct the mood of
the game, and provide information that will be
used in gameplay. According to Jørgensen (2006),
we can state that sound serves two main func-
tions. On one hand, it “has the overarching role
of supporting a user system” and, on the other, it
is “supporting the sense of presence in a fictional
world” (p. 48). This basically means that sound
creates “a situation where the usability information
of elements such as [sound] becomes integrated
with the sense of presence in the virtual world”
(Jørgensen, 2008, Integration of Game System
and Virtual World section, para. 1).

the (Double) causality of sound

To fill the important functions exposed by Jør-
gensen, I believe that sounds first need to create
a feeling of causality with: 1) the images (and
more largely with the gameworld) and 2) with
the gamer's actions.
Just like in movies, images and sounds are
tightly linked, producing the effect of added value ,
described by Michel Chion (2003) as a “sensory,
informative, semantic, narrative, structural or
expressive value that a sound heard during a scene
leads us to project on the image, until creating
the impression that we see in this image what in
reality we 'audio-see'” (p. 436, freely translated).
The added value of a sound on the images creates
what Chion called audio-visiogenic effects which
can be classified within four categories: (1) ef-
fect of sense, atmosphere, content, (2) rendering
and matter effect ( materializing sound indices )