Listening to Fear - Game Sound Technology and Player Interaction: Concepts and Developments - page 205

systems have been designed through sound. The
most renowned case of such a technique and,
incidentally, the most studied—being discussed
by Carr (2003), Kromand (2008), Perron (2004)
and Whalen (2004) —is the pocket radio in the
Silent Hill series. This radio, which emits static
when a threat is nearby, plays its role as a warning
system perfectly. Forewarning can also be created
through a more classical way through making use
of off-screen sounds (Perron, 2004). This is the
case in Alone in the Dark: The New Nightmare
(Infogrames, 2001) when, during the numerous
seconds necessary for the gamer to go down the
stairs leading to the interior court of the fort, it
is possible to hear sounds associated with plant
monsters coming from outside the frame of the
fixed virtual camera shots.
If we could believe that such a warning, pre-
figuring the entrance of a gloomy monster inside
the screen, could reduce the feeling of fear or
uneasiness in the gamer, research cited in Perron's
(2004) work tends to prove the opposite. As the
author himself specifies, “[…] simple forewarning
is not a way to prevent intense emotional upset.
It is worse than having no information about an
upcoming event” (Perron, 2004, p. 135). Such a
method creates terror by anticipation based on a
fear of the unseen.
However, what Perron fails to highlight, is
that forewarning does not rely only on the sound
function of the same name. To be really effective,
the forewarning must be unreliable and/or the
quantity of information about the localisation of
the generator must be limited. This precision offers
the opportunity to introduce another strategy of
horror computer games which relies on the func-
tions of game sound: luring the gamer with sound.

will privilege without ambiguity the identification
and localisation of the source with sound, will
submit sound's diffusion to the sound proper-
ties' logic” (p. 53, freely translated). To create
fear and strong feelings of discomfort, horror
games execute a reversal of this concept making
the generators of the sounds harder to identify
and localize. In the example from Alone in the
Dark: The New Nightmare described earlier, the
designers have avoided creating an evolution in
the morphological properties of the sounds of the
plant monsters in relation to the player character
travelling through the fort's space. This technique
is used to alter the information the sound is car-
rying regarding the distance separating the threat
and the gamer's player character. While listening
carefully, the gamer remarks no variation in the
dynamic profile and mass profile of the sound
generated by the creatures of darkness even though
the player character performs a descent which, if
it were scaled, would be equivalent to a little less
than a hundred meters. In this case, the designers
intentionally reduce the quantity of information
carried by the sound in a way that limits the
gamer's interpretation of space and time, as it is
impossible to evaluate the distance between the
player character and the monsters. However, this
tweaking of the spatial and temporal functions of
the sound allows for an emphasis to be put on its
forewarning purpose, which is bound to influence
the progression function of the sound. Preventing
the easy localization of the source/generator of the
sound has an effect of reinforcing the suspense
established by the forewarning while simultane-
ously forcing the gamer to take a more prudent
approach while going down the stairs.
Many horror game strategies rely on creating a
certain level of ambiguity regarding the origin of
sounds within the gameworld. While this can be
achieved, as suggested by Daniel Kromand (2008),
by blurring the frontier between the diegetic and
non-diegetic parts of the game, similar exercises
can be performed between instances within the
diégèse. This partly explains why I chose to

Luring the Gamer With sound

In his master's thesis, Serge Cardinal (1994)
explained that “filmic writing favouring the
emergence of a clear spatial structure will have
the tendency to anchor the sound with its source,