Listening to Fear - Game Sound Technology and Player Interaction: Concepts and Developments - page 208

production and reception of the games, these strate-
gies, to be efficient, must play with the gamer's
expectations—regarding the reading and listening
constraints imposed by the genre and paratext—
and exploit the cognitive schemes that help them
to classify the information they receive during
their gameplay sessions. In this line of thought,
the games must create situations that will generate
negative emotions such as fear, horror, and terror.
As only the gamer gets access to these emotions, I
privileged an approach oriented on the reception of
sound in a gameplay situation rather than a mere
analysis of technical data. It is consequently with
a terminology that does not reference directly the
game code or algorithm, but instead focuses on
the gamer's mental reproduction of the videoludic
universe, that I attempted to explain the importance
of sound in the development of horror computer
game strategies.
The gamer's first objective being to insure
the survival of their player character, their tasks
mainly revolve around detecting all the intrusions
that might become hazardous for their character.
In these circumstances, gamers must structure
the sounds they hear and extract from them all
the information they need to properly respond to
a given situation. This cognitive process has been
broadly presented with the help of Arsenault and
Perron's model (Figure 1). More precisely, the
gamer must determine the origin and the cause of
the sounds. To do so, they must first determine if
a sound is generated by an event present within
the videoludic world or overhanging this world.
The gamer must then refine this categorisation
to establish more precisely what, between their
actions, the enemies, the game environment, and
the game system, is the generator of the sound.
At the same time, they must pay attention to the
affordances (their functions) of the sounds which
might communicate information about the space,
the time, the enemies, and the events occurring
in the game environment. The gamer must then
evaluate which affordance must be prioritised
according to the circumstances.

To feel safe, the gamer must be able to quickly
find answers to their questions. To arouse fear,
horror games block this process. While the mor-
phologic nature of a sound is sometimes enough
to induce a strong feeling of discomfort, horror
computer games mostly rely on sound strategies to
reach their goal. From the startle effects to the cre-
ation of ambiguity between the sound generators,
the games trick the gamer's listening by limiting
the information the sounds carry. Plunged into a
universe of “un-knowledge” (Kromand, 2008),
the gamer can only be scared by their gameplay
experience. To be really effective, the sound strate-
gies must be part of a whole and integrated into
a global staging of fear, which also depends on
the relationships between the sound and images,
the gameplay, and the game's narrative. In the
end, it is the pressure applied by the genre, and
the deconstruction of the structure and the func-
tions of sound by the different in-game situations,
that will determine the true impact of the sound
strategies on the gamer.

rEFErENcEs

Alone in the dark . [Computer game]. (1992). In-
fogrames (Developer). Villeurbanne: Infogrames.

Alone in the dark: Inferno . [Computer game].
(2008). Eden Games S.A.S. (Developer). New
York: Atari.

Alone in the dark:The new nightmare . [Computer
game]. (2001). DarkWorks (Developer).Villeur-
banne: Infogrames.

Altman, R. (1992). General introduction: Cinema
as event . In Altman, R. (Ed.), Sound theory, sound
practice (pp. 1-14). New York: Routledge.

Arsenault, D., & Perron, B. (2009). In the frame
of the magic cycle: The circle(s) of gameplay .
In Perron, B., & Wolf, M. J. P. (Eds.), The video
game theory reader 2 (pp. 109-132). New York:
Routledge.