Listening to Fear - Game Sound Technology and Player Interaction: Concepts and Developments - page 211

ENDNOtEs Worldof Warcraft . [Computer game]. (2004).

Vivendi (Developer). Irvine: Blizzard.

1

It must be mentioned that this chapter does
not wish to theorize the perhaps ill-suited
notion of videoludic genres—a fertile field
of computer game research that should, in
coming years, generate quite a debate-but
wishes, rather, to use it as a tool to better
understand how gamers structure their
gameplay session in survival horror games.

KEY tErMs AND DEFINItIONs

Allure: It is the amplitude or frequency modu-
lation of a sound.
Comprendre: According to Schaeffer, com-
prendre means grasping a meaning, values, by
treating the sound like a sign, referring to this
meaning as a function of a language, a code.
Dynamic Profile: It is the temporal evolution
of the sound's energy.
Écouter: According to Schaeffer, écouter, is
listening to someone, to something; and through
the intermediary of sound, aiming to identify the
source, the event, the cause, it treats the sound as
a sign of this source, this event.
Entendre: According to Schaeffer, entendre,
here, according to its etymology, means showing
an intention to listen [écouter], choosing from
what we hear [ouïr] what particularly interests
us, thus “determining” what we hear.
Grain: It can be defined as the microstructure
of sound matter, such as the rubbing of a bow.
Mass Profile: It is the evolution in the mass of
a sound. For example, from pitched to complex.
Mise En Scène: It is the organisation of the
different elements that define the staging of a scene,
or, in the case that interests us, the simulation of
a gameplay sequence.
Ouïr: According to Schaeffer, ouïr is to per-
ceive by the ear, to be struck by sounds, it is the
crudest level, the most elementary of perception;
so we “hear”, passively, lots of things which we
are not trying to listen to nor understand
Videoludic: It is an adjecti.ve linked to vid-
eogames. The use of this term opens a door for
the utilisation of sonoludic as an adjective for
audio only games or computer games in which
gameplay mechanics are mostly based on sound.

2

For space reasons, I chose to limit my analysis
of these specific factors. Just keep in mind
that the industry and the technology play a
great part in the final rendering of the games.

3

Note that the former definition is largely
associated with reception issues while the
later refers to the productions aspects of the
games.

4

Generic issues of survival horror games will
therefore be approached as a “constraint
of listening” from which the gamer will
organise and evaluate the role of sound in a
given context.

5

Indeed, while playing a game, the gamer
never has access to this code. As Arsenault
and Perron (2009) explained, the gamer
“only witnesses the [...] result of the com-
puter's response to his action. He does not,
per se, discover the game's algorithm which
remains encoded, hidden and multifaceted”
which means that “the notion that a gamer's
experience and a computer program directly
overlap is a mistake” (p. 110). While this
statement upholds the approach of this
paper, it also calls for a use of terminology
that can reflect a game audio structure with
accuracy and that can be applied directly to
a gameplay situation.

6

I find necessary to make this distinction be-
cause the notion diegesis, which is now often
broadly defined as “the fictional world of the
story” (Bordwell, 1986) might be question-
able as it sometimes seems to borrow too
much from narrative theory. Étienne Souriau