Emotion, Content, and Context in Sound and Music - Game Sound Technology and Player Interaction: Concepts and Developments - page 241

and interaction with the game, rather than being
present purely to be heard. They reiterate that
sound in games at present is reactive rather than
interactive. However, in this chapter, we suggest
that sound is simply a tool of the emotions and
that it is player emotion that should be interactive,
rather than reactive, in order to provide a new level
of computer gaming experiences. We feel this
can be strongly underpinned by the use of sound.
Parker and Heerema go on to describe audio
gaming and provide a series of examples and
discussions of scenarios where sound can be used
as the primary interaction mechanism between the
player and the computer game. These range from
the player reacting to audio cues, providing the
game with input using speech, or other sonic input,
and by directly controlling sound and music in the
game. Although concise and valid at representing
the current state of play of sound in games, their
work does not consider the affective nature of
using sound in games. Emotion is triggered by
sound and the two are intrinsically linked.
Recent work by Grimshaw, Lindley, and Nacke
(2008) seeks to formalise the relationship between
a subject's immersion in a game environment as a
function of the auditory content. Grimshaw et al.
employ a series of biometric techniques to provide
insight into the human emotional and physiological
response to the sonic actions and environment of a
first-person shooter game. Their method employs
a significant array of quantitative, physiological
measurements that are correlated with subjective
questioning. The deep complexity of human emo-
tion and psychology is exposed in their work as
a strong relationship between the results of these
two investigative methods cannot be found. This
deficiency is the subject of significant discussion
by the authors and, unsurprisingly, it is suggested
as an area for significant future investigation.
It is important to place an emphasis on this
point: although broad hypotheses and empirical
evidence show sound and music play a large part
in stimulating emotional responses in human sub-
jects, the quantification of these effects, especially

objective measurement, is elusive. Subjective in-
vestigation has traditionally always been the forté
of psychological and sociological researchers. It is
for this reason that sound designers and scientists
working in the field must have an awareness of
these issues, especially the sound designer working
in computer game and multimedia development.
In short, emotion is highly difficult to measure in
an absolute way. Bridging this gap must be done
carefully and backed-up by considered research
and investigation.
There is a wealth of literature relating to the
emotional impact of games. Equally, there is an
increasing amount of published work concern-
ing audio games; the majority of literature still
concerns itself with traditional, visually-focused
games. As the reader may have noticed in this sec-
tion of this topic, there are few studies that have
concerned themselves with using sound as the
primary interactive method whilst also monitoring
and responding to the emotional reactions of the
game player. It is just this sort of scenario that the
studies and ideas presented in this chapter aim to
inspire, support and help stimulate.

Are sound and Music really
Important in Games?

It is interesting to consider to what extent sound is
perceived as being important by users in computer
games. If we consider the move from the beeps and
clicks that early computer games such as Space
Invaders and Pong made to modern alternatives
such as the Guitar Hero series, we can see that
the computer games industry has certainly placed
an increased focus on the use of sound and music
in games. To this extent, we conducted research,
by means of a user survey, into determining user
awareness of sound in computer games. The work
is documented in grater detail in (Cunningham,
Grout, & Hebblewhite, 2006), but a summary
of the important findings and discussions are
provided here.