Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
Table 2. Survey of Participants' Interest in Game Soundtrack and Music
Does the soundtrack/music of a computer game make you more interested in
playing or buying it?
Yes
50%
No
44%
Don't Know
6%
to a gamer parting with their hard-earned cash.
As mentioned earlier, game series like Grand
Theft Auto , FIFA and Dave Mirra feature music
by well-known recording artists, in some cases
including music that has been commissioned
specifically for that game.
It can be seen in the results summarised in this
section that, other than the added value suggested
above, users do not place any particular emphasis
on game sound. As was expected, the main aspects
users were interested in were the playability and
graphics of a game, although interaction with
sound offers great potential. The development of
new sound-motivated games will be a dynamic
and challenging field in the years to come, though
we must not forget the golden rule of a successful
game: playability.
The under-use of sound in games is further
supported by Parker and Heerema (2008), a source
the reader is encouraged to investigate if they are
still in doubt as to the true potential of sound in
the gaming environment. To quote directly from
their work: “The use of sound in an interactive
media environment has not been advanced, as a
technology, as far as graphics or artificial intel-
ligence” (p. 1). Their work goes on to justify these
assertions and they explain that poor quality sound
in a game often results in the game being unsuc-
cessful in the marketplace, whilst the success of
a game containing an acceptable or higher quality
of sound will be based upon other factors such as
playability or graphics.
It is clear from the discussions and investigation
covered in this section that human interaction and
psychological and emotional links with games are
more and more to the fore, as well as becoming
increasingly important in the development of suc-
cessful gaming experiences. It is fair to assume
that users are not only affected by sound and music
but that they also respond to feedback and interact
with the game, essentially providing full-duplex
communication between human and machine that
is becoming increasingly information-rich. It is
these interactions and information that the rest of
this chapter focuses on.
cONtENt
Digital audio data holds much more information
than the raw binary data from which it is consti-
tuted. At its barest, sound and music are generally
provided to augment and provide realism to the
current scenario. However, as we demonstrated
in the previous section of this chapter, computer
games are truly multimedia experiences that
combine a range of stimuli to interact with the
user. In short, we see the area of content analysis
as providing a semi-intelligent mechanism with
which to tie together one or more media employed
in a multimedia environment in order to provide
even more effective and efficient interaction and
experience.
Content of a particular medium can take many
different forms, some of which will be shared
across a range of media while others will be ex-
clusive to a particular media type. The following
is an attempt to briefly describe and exemplify
these two categories:
Shared content information. If we consider
an entire multimedia artefact as being a
hierarchical object, greater than the sum
of its parts, then shared content informa-
 
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