Guidelines for Sound Design in Computer Games - Game Sound Technology and Player Interaction: Concepts and Developments - page 367

ally or as an insightful metaphor, we must realize
that if we want a player to resonate to a system's
desired state we may need to first get the system
resonating with the player and then progressively
bring the system-and the player along-into the
desired state.
Resonance-including, for our purposes the
related concepts of entrainment, sympathetic
vibration, resonant frequencies, and resonant
systems-has been said to be “the single most im-
portant concept to understand if you are to grasp
the constructive or destructive role of sound in
your life” (Leeds, 2001, p. 35). We believe reso-
nance is fundamental to the exploration of sound
in computer games, notably to support a model
that serves as an aid to understanding and, hope-
fully, overcoming the issue of empathy between
a game and its players.

ing: considering the relevance of acoustic proper-
ties of elements selected for interaction, namely
as to their emotional effect; conveying meaning
and coherent consequence to diegetic sound, inside
the gameworld; allowing to perform through the
exploration of the sonic outcome of meaningful
actions; exploring the activation of events and
interaction elements through the interpretation
of the corresponding acoustic expressions; inte-
grating users' context in the sonic composition;
supporting and exploiting resonance and entrain-
ment; and dealing with perception issues during
a user's experience. Each guideline is presented
with a description, relevant context, and examples.
For the conception of these guidelines, we
did not focus on speech-based interaction. Also,
although we do not exclude the use of music,
we are mainly interested in exploring interaction
through non-musical sounds. In terms of sound
layers (Peck, 2001, 2007), this does not mean we
will not be considering dialog and music because
that would ruin our commitment to the holistic
approach underpinning our research: Depending
on the purpose with which specific sound stimuli
are added to the composition, they can play a role
in any layer. It simply means we are not attempting
to contribute guidelines that specifically go into
such matters as dialog generation and interpreta-
tion or musical composition in the strict sense.

GUIDELINEs FOr sOUND
DEsIGN IN cOMPUtEr GAMEs

Based on the concepts and findings here described,
we have distilled a set of guidelines for sound
design in computer games. We encourage readers
to understand this set as a work-in-progress. Our
purpose is to contribute to the research community
by building knowledge that can give us and other
researchers the confidence to consider it plausible
and worth refining not least for its use value to
computer game sound designers. Therefore, these
guidelines have no claim (yet) of truth-value:
instead, their value is strictly instrumental to the
research and structuring of a body of knowledge in
sound design. Also, the guidelines do not prescribe
procedures but, instead, establish a mindset that
can inform those procedures. In that sense, they
state what to care about rather than stipulating
how to do it in a particular instance. But, most
of all, they are meant to generate understanding,
not to be obeyed.
The guidelines attend to the identification of
several affective aspects of sound design, includ-

Guideline 1: select Elements
with High sonic Potential

It is strategic that the inherent, potential sonic
expressiveness is valued when selecting the inter-
action protagonists in early stages of design. This
mindset applies to the full extent of the game's
components, including objects, characters, script,
and features such as the gameplay. Actually, this
guideline is the mother of all others here presented:
In every each of them, for the designer to be able
to implement the respective idea, a dedicated
selection of these components is mandatory. We
will avoid stating it as a prerequisite because it