Guidelines for Sound Design in Computer Games - Game Sound Technology and Player Interaction: Concepts and Developments - page 369

Guideline 2: select Elements Whose
changes in sonic Expression May
support or translate Emotions

birds (relaxation, attentiveness, fleeing); weather
elements (calm, scaring); baby sounds (joy,
tranquility, agitation, affliction); nice breakable
materials (aesthetic contemplation, trespassing,
destruction). When designing a game's emotional script,

the designer should evaluate how sound will
contribute to it. There is no doubt emotions are
core to computer games. Additionally, it is well
documented that sounds can be used to support
emotional contexts. Actually, that is a common
practice-and sometimes the ultimate goal-in
some mature fields as music (Gouk, 2004) and
the cinema (Lynch, 2003). It is important to notice
we are not claiming that sound should be the way
to support emotions in computer games. Sound
is one way to contribute to that but one way that
should not be forgotten, considering its potential
and particular strengths for these purposes.
One approach that can be further explored,
when selecting each acoustic element according
to its association to emotion, is to evaluate it
with an emphasis on its ability to support differ-
ent emotions, that is to say, to express emotional
changes through its own sonic alteration. This is
not mandatory, since emotional changes may be
achieved by resorting to different elements-pos-
sibly one to support each different emotion-but
it may be advantageous to explore the use of
elements capable of supporting several emo-
tional states and signaling the correspondent
change. That, for instance, may relieve the user
from interpreting new sonic elements for their
emotive associations, and may provide gains in
effectiveness. Moreover, the swapping of distinct
sonic elements in the soundscape is more prone to
erroneous interpretations, such as motion of their
respective sources, although visual information
may be enough for disambiguation. Finally, and
more relevantly, this approach is more likely to
offer continuity and emotional gradations.
As in Guideline 1, this is a matter of creative
gathering and the selection of possibilities. A
few illustrative examples of elements and their
possible associate emotional states would be:

Guideline 3: Allow sound to
Matter in the Gameworld

The nature of the interaction, as perceived by the
user, should be extended in order to genuinely
integrate sound as an instrument for action in the
environment. This is perhaps the most neglected
use of sound in computer games. Sound, if used,
is predominantly relegated to complement the
visual rendering. It serves as output, which is
good but just half the idea. In fact, acting through
sound makes perfect sense in a system with a
bidirectional interface. There is no reason for
sound driven actions not to deserve the same kind
of appreciation as running, jumping, grabbing, or
shooting. Allowing the player to perform through
sound, either as a consequence of some contex-
tualized and meaningful action or by explicitly
deploying some sonic event, has the potential
to greatly extend the value of the experience.
Moreover, it significantly enlarges the space of
possibilities in terms of design of the gameplay.
Reasons for the under-exploration of this kind of
approach may be that this is something that could
hardly be borrowed from music or cinema-the
chief contributors for sound design practices in
computer games (Deutsch, 2003)-and that it is
also commonly neglected in computer applica-
tion interfaces.
It should be noted that we are thinking beyond
speech-activated commands. Speech recognition
is not a goal in our study. Also, the kind of input
suggested in this guideline is particularly mean-
ingful if it does not consist of a mere mapping of
commands that otherwise would be entered by
pressing a key or button. Although the latter may
be useful, it doesn't truly represent a change in
the interaction itself but only in its activation. In