New Wine in New Skins - Game Sound Technology and Player Interaction: Concepts and Developments - page 386

used to implement them and will be illustrated
through examples.

objects need to be rendered in a way that the brain
expects so that the information they represent can
be effectively processed. Virtual Reality research
demonstrates that plausibility and consistency
are very important in generating the sense of
presence and supporting in-world performance.
There is a need then to attend to the “objective”
characteristics of the sound object (particularly
environment ambience). (Bridgett, 2009a)

GAME sOUND DEsIGN tODAY

the Dominating Paradigms:
simulation of reality and
Hollywood Film Aesthetics

Looking at the topics discussed at the 2009 AEC
conference on Game Sound in London (Audio
Engineering Society, 2009) as well as the web-
sites of the Interactive Audio Special Interest
Group (IASig 2 ), the Game Audio Network Guild
(G.A.N.G. 3 ), Gamasutra 4 and others, shows that
the hot topics in contemporary game sound are
quite evident: dynamic mixing and digital signal
processing (DSP), dynamic procedural sound
generation techniques, and meta formats like
Interactive XMF. 5
In many cases, the related discourse concerns
the development of a credible “recreation of
reality” (Young, 2006). The technical apparatus
of computer games provides everything needed
for creating sounds that provide a truly coherent
simulation of “reality”. With the help of sound
design, middleware sounds can be “attached” to
sources, placed in Cartesian space and linked to
movements and scripted events. A powerful com-
bination of software engine and sound hardware
calculates and produces the correct psychoacoustic
transformations for creating the illusion of loca-
tion, movement and spatiality. The creative focus
on the simulation of reality is manifest in the
interest in providing a naturalistic presentation
of complex sound environments. Simon Carlile
writes in a comment to an article on the future of
Game Audio:

The automatic generation of sound in real
time through physical modelling seems to be a
logical next step in game sound, just as physics
simulations have become established through
middleware like Nvidia's PhysX. 6 In this scenario,
“creative” interventions are mostly limited, for
example, to modifying volume falloff curves in
order to fine-tune dynamic spatial mixing, but even
this is driven by functional necessities, which are
mostly the understandability of dialogue, creat-
ing clear distinction between “foreground” and
“background”, or preventing an overload of the
mix. It is symptomatic, that so far the only winner
of the award for “Most Innovative Use of Audio”
(given by the Game Audio Network Guild 7 that is
not a music game 8 follows these strategies and uses
the technologies mentioned: Tom Clancy's Ghost
Recon: Advanced Warfighter 2 (Ubisoft, 2007)
was awarded for its “audio controlling graphics
& physics engine”. This example reinforces the
observation that the ideal of a simulation system
is driving innovation in game sound design.
It is arguable that the only exception from
this limiting orientation towards the reproduction
of “realism” seems to be found in the genres of
horror and survival games as well as in games
with suspense-driven settings (see, for example,
Kromand, 2008). But within such contexts, “real-
ism” is simply replaced by the aim of fulfilling
established aesthetic expectations and conventions
using stereotypes and clichés from filmic genres
(horror, psycho-thriller and so forth). On closer
examination, this reveals a fundamental dialectic
inherent within contemporary computer games:

There can be hundreds of simultaneous sound
objects when we cross the road but fortunately
we hear out the approaching truck pretty reliably.
But to allow that capability in games, the sound