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that would entail different (perhaps more second-
ary, limited, or perhaps more information-based/
driven) uses of game sound than entertainment
games - driven by a quest for playfulness, fun
and challenge.
telepresence, body-suits, etc. This vision might
now actually become technically feasible.
But just to give this a twist into a slightly dif-
ferent direction: What if in the future (which
actually has already begun in some ways) there
is no “closed system” of gaming anymore? No
dedicated software and hardware interfaces?
When gaming is pervasive, where you are, where
shopping for food becomes a quest for the one
milk bottle which contains the key to level 92?
When your CO2 footprint directly links to your
avatar's stats and to bonus programmes offered
by a green power syndicate?
Human computation - the use of gaming structures
for humans to do actual work, may be fringe now,
but I see it rising with trends like education technol-
ogy (I myself am in that field, somewhat…) and I
can't help but thinking game sound - its potentials
for fun and playfulness - might suffer, should
pragmatics over-ride aesthetics and playfulness.
Just throwing this out there...
What of sound, then, being neither a reflection
of a (constructed) reality nor the expression of a
separate, self-referential aesthetic system (“game
sound aesthetics”, think 8 bit...), but an element
in a hybrid, electroacoustic soundscape? I'm do-
ing some extensive research on sound design for
interactive artifacts for everyday use and there I
constantly run into this question. In this scenario
there is no distinguished system of aesthetic codes
anymore as we know it from film and today's
games, there is no entering or leaving a specific
application, environment, cinema, game, etc.,
there is just a constant “multilayeredness” of pres-
ence and agency - or maybe a constant switching
between presences. And this poses fundamental
questions about what might be suitable (sound)
design strategies. How do we combine, merge,
juxtapose, subvert the “naturally occurring”
physical sounds, and the sounds of a pervasive
gaming system? And how do we integrate these
sonic events into the socio-cultural fabric of
everyday life?
Grimshaw: I don't think game sound will suf-
fer. Pragmatics might be needed should game
structures broaden their reach into non-gaming
areas because such areas are not intended to be
games and therefore do not need (necessarily)
game aesthetics and playfulness.
Grimshaw: With regard to Droumeva, you
brought up the idea of network tangible control-
lers. What about extending this to incorporate
biofeedback in a multi-player system? We've
already discussed using a player's psychophysiol-
ogy to affect/effect sound in the game and, due
to the nature of networked games, assuming the
new sound then has a feedback effect upon the
player, this will probably have an effect upon
gameplay and other players. So far, the biofeedback
sound is only heard by the one player -- could the
parameters used to drive the sound synthesis/
processing also be sent via the network to other
player's audio engines? In a horror game, can
players then sense the fear of others?
This sounds maybe far out, but then again, it is
happening already. Do we need to investigate
not only the “acoustic ecology” of the game, as
pointed out by Grimshaw in his work, but an
acoustic ecology of our game-lives?
Hug: There is something in this discussion
which strongly reminds me of mid-end nineties
discussions about full immersion cyberspace,
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