Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
track plays music with a certain content represent-
ing a level of intensity or emotion and the game
engine cross-fades between the tracks to create
the correct blend of intensity and emotion. The
horizontal dimension is often implemented using
short phrases of 1, 2 or 4 bars linked together.
When a transition from one musical segment to
another is motivated by the state of the game, the
current phrase is played to the end and the chain
of linked phrases takes another route than if the
game state had not changed.
and awareness about vision, graphic design and so
forth is also remarkably higher, more general and
more common than their sounding counterparts, as
are the creative tools available. In the Association
for Computing Machinery's Computing Classifi-
cation System (2010), sound and audio are added
late compared to, for example, computer graphics.
Sound and audio are also mentioned on a lower
level (level three) in the classification system,
whereas computer graphics is a level two item.
balance the senses
3D-Positioned Audio
Our eyes play a dominant role in our everyday lives
and computer game development has tradition-
ally put most emphasis on graphics and vision. At
the same time, other modalities and media types
such as sound and hearing can be described as
underused. This suggests that new computer game
concepts could potentially be found by chang-
ing the balance between modalities and media
types. What happens for example if we reduce
graphics and visual stimuli and instead build the
gaming experience more on sound and audition?
What would the effect be if you had a computer
game with only an absolute minimum of graphics
and instead a rich, varied and gameplay-driving
soundscape? Potentially such a game would be
immersive in other ways and give different types
of game experiences compared to more traditional,
graphics-based games. A couple of things im-
mediately become obvious. First of all, the game
designer must let other qualities than computer
graphics build and drive gameplay. Secondly the
player is liberated from the need to keep her eyes on
a 20-something-inch rectangle (in mobile applica-
tions only a few inches). Instead, all of a sudden,
she becomes free to move over much larger areas
or even volumes. Both these open up possibilities
to create radically new types of computer games
for radically new computer game experiences.
They also represent new challenges for both game
designers and computer game players (see Hug,
2011 for an expansion of such ideas).
Since sounds are the results of physical events
in three-dimensional space, it is often vital to
be able to give the impression of game sound
as emanating from a certain point in a 3D space
(see Murphy, 2011). 3D-positioned audio is a
powerful technique to bridge the gap between
the virtual game reality and the physical world
of the player's senses. This is especially true for
sound effects but is also very useful for speech
and dialog. Music and ambient sounds are most
often not 3D-positioned.
sOUND FOr FANtAsY
AND FrEEDOM
We cannot hear away from a sound like we can
look away from an object, and we have no “earlids”
to shut as we can our eyelids. These simple facts
makes sound ideal to use if you are looking for new
game concepts to contrast the traditional screen
and eye-based computer games. Western societies
are often said to be vision-based or eye-centric.
This suggests that we rely mostly on our eyes and
use our other senses and abilities more or less just
as support for what we see. In language this is
reflected in that we “watch” things. We “watch”
TV and films despite silent movies being history
since the 1930s. We even “watch” music concerts
(at least this is true in Swedish). Our knowledge
Search WWH ::
Custom Search