CONTEXT - A Game Design Vocabulary - page 97

Sound as Emphasis
Jeff Minter's Space Giraffe (2007) continually bombards the player with visual information, with
melting lights and distorting lines. As the player becomes oversaturated with visual chaos, she
is forced to depend on the audio. Each enemy makes a different noise when shot, allowing the
player to construct a map of the scene and determine what kind of enemy behaviors she'll have
to plan for, using a kind of sonar.
Lesbian Spider-Queens of Mars is a fast-moving game. It signals the arrival of each new slave with
a different noise. The slow, shielded slave that can only be zapped from the back has a lower-
pitched kind of laughing noise, for example. This gives the player an idea of the threats that
exist without her having to look away from the danger she's currently concentrating on. DOOM
is similar: because of its first-person perspective, the player might not be facing a monster
when it becomes aware of her presence and begins to move toward her to attack. So each dif-
ferent species of monster has a unique “roar” when it first sees the protagonist and becomes
aggressive.
Sound can influence a player's choices. In Super Mario Bros ., every successive sound made when
Mario jumps on an enemy increases in pitch until the player achieves a reward (an extra Mario).
A rising pitch creates an expectation: it encourages the player to complete the progression.
Mike Meyer's game Horse vs Planes (2012) pulls a similar trick. The player is given a score bonus
every time she collects a fruit in quick succession. The first is worth 100 points, the next is worth
200, then 500, to a maximum of 10,000 (see Figure 4.23). There's an element of time pressure,
though: if the player takes too long between collecting fruit—two seconds—the bonus resets.
The pressure to collect fruit rapidly and maintain the bonus complicates the protagonist's—
a horse's—relationship with the antagonists—the planes—that are zooming dangerously
through the play area. As in Super Mario , the fruit collection noise increases in pitch along the C
scale with every increase in bonus points, up to the maximum, at which point the pitch (and the
bonus) remain the same until the timer resets (and the pitch along with it).
The pitch of these sounds communicates three things. Most importantly, it tells the player that
her actions are having a cumulative positive effect, that she should continue doing what she's
doing. It also tells her when the effect has plateaued. Finally, when the bonus times out and
resets, so does the pitch of the sound, so when the player hears the pitch drop, she knows the
chain has been broken. The sound that accompanies any fruit tells the player, concisely, where
in the game's reward structure she currently is. And the expectation of successive notes com-
bined with the disappointment of the pitch resetting creates a strong drive to perform well and
not break the chain.