MUSINGS ON VIDEO GAME SOUND (1)

THE DEVELOPMENT OF VIDEO GAMES AND VIDEO GAME SOUND

Gilbert Seldes, in 1924, suggested that Seven Lively Arts were the primary contribution towards artistic expression in American popular culture (Jenkins 2006). These arts, which include jazz, Broadway musical, Hollywood cinema, the comic strip and the vernacular humour column, have gained cultural respectability over the past seventy five years. Now, Henry Jenkins (2006), suggests the same artistic status for video games and argues for their equal respect.

The gaming industry continues to create increasingly complex multi-media gaming experiences, for example, with games such as Amplitude (2001) and Rez (2005) (Friberg & Gardenfors 2004: 2), where interaction with the sound dictates the gameplay and drives the narrative. Jenkins (2006) even implies that the intrinsic emotional and interactive responsiveness in video games is greater than that of cinema and that games create a degree of immersion unachievable in film.

With the increasing level of interactivity, sound has become a vital element in game design. From the early eighties, when game audio, described by Karen Collins, as, ‘repetitive, incessant bleeping’ (2008: 1), sound designers recognized the need for the audio to not only be less repetitive, but to actually respond to the gaming environment or the game player‘s actions.

In addition to this, the emergence of ‘movie envy’ (Rouse quoted in Bryce & Rutter 2002: 2) in computer game designers, raises awareness of the need for sophistication and interactivity in game sound. With the growing acceptance of video games as artistic expression or as a ‘lively art’ (Jenkins 2006) in popular culture, the industry has seen an increasing level of maturity in game audio design as sound now plays a more integral role than ever in the gaming experience.