Awareness

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Synopsis

Sound signalling some relevant aspect of gameplay.

Relationships

Relates to:
Emotional Script , Narrative .
May use many, including:
Character Soundprint , Failure , Achievement , No Can Do , Window of Opportunity , Hurry Up! , Beacon Locator , Identification , Ouch! , Imminent Death , Seeking for PC , Suspicious NPC , Unaware NPC , ....

Description

Sounds of Awareness expose aspects of a circumstance that demand some degree of attention, relevant to gameplay. These stimuli may either evidence a problem, inform about a state, emphasize an opportunity, or reinforce the outcome of happening.

Many of the sound explorations in a game could be classified as Awareness. Still, some of the explorations approach very specific problems for which also specific solutions have been found. Those include Failure, Achievement, No Can Do, Hurry Up!, Window of Opportunity, Beacon Locator, Ouch!, Imminent Death, Seeking for PC, and Unaware NPC. Even PC's and NPC's Character Soundprint serves the purpose of informing about the character's closeness, Identification, health state, etc.

To a certain extent, sounds of Awareness are mostly unidirectional, i.e., they output something. Yet, if these sounds are designed in a way that they effectively produce changes in the player, namely at the emotional level, they may be instrumental to indirectly shape the players input.

Examples

Assassin's Creed: A pulsing Sound Effect tells that there are attentive guards nearby. Blending with the crowd, as when sitting in a bench, diverts their attention (and consequently the sound mutes).
Tomb Raider Underworld: Checkpoints are (exclusively) signalled through sound (a Sound Effect).
Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots: A beep informs that the Solid Eye is running out of battery (notice selection at the bottom-left corner).
[show less examples...]
Crysis: The voiced warning (Dialogue) makes the player learn that the suit's invisibility is about to be compromised.
Half-Life 2:
Papa Sangre:
LocoRoco: When a Moja is nearby, the playing LocoRoco vocalizes a scared warning, which besides being informative is highly emotional. The LocoRoco can see the Moja before the player does, so this acoustic message gives another additional advantage over graphics.
Ico:
Shadow of the Colossus: A sound warns when Wander ought to find a resting stance, otherwise he will lose grip and fall, most likely to death.
Halo: Reach:

Additional Comments

The advantages of sound over (or in combination) with visuals to implement mechanisms of awareness is one of the aspects claimed by pioneer authors who carried a collective initiative to leverage the recognition of sound as a field of research [1].

External Resources

It may also be relevant – at least insightful – to consider the state of the art on the design of alarm sounds, e.g.[2]

References

  1. Kramer, G., Walker, B., Bonebright, T., Cook, P., Flowers, J., Miner, N., et al. 1997. Sonification report: Status of the field and research agenda. http://sonify.psych.gatech.edu/publications/pdfs/1999-NSF-Report.pdf
  2. Hatch, W., & Pirhonen, A. (2011). Designing alarm sounds for the control of a hydraulic platform. Proceedings of the 6th Audio Mostly Conference: A Conference on Interaction with Sound, AM ’11 (pp. 116–121). New York, NY, USA: ACM. doi:10.1145/2095667.2095684

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