Sing to Act

	The card's front face	The card's back face

Synopsis

Performing songs to achieve a purpose.

Relationships

Context:
Consequent Sound , Make Sound not War .
May imply:
Sound Input .

Description

Some games feature the ability to Sing to Act, as part of the gameplay. This kind of exploration unfolds new opportunities in terms of the interaction with the environment. Some of them include the design of alternatives to the "classic" belligerent approaches (Make Sound not War), which in turn may have interesting effects in terms of the Emotional Script.

Being able to influence the game world and/or its inhabitants through the a PC's acoustic behaviour (Consequent Sound) contributes to augment the multimodal coherence, and to characterize the game world in a way that all entities don't behave as if they were sound insensitive.

A particular case, which we are addressing separately as a different design pattern, is Pitch Gameplay. Whilst in the case of Pitch Gameplay it is the performance of singing itself that is in focus (namely the evaluation of the accuracy of such performance), in the case of Sing to Act the act of singing is semantic instead, and it works as the means to achieve an end that is collateral to the act of singing. As such, it is not fundamental that Sing to Act is performed through actual Sound Input. In practice, that means that it may make sense that is (only) the PC to sing an not the player.

Examples

Journey:

Spore: Singing to conquer the friendship of another species.

Patapon: The patapons can invoke miracles by performing the corresponding song. These songs are progressively learned (Levelled Performance) and consist of playing a score using the drums.

LocoRoco: The LocoRoco singing in order to wake up and enchant an entity who will reward them with an item or who will unblock their passage. For the singing to work the LocoRoco need to be more than a certain number (in the example that would be ten).

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Aquaria: Naija can sing the particular note that resonates with a certain entity, in order to trigger some behaviour (like releasing an item). Additionally, she can sing songs that are unlocked along the game (Levelled Performance) and that give her special abilities.