I was recently invited to speak at the Culture and Computer Games: Studying Online Activities conference held at the HumLab in Umea, Sweden. The conference was organized by Torill Mortensen, and the participants were mainly European games researchers who have their own WoW guild, The Truants. As a non-WoW player I was honored to be asked, and the conference was great, featuring not only research talks and research-in-progress discussions, but also workshops on how to make machinima and how to pull data from games for interesting sorts of analysis and display.
I arrived in the middle of one presentation about game audio (by Kristine Jorgensen), and I'm so sorry I arrived late. Her talk was one of the first I've heard that takes seriously the audio in MMO games. More thoughts on why audio is so fascinating below the cut--
Kristine argued that audio is extremely contextual, and so players must be familiar with a particular situation to know what a certain audio cue will signal. In the discussion following her paper we talked about how the sound of certain spells going off, for example, might cue a player that other party members are (or are not) doing their jobs, as you either receive or fail to receive buffs, cures, and the like. This also reminded me of Final Fantasy XI Online, where the sound of spells was critically important in my job as a white mage, as sometimes the text going by was too fast to read and check if a certain spell had been executed or not.
I also think there's another aspect to audio that is key- and also tied to context. That would be how audio can help form the game community, or at least play a role in its development. A former student of mine and I once joked about the 'de-leveling' sound you hear in FFXI, which seems to add further to the insult of death along with losing a level. But that sound, and others like it, also add to the shared experience of the game- it gave us something to talk about, to share about the game. Likewise, FFXI has some of the most beautiful game music I've ever heard, and some regions are so lush with sound, they are a pleasure simply to travel through. So to me, game audio is definitely a part of MMOs that can not only enhance game play, but also the game experience.
Does anyone else have particular thoughts on how game audio adds to or subtracts from the game experience?
