I keep hearing things

Spikey — Sat, 28 Feb 2009 22:47:47 +0000

As Alvan just seemed to dive off the deep end with his post on audio in games, I should include a few words before the next barrage is launched. The ambient soundscape I thought about when including tabletop playing in the mix, wasn’t about communicating individual situations and character moments – it’s way too hard to fashion such mechanics and control them sufficiently. More in the lines of “what sounds tell your mind you’re in a very old forest, even if you don’t pay attention to them?”. Setting the baseline mood. No sounds shoveled in your face, just a carpet of aural information quietly humming to you what’s between you and the horizon. What one does on top of that, is different matter and could either add depth or break things.

Once the players – as characters or audience, whichever works here – are used to the soundscape in the background (read: doesn’t pay active attention to it anymore), a sudden GM-introduced threatening in-game plot moment with sounds suddenly off could be a big impact on how the moment is driven into the lizard parts of players brain. Internally, when we get threatened or get thrown off the normality due to a sudden, completely unexpected event in real situation, we stop paying attention to normal things. Survival mode, attention focus and all that. When the same thing is played on us externally in a situation that’s inherently not real, it’s a good curveball that tips things out of balance. And of course, it’s used in just about any production that’s narrative and has audio in it. And of course, it’s so simple there has to be people using it already in RPG’s, too.

The CoW: Half a Dozen Years » ambience

I keep hearing things