On my neverending quest of figuring out immersion in all kinds of surrogate realities we like to dabble in, some interesting observations came from completely surprising direction: Extras of Police Squad! DVD. Actually, Leslie Nielsen’s interview in there. 

He discussed the reasons behind the cancellation of the show after only 6 episodes, major reason being how it was a show you had to watch. No, yes, really. A television show that was meant to be watched, failed for that reason. Thing is, average Joe and average Mary come home from work, relax on the couch, turn on the telly and zone out. They don’t zone into television or the surrounding social situation around them, but somewhere in the middle.

Police Squad! being a show where you had to pay attention to both see the hidden jokes and often see where the spoken humour comes from, you’d have to avoid blinking to get it all in the way its creators intended in good faith. No, average Joe and average Mary only pay half attention and need the cued audience laugh backgrounds to remind them to be amused while watching their fave sitcom while chatting on the phone. They need to be told the general gist of things without having to look actively, because they’re talking about how that wallpaper should be painted over. It’s all about not paying attention, as they sit down to be entertained after coming home from work, where they had to pay attention all day. Major point there. It’s a situation they dictate in their own terms, in their own personal surroundings, at their own pace.

Leslie Nielsen also mentioned the size of TV screens, and it’s worth mentioning here even when the home TV sets are growing larger each year. Small screen simply does not support background action. The visual jokes and semi-hidden slapstick moments in Police Squad failed to work on limited screenspace, but those same jokes shot Naked Gun movies into successful franchise. When they were blown up into the size of a damned wall, audience really did see. 

Of course, since The-Cow.net is about games as well, we all should now sit down and confer about the relationship of said observations towards games. On a high level, it’s about immersion. On low level, we’re dabbling with everything that delivers and communicates context and story to the player. It could be those soundscapes filling the room during tabletop RPG session, or carefully chosen backgrounds during dynamic camera edit on console action games, keeping the focus on foreground, or whatever. So, how to know what tricks to use? 

I’m so waddling into Alvanspace here, and it’s creepy in here with all the flotsam eyeballing me up. But here goes..

Let’s take regular tabletop RPG. Players know each other and there’s always off-game chitchat and generally arsing about, unless they’re hardcore system nitpickers everyone hates, but for that same reason, those spoilsports never get to play the really cool games with the really fun people, so we’ll just skip them. Anyways, all that reads as social situation during the play. On the other hand, the players arrived there specifically for the game, so that reads as paying attention since they’re so motivated to bother traveling a bit, et cetera. However, there’s very little for the senses – no visuality, no directly in-situ informative sound cues, no hints of an angry orc through bad smell, or so everyone hopes. All that is delivered to players through spoken narrative, with music etc providing mood in very broad and unintrusive way. Besides the differences in delivery, it’s very much like the average Joe/Mary mindset in front of television. Casual entertainment, if you may.

Console games? More in the cinema end of the spectrum. You go to movies, you end up sitting in darkness with all your attention focused, directed and guided towards the massive silver screen. You won’t miss a beat, and social situation happens before and after the flick. At home, you grab a game pad, holding it in your hands. It becomes a focusing element that keeps reminding you how you’re in control of something, so you concentrate. You use your hands, and that clicks lots of switches in your brain. Your reflexes kick into high gear, adrenaline pumps up and oh boy, your attention is in firm hold. You wiggle your fingers and it all translates directly into visual and aural situation that progresses on and on. That’s the key. You concentrate because you use your hands, the most used tools ever. They’ve been around as long as your brain, and they were the very first thing you ever figured out about yourself. So, in a way, the game connects with you in some scarily direct ways. 

Even if your buddies are there playing with you, social interaction (laughter, remarks, etc) all circle around the game and ongoing events in there. It’s a personal or shared zone, but zone nevertheless. You’re all connected to the game through tactile communication, for lack of better words.

Maybe that’s a big item in the list of questions on how to get tabletop RPGs more immersive. No draconian rules about not SOCIALIZING but PLAYING are needed, but maybe give the players outside influence to steer them into the wanted mindset. Immersion through surroundings is kind of out of question – I can’t imagine getting immersed into the game if there’s a big projector screen with some eerie symbolism flowing around, not to mention wizardly scenes from Harry Potter or whatever. No, RPGs are around the table, and that’s the visual context. Then again, handing the players some orc and elf figurines to fiddle with isn’t going to cut it either. I’m intrigued about involving some tactile immersion here, connecting the certain synapses like the game pad does. Some minimal physical involvement that doesn’t look or feel too out of place around the table. 

However, more I try to come up with something physical, I keep coming short-handed.

Given the realworld situation and surroundings where the game is played, there’s really no extra gadgetry that would help the players to dive into deeper end of world pool. And more I think about it while writing this, more I keep going towards the sounds used in conjunction with stuff happening around the table. Again. But alas, this time it’s much simpler and it will have tactile experience involved in a very important way!

Scenario-time! 

GM lets Joebob know he has a good chance to make a bloody good show with his next attack – but only if the dice rolls for his favour big time. It’s a potential show-off ending to a fierce battle, and even the music is off. Tense silence fills ears. Joebob takes the dice in his hand, aware of everyone watching, and Joebob ..

[GM hits a button hidden under the table, and slow heartbeat-like rumble that goes du-dum, du-DUM, DU-DUM begins to rise up into existence, dominating everything. Lights dim slightly, except the one that is pointed at Joebob and his dice]

.. stops for a second, hair standing up in his neck and wondering how the hell his teeth are clattering, and with a short sweep of his hand, he lets the dice fly. Dice hits the tabletop — and rumble stops right there, as if cut by knife. Dice number is checked, situation releases and then those lights return to normal, too. Game goes on, regardless of outcome. It wasn’t about the outcome in the end – it was the anticipation everyone wanted to play.

So, perhaps we can make the most basic gameplay controller, the humble dice more tactile to us, if we tie different elements to it. It requires some setting up, but hardly impossible for any GM with some dedication and sense of live dramaturgy. Include an event at the begin to set the players into game, and work the arc as you feel, as long as you give the players something to really feel about in the end. Even if one event clicks big time for players, they remember the whole game as very memorable. 

Tie it all together. I dare you.

“It was a grizzly scene, possibly a murder-suicide pact – I don’t know what the fuck happened”

A very descriptive quote. It creates vague notions of how it might have happened, what did happen and leaves us curious, and shocked. Evoking empathy and mystery. Very standard event in entertainment industry, yet handled in so many different ways. Most of the time, it emotionally impacts us when we are passive in front of television and let it all wash over us, allowing ourselves to be smothered with scripted-to-detail flow of it.

How on earth do you communicate the emotional magnitudes of such event to a player who sits comfortable on a sofa with a piece of knobby plastic in his hands? Throw blood on screen? Meh. Five-eyed tentacle monsters the size of skyscrapers? Bah. Basic videogame tropes, and they have lost much of their impact. Only games that manage to pull a good left hook on the player are those with something new and plenty of borrowed. Dunno about blue, we really don’t have to go to color grading here.

Do you do it by player character narrative? A voice of the character you’re playing? But it doesn’t sound like you! Are you audience or player character or something in between? It’s a detachment from gameplay in itself. Basic narrative voice? Basic, works, but has to be played beforehand really really well so it won’t become one of those annoying gameplay breaks. You know them, I know you do. Most of the time we get to see a fancy CG clip with near-Hollywood production values. How does that work, then?

“Ah damn you, stupid cutscene,” *clickclickclick* “AND WHY CAN’T I SKIP THE DAMNED arfg meh” *foreheadslap* and off you go, distracting yourself by clicking around a random pornsite in teh intarwebs, ruining your life forever, cocaine, etc.

Developers poured sweat, blood, money, tears, long hours, lost marriages, haggard faces and years worth of therapy sessions to those cutscene / narrative break moments and what do you do? You throw a tantrum, you selfish prick. Have you no heart or sensibility to those starving and homeless? No, wait — it’s not your fault! My apologies. I should have added narrative design to the list of good sacrificial traits us developers have, but then I wouldn’t be writing yet another blogpost that stinks of a bitter lemon a very fat and unpleasant tourist has sat on for hours.

Exhibit B:

Developer conclave, the masters with tallest chairlegs, sits silent under a pendulum axe that swings nigh-on their worried brows.

Lords of their realm are not pleased with their latest offering, the majestic tour de force through worlds imagined by their masterminds, and they have summoned a wrath on their homes. A Mandatum carved in black obelisk has been tossed amids the conclave, and lest they follow it, they will be banished from their realm.

Their gods are gods of coins, and coins they need to create worlds, and worlds they need to create to summon more coins for their gods. Vicious circles surround them, and the Mandatum has words that glow red:

“Sequel must be made, and Sequel must replenish the faith of all who follows us; Sequel will set us up as lords of imagination, and this world will follow us to those we create. Sequel must have thriceworth explosions, ten sacks more guns, and in hearts, it must taste bitter and sorrowful, yet caring and full of springtime hope”

Conclave has banished the scary-speaking and shallow designers, for they were aliens to them. They have new ones, young and snappy and filled to brim with new ideas, yet new ideas worry conclave, who already shit worry-shaped bricks out beneath their lizardly tails.

“How do you, young and snappy and filled to brim with ideas designer minds, would approach this quest? How, shall we reform our words, will you fulfill this bloody Mandatum we have received from the angry skies?”

The new designers, their hats full of their head, with their heads too big for their hats, reply:

“We shall rethink teh whole thought of moving pictures, teh very soundness of it. We will bring you a new prince of emotions, of new pedigree of teh empathy itself!”

The conclave, as if made of one mind and of one body, buries its many heads in its colourless hands, and shits some new bricks.

Designers scurry amidst the trained monkeys, peering over their hairy and scrawny shoulders, asking this and that. They are like mosquitos, sucking a drop of ideas from there, another from elsewhere, and so it goes. They look at the world monkeys are creating, on deeper level than mere head-lines and key-words and idea-boards.  They see the ethereal and surreal and unreal character take his babysteps, reaching out to his buddies amidst the ravages of war, in the torn land. They are empathic creatures, and they are moved.

“Something is here. Something wicked has cometh. Be still, my heart! What is it made of?”
“It is sad. No, it is hopeful, but has not found resolution yet. It is a story in itself. How do we tell teh story with no words like teh words we are written in?”

They confer. They look back at old moving pictures, and see how moving and marvellous they are. Yet, they were not of the same world, in the end – they were of another. Detached.

How to attach them? Something new is needed. Did they not have the world already, a beautiful world that interacts with you, a world that touches you back and reacts when you shoot at it? Their eyes opened up, and they sang a song.

Hi-ho, world is not of heartless  personae-less AI-animatronics;

Hi-ho, world creates the stories it weaves it leaves for us;

The AI-animatronics teh monkeys have bred are teh answer, thus;

[chorus] Me so horny, ahunka-hunka-hunka!

Wait, did I just wander towards context-sensitive AI and world and .. oh, drat. No, forget all that for now. I won’t go there, partly because I still like to entertain the idea of presenting you dear readers with gameplay blogread breaks that possibly annoy you to no end, and if you’re a game developer, you probably deserve it anyways.

So. Cutscenes?

On my part 1 of this probably neverending quest against wrongful cross-use of different storytelling media, I was rather annoyed at how media for passive audience gets treated in media for audience that dictates action and is hardly ever passive. Did I say cutscenes are inherently bad by nature if they are in games? Hell no. They can carry the story forwards, and if they are long and interesting enough, they do turn the player around into passive audience mode. It’s just the introduction and preparation and other cunning juggling of mindgames that gets forgotten, or gets acknowledged with “.. but it’s C priority, look at the schedule and just forget it already.”

Let’s juggle with some ideas. Let’s follow that white C priority rabbit down the hole nobody ever goes.

Traditionally, as mentioned before, cutscenes get slapped in where the transition from place / gameplay event / level to another occurs. It’s introductionary clip, a thematic booster or a plot forwarding device. Nothing wrong with that! It’s external stimulus within the game, as it comes automatically and with no player interaction required. One inherent problem might lay in the natural fact that it’s made to match the game world. It looks the same, it has the same colors and same art direction, even if it has higher production values and better looks than the game itself.

Scenario 1: Marshall Blueberry Got The Twitches

Player trots down an alleyway after clearing it free of giant cockroach combatant drones. It narrows down ahead, but we can see it opens up to a T junction alley between city blocks ahead. Right as the player is about to step to that crossing alley,

something loud and yellow and black and blue screams past his eyes, blurry and totally out of this world. Viewpoint suddenly shoots away, world on screen turns into caricature comic book representation of Your Mind On Cockroach Drugs, with more angles and corners than there can logically be, with colors dancing and the cockroach recon convoy passing our players location, who now is seen curled up in fetal position. We are watching him from high up, as if in astral experience. Loud cacophony fills our ears, wild vivid colors only drugged up demo coders can come up with fill our eyes, and with a quietness that comes so fast it sounds like a bang,

everything returns normal. Black frame or two on screen, regular colors of the world fill our view, everything is 90 degrees tilted. Your character is still on the ground, and you SO did not expect that moment. Oh, right, there was some gas tossed your way during the last skirmish..

Yet, cutscene it was. Thematic, maybe – or if the convoy had some wild caricatures of doomsday machines being transported, it could have been a plot forwarder as well. With good luck, it left the player eager to move along and figure out (allowed to figure out, really) what those drugged up, psychedelic hallucinations actually meant. And most importantly, it threw the player off the safe stand, reinvigorating him. It gave him something fresh to chew. It’s a game, you can go ahead and run with scissors at hand!

It doesn’t have to be the same static looking world you live in, you bitter monkeys.

Scenario 2: TVTropes edition!

Player trots down a grey alleyway after clearing it free .. you know. The same basic premise, right? Just as our hero is about to put his foot into the alleyway, we snag the viewpoint with a reflex snap towards right, where a BLOODY HUGE MASSIVE CRAB TANK AIEE–
(cue War Bonds Are Good For You -jingle and video reminder)
Hello folks, have you been feeling downwards lately? Have you not considered – or have you considered, but never dared to try the radio-activital water enhancer? With pellets of pure uranium carefully hand-casted into cement base, you only dip our Radium-O into your water tank and it will be filled with reinvigorating, life-energy boosting ATOMS OF THE FUTURE for you to drink! Available now from Lol-Mart!
(cue War Bonds Are Good For You -jingle and video reminder. “Returning to live action now!”)
–we snag the viewpoint with a reflex snap towards right, where a BLOODY HUGE MASSIVE CRAB TANK AIEE is shooting past your eyes and oh shit that’s big, those are hardened orbital bunker buster nukes on that platform, and oh wow I’ll just wait this one out, I know I’m gonna run into these baddies again–

And so on. Player is very, very used to all kinds of media. He watches television and movies. Television more than movies. He probably has watched television more than he has played games. He bloody well grew up with it. It was his nanny when he was a toddler. We took a step out of the box only to find old familiar things in new context, but somehow, as it was all so very familiar, it didn’t annoy .. And it was part of that world! Atomic age, with gigantic cockroaches with nukes that go to orbit. Cutscene itself did not serve gameplay function, other than slip a bookmark into the players memory about what he’s done and seen before. He’ll remember that moment, and that’s depth in itself, in a world filled with cliches seen bazillion times.

So maybe it wasn’t exactly out of the box. Maybe it was more like beating and kicking the box into different shape, but it doesn’t matter. Only as long as you can see the box, tiptoe around it, have some whacks at it and generally see ways to make things that go into the box and out again, you should be fine.

- If it’s a radically different cutscene, make it radically fast change because it’s not in balance with regular gameworld.

- If it looks like the ordinary gameworld, present it in much slower fashion as it’s heavily balanced. As mentioned, unbalanced you can whack into the weirdwoods as hard as you can, and it’ll be better for it.

Scenario 3: Daily grind

Our hero is about to embark on the crossing alley, and world pauses for split second. You hear DVD whirring to life. Screen comes back alive, but from a different viewpoint. There’s a big-ass tank-like monster with chipped armour, viewed from almost ground level to emphasize the big guns and bolts and stuff covering it. Lots of shiny bits, flares, DOF tricks with camera that shakes and rattles. A tank tread rolls menacingly towards the camera, which cuts to another angle right when the heavy metal descends on it. We’re shown the full size of convoy now, from aerial perspective. Sound is muffled, a cloud drifts under the camera to further emphasize scale. It’s all very movie-looking.
Cut back to player viewpoint, with player control. If he walks now, he’ll die under the machines. So he waits, watching. Pre-scripted convoy doesn’t care about him, its only function is to hint at future developments of this world war against bloody big insects with guns.

Sound familiar? I won’t even go there anymore, lest this blog gets banned from teh intarwebs for all the cursing.

Traditionally we suffer from too much safety, stay too sheltered and make familiar decisions. Things end up too “financially sound” and “marketable” and “it’s what others do so it’s what players want”. There’s no need to make the whole game artistically different and clever and celshaded whatnot with “unique art direction” with “extravagantly brave colours”. Just include the salt that goes on top of the same goo others are cooking. Little pinch is enough to remind people of the proper flavors.

There’s so much more to be said, regarding generally descriptive moments inserted in the middle of gameplay et cetera, but this is already bordering on too long post. I do smell the part 3 coming in nearish future, possibly with the notion of fading the cutscenes transparent to the player, or something. Until then, do leave comments if you have anything to add or argue.

That funny man-animal who uses my character sheets as insulation between soda and desk, Alvan, hit some excellent points on storytelling and then casually threw the awfully hot ball to me.

Cutscenes, he said. Why on earth do games rely on cutscenes, he asked. Bloody good question, and while I have no literal facts as such, I can only speculate and rant – but since speculation and rant makes better entertainment than mere facts, nobody loses. Also, the subject matter itself is based on things that are difficult to quantify unless you’re Dr. Phil, and even then you might get into arguments.

Exhibit A:

You make a game, say, FPS action wonderfest of sort. It’s basically based on you shooting things. A conclave is formed, features written into stone, weapons of war decided and armies constructed on little patches of paper. But — what now! someone is suddenly startled, points to the sky and calls out – “It’s well advisable to know why you’re shooting!”. You present this groundbreaking epiphany to the masters. From behind the curtains of management a loud “Oh, a backstory is needed, then!” sounds and echoes down the hallways. “A world with a reason, with personae our hero can feel at ease with!”

Klaxons wail, loudspeakers shout go-words! Trained monkeys scurry to their tasks, attending meetings and pushing tasklists and making schedules, everyone with a glowing sense of importance inside their hot and bothered hearts. We are creators of worlds, rulers of immersion, masters of gameplay!

Amidst the scurrying and goal-oriented teamwork, sudden plea is heard behind numerous concept art sketches and level design ideaboards: “How do we progress the story, how do we, pray, tell the player what happened, what his character feels beneath his forged iron carapace, what will happen now? Please, masters, tell us!”

Masters flinch, designers are summoned, and hidden under the shadows of their hoods they confer.

-This iss the best way. Trusst me. A movie within the game. Many moviess. Moving picturres carry worrds. We giev our art to massters of moving picturss and they do us moviess. We put moviess between levelss! Where loadingbarr goes!

Masters stand proud, a path has been found and it is golden, and it will bring them numerous coins of gold.

Designers go on about their business, designing core gameplay, weapon balancing, character perks, progress curves, everything their soon-to-be laid golden egg is made of.  A writer is hired, a professional master of words and worlds. He waves his hand over the vistas they have created and behold, a world is born! He writes it down, and he sees it is all good. He collects his coins and goes home to breed and procrastinate some more.

The golden words are spread out to all who make the game.

“This is our world, this is how it must feel like! It is .. Quite blue!”

Trained monkeys nod and add some blue, anxious to see what their world will be like in the moving pictures that bring their gameworld to life. What will it tell them? They concentrate on getting the best mesh topology for their characters, most cleverly blended IK animations and making sure there are no otherworldly invisible collision objects laying around. Reset XForm buttons are pressed, with sweat on forehead and no hands that dare swipe it off. Production is at full blast, and everything depends on this game. It must be the new benchmark in its genre! Hands clench in fists, manhours crunched.

“You have to have the best shaders! You have to tighten up graphics! Wait – that looks good, give it a name! Now, have our swiftest courier to take it to our marketing department!”

The big wheel rolls on.

Movies arrive from the golden lands far across the distant waters. Everyone is gathered in the big hall adorned with fantastical mechanic devices that illuminate the great wall with moving images and fill their eager ears with sound. The movies are good. They watch them all – twentyone of them – at one go. It is a beautiful, war-torn story of lost cause hovering above a brotherhood of men, who only wish to be brothers regardless of color or stature – to bear the burden with your mates in their chipped armours.

Lights flicker back, audience is thrown onto their feet, cheering and applauding. Their Game now has a story, a movie within their play, and movies tell stories! It all makes sense and it all feels so very good.

Game becomes gold, and is shipped to far-flung countries and coins change hands.

Reviews come in.

“Graphics are ace, and DOF and Shaders and Lens Flares are amazing feats of technology! Other than those and nice cutscenes, it’s a basic shooter. 6/10″

Wail, gnashing of teeth. Does not the acclaimed critics understand their words, their story? Are they blind?

No, they are not. You are blind, you wacky bats. You just made a point of having neatly structured levels, clever AI and gave places the same names as your precious and expensive cutscenes have. How did you treat the cutscenes? Are they movies of their own? Connected to gameplay moments player just experienced? Probably somewhat, but it is my humblest of opinions that cutscenes serve no storytelling value from the games point of view if A) the gameplay itself is not treated as part of the same story arc present in cutscenes, and B) the player experience is forgotten.

“No, the experience is there! We made sure the gun recoils realistically and walls topple majestically! Our end bosses are bigger than the end of universe! Surely the player experiences it all!”

You silly clown. Did you prepare the player for the cutscene? Did you stop and think about players role in game, and in cutscene? Yes, his role in cutscene. You strip his soul with gunplay, drive him mental with interactivity, make his eyes sore from effects and his mind dented with immersion, and then there’s AI that’s more natural than your grandmother and WHACKBANG you snatch it all from his hands. You force him into invalid cripple with no limbs. Passive audience, away from all that action and control and hoohaa. Did you consider the gameplay levels as storyarcs? Did you build up the tension, introduce twists, give the player a resolution, a wind-down moment, did you design the gameplay cool-off to force him to bloody stop and relax, leaning back on his seat with his hands off the goddamn gamepad so you can present him a pre-chewed bit of storytelling, fit for the state you just left him in?

No, of course you did not, you monkey.

Cutscenes suffer from their own history. When they were new and snazzy, they were selling points themselves. Remember Diablo 2? I remember more people talking fervently about the CG intro than the game itself, before it was on the shelves.

These days, awesome graphics are  a baselevel expectation. You don’t sell the game with cutscenes alone. Yes, people want stories and immersion. Yes, cutscenes can work in conjunction with the progressing game world, but more often than not, they are more or less slapped between levels with some shared graphical assets to tie them into the level you just played or will play anysecondnow. Your AI buddies that couldn’t find their way out of doorway suddenly become lipsynched and motion captured marvels that put Hollywood to shame.

Now that I got to the whole damn point, I’ll take a cool break and write more tomorrow when I’m awake again. How does it feel, to get cut off just when it got interesting? Hoping for a comfortable arc here? A coherently constructed story? Hahaha.

Just a quick addendum or example or derivate or something to this. How is audio used in Left 4 Dead?

The video game Left 4 Dead is begging to be mentioned when one talks about creative ways of using diegetic and extra-diegetic sound in games. The survivor side of the game plays with high reliance to soundscapes, sound cues and music. So much in fact that you could say beyond the very basics of survival, everything in the game boils down to listening to what’s happening in the game.

L4D uses both character level and player level audio to support the game play. The very basic soundscape of L4D is made of player level music (well, more like long synth chords, most prominent at start of levels, to open up the level) and character level ambiance sounds of the environment like crows and sounds of thunder. This creates a very strong base mood for the game.

The second way sound happens is through the sounds of the player characters. First of all, they produce the sounds that you’d expect – when you shoot a shotgun, you hear a shotgun sound. When you move around muck, you hear squishy footstep sounds. But beyond these, the characters comment on the environment actively, even without the player telling them to. When they get attacked, they scream for help. When they notice one of them is low on health, they tell the other character to heal up, etc. This is fully happening on the character level. The player can intrude on the character level and command his character to say some of the pre-scripted things, for example to call out that there is a boomer ahead, around the corner even if the character is unaware of it. There is a player level audio bit to some of the character actions as well – getting attacked by a special infected will cause a dramatic song (again, mostly synth chords) to boom out from the loudspeakers. Also, worth mentioning that the characters’ dialogue sometimes dips into the metadiegetic level of story-within-a-story when they reveal things of their past or when their comments tell the story of the infection, as well as telling the player what the character-level story is (in the “We have to follow these tracks to an abandoned military base” style). (thanks Kham for pointing that last one out)

One of the ways people grief when playing Left 4 Dead is to make their character repeat some stupid line of their repertoire like “PILLS HERE” every second or so, causing the other players lose their ability to keep the character level separate from the player level, falling into disbelief of the whole character level of the game in the progress. Not to mention it’s annoying as hell when someone keeps shouting “PILLS HERE” in your ear.

The third way, of course, is the other actors of the game besides the player characters. The helicopter flies above you and use a megaphone to tell you to head to Mercy Hospital. A gas station explodes with a thundering roar. Infected people whimper and moan. And then there are the special infected. Each of them having a distinct sound following them. The smoker coughs, the boomer gurgles, the hunter snarls and then screams when he’s moving. The witch cries and sobs, and the tank roars. And when you hear the multitude of gnarls a horde of normal infected generate, you know there’s a lot of nasty heading your way. These are all character level sounds. When you turn your head in the first person mode, you notice the sounds move left to right and right to left, allowing you to pinpoint a boomer hiding behind the corner a long time before you see it, or hear the witch getting closer as her sobs grow louder. And spotting the specials before they are upon you is really the only way to survive on the higher difficulty levels, when things get tough in the game. On top of those, the witches, tanks and hordes also have a player-level musical theme, that emphasizes the mood of the situation – with the witch it’s a surreal melody that gets piano hits when the witch is almost agitated and turns into a panicing cacophony when she’s out to get you. With the horde, you get a couple of creepy chords a moment before the screeching starts and the masses start flowing. And with the tank, it’s a very doom-inspiring track that makes the player scared enough when the big bad things is coming.

There is a fourth level of audio in the game, if you happen to get into a team that is doing it. The game supports voice communication between the players via microphones. As any conversation between real people, this sometimes is just silly chatter to lighten up the mood. Sometimes it’s completely unrelated to the game, and sometimes it’s a repetition or extrapolation of something the characters could have communicated on their level. For example, a player might say “a hunter got me” to the microphone, even if the audio cues of the character level in the game could have given the same information to the other players (the characters shouting “A hunter got Francis” and Francis screaming “Get it off me”). Thus, there is a player level communication going on about the game as well as the communication that happens via the detour of the character level. And then there is singing. There always needs to be singing to the microphone. I have no idea why.

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.

Oh Boy. Talk about gauntlets getting thrown. So, sound-effects, soundscapes. Music versus noise. Carefully arranged notes in a constant form with pattern, lyric, meaning, sometimes good, sometimes plain awful. Themes, especially the ones that repeat, grow and mutate. And then just silence. Followed by a soft echo of footsteps. A noise here, another there. Sound of the ship’s bulkhead bending in the storm. And as you step out, the roars of wind, rain and lightning hit you in the face with the full force of nature. You hear it roar in the distance, and know it will soon be upon you.

There are soundtracks of wonderful music that guide our thoughts and there are sounds that do that as well, forming a soundscape of the environment we’re in. The big difference between a soundtrack and a soundscape when talking of things like movies or RPGs is that the soundscape, the world of sound effects, is something that exists on the diegetic level instead of the extradiegetic world of the typical soundtrack. These fancy words mean that you can assume that the characters of the story are hearing the soundscape, whereas usually a soundtrack is there only for the audience of the story, not audible to the characters inside the story (exceptions exist, of course).

Now, a well-designed soundscape is something that’s very common (one could say, a necessity) in television and movies, somewhat common in video games but pretty rare in RPGs. At least any I’ve participated in. The two things that have come in the way, to be honest, are the amount of preparation of using sound effects compared to music, and the technology that has been evading the typical game master.

Building a proper soundscape for a roleplaying session isn’t as easy as one might think. In movies and television, you don’t need to think of the lasting aspect of your sounds. The scenes will linger in environments for a few moments so you can think very nicely what exact sounds you need and time them to the millisecond. When you’re playing games like Half-Life or Left 4 Dead, the sounds around you get generated by the computer in response to your actions, the actions and presence of other entities, and randomized from a pre-generated pool of environmental sounds to create the needed effect.

In tabletop RPGs, neither approach is fully usable. Compared to TV, there is no guarantees how long a scene lasts, as all description of action is done as speech and there is a factor of the actors having a say to what happens. You might think a warehouse scene lasts for 5 minutes tops, but your players might spend 10 minutes with their characters at the warehouse, or they might take an hour. Having the same 10 minute planned soundscape loop six times gets annoying really soon, especially if the selected sounds are there to provoke a response. They not only lose their effect, but they will turn it against you as the immersion gets broken – suddenly (gasp) the same creepy footsteps are heard for the third time. As they are present on the character level, they will get ridiculed on the character level. Or you will have to explain that they are not part of the diegetic level anymore.

Computer games give a bit better starting point – a video game’s sound director can’t go about thinking beforehand that it takes 5 minutes, 32 seconds for a player to complete the level. He has to build a generic sound base that will give the player a feel of the environment, without invoking specific action. He avoids the repetition by adding some computerized randomization to the base sound pattern and of course avoiding sounds that would require a response from the player on this base-track. Then he moves forward, having something on his side that a standard GM doesn’t – he can combine the sounds with the triggers from specific events beforehand, so that they play when someone fires a shotgun or walks on a metal floor or topples a pile of cans by accident. Or even when the player is approaching a certain situation or location on the map. Automated responses to the actors, and to be honest, the most realistic soundscapes stem from that.

For a RPG soundscape, like for a soundtrack, you’d pretty much need that base that you can play while there is nothing interesting happening. As a soundscape can be assumed to be heard by the characters as well as the players, it requires more attention than a soundtrack. This base-scape will be playing a lot in a campaign, so it would have to be extremely long to avoid the feeling of repetition. In fact, you’ll need a few extremely long, different bases when you’re building a campaign – there will be various situations that need a somewhat distinctive feel attached to them. Besides those you’ll need other sounds. Sadly, what you can’t really do, is to have sounds for the actions that the players have their characters do – you can’t have a sound-effect for every one of their actions as you have no clue what those actions might be. And even if you did, you’d be always firing the sounds of only after the action has happened on the diegetic level, so there will be unnecessary redundancy that doesn’t especially benefit anyone. And in my opinion, most of the sounds made by other actors should be left to imagination and description as well “you hear the approaching footsteps of the scientists returning from their break”, “the guard accidentally drops his soda can on the floor and curses” as you will need to provide the players with information like where the sound came from and in most cases who was making it. On the other hand, using audio samples to play when something breaks the standard ambiance, yet wouldn’t benefit much from emphasizing on it on the level of the story, would work. A strange sound, a scream, a roar, the sound of thunder approaching that would gradually turn into the base sound once the thunderstorm is upon you. Things that predate actual action or are there just as sounds, nothing more. Yet. Echos of the future.

On practical side, for campaign play, I’d probably start building the base soundscape myself from scratch instead of using something fully made beforehand by someone else. Even if getting quality sounds for free can get tedious, it becomes much more personal and the feel is less hectic if you take time to manipulate the material to fit your needs. There are good services like YLE’s Tehosto around that can get you started, but the samples you get from one source are usually too short to be used on their own, so you need to look around the internet to find enough sound bits. And even when you have enough material to fill a nice long soundscape, you’ll notice that when you start mixing from sources, the difference in quality and style can sometimes be audible. And you will end up ditching a good portion of the sounds you have, eventually needing a lot more sounds. If you want to be really personal, you can record a sound from some place by yourself. Getting a good enough microphone to be able to record the ambiance of an environment on your own might be a very costly task, unless you have friends in high places who can borrow or rent you one. But recording an hour-long thunderstorm will really pay off if you use it on the background in a game – it will sound a lot less cheesy than something you stole from a sound effect box. Once you have a large enough library of sounds to play on the base, you compile them together with some sort of a tracker program, I suppose. I haven’t done that stuff since the 90’s, to there might be better ways to do it these days.

For the specific sounds that get played, you’ll need some form of a mixing software that allows you to play multiple tracks at the same time. – a somewhat affordable solution is Virtual DJ Studio, that offers a very nice, fully working trial version for you to toy around with while you wonder if you want to use it. Then just line up the effects you want to play next to your base track and slide them in when it is their time. And there you go, a soundscape. I can imagine it working very well in horror scenarios, where the players are already on the edge of their seats because of the story.

As a counterpoint to all of this, I must admit that I love using a non-story level soundtrack on the background of RPG sessions – partly because I takes a part of the pressure off from me if I try to get the game going toward a certain mood, and mostly because I love toying between the story-level and the storytelling-level of the game. You can create a lot more contrasts with music than you can do with stuff that exists on all levels of play. Using music on the other hand allows you to stop using music, which on its own can be very very effective (as Buffy the Vampire Slayer has taught us). Doing a full campaign where the ambience was fully created with sound-effects is something I probably would never do, but using some ideas from this post might eventually creep into the games.

Sound is half of the experience in movies, they say. Probably even more in other media, such as music video. Or radio, if it still exists – haven’t checked.

Sound is also a key player in how we experience our surroundings, draw context from and get important clues we don’t even realize. Like today, when I was happily exhausting the contents of my bladder the way guys do – standing up – and the blasted light went out. There I was, hands full of a tap that wasn’t going to turn off after all the coffee, and I couldn’t see anything. Blind as a bat. Turns out you can aim by sound rather well, and like bats do,  easily differentiate between different materials by the way they sound when .. Well, eventually, I fumbled my way back into light, in a fresh state of mind of having seen – or heard – things in new light again. Learning is a wonderful thing, and often keeps cleaning ladies getting butter on their bread.  Also, I’ve been trying to figure out what’s the key difference between the car I’m borrowing and my own (..at shop. Thank you, France), as I keep feeling curiously lost with the current car. After my wild mild water park adventure, I realized it’s the sound – too quiet and what I hear is too differently connected to the overall tactile feel, and I’m subconsciously expecting the connections from my own car. All wacko.

All this, in turn, made me wonder about audio backgrounds in games. Half-Life series are excellent in this regard concerning atmosphere, and just about everything from DICE concerning sheer intensity and psychological pressure. If you have a buddy with Battlefield: Bad Company, get him playing it and listen. That’s not a game you hear anymore, if you stop looking at it.

I’d probably get massive (and good) creeps if I was playing some Fringeish/XFilesish/Madsciencegonebad RPG with a soundtrack that took cues from Half-Life – lots of ambient creaks, rattles, scurrying sounds, everything that makes you jumpy of the next corner. How’s about it, Alvan? Ever thought of ditching music in favour of “ambient surroundings” with music coming in only at few key points where it serves intensity and emphasis, and even then on top of said soundscape, not replacing it?

In the bright future, tabletop RPG sessions are built hardcore, with a sound mixer guy who knows GM by heart and adjusts, mixes and changes the aural soundscape constantly .. Be the player group walking from thicker woods to a husky meadow, or surprise ambush by 500ft squirrels that murder light itself — the sound is always there, describing things and changes in local surroundings with language you never realize listening. I said it first.

This piece started out as an innocent “oh haha ur so rite fringe is sooo good lol” -comment on Alvans earlier post, right before it went on a binge and never returned home. It went out the window and came back as regarding videogames (surprise!) and how they somehow manage to fumble it all and be very videogamey, or in some cases, draw you in and leave you bleeding for more. Mostly, what makes them tick the way they do – for me, anyways.  And how this text will recklessly stumble right through the confines of whatever it’s supposed to be wedged between, oh, it’ll never apologize.

Notice I’m not treating all games under the same ideology, just those heavy on story (or depicting a notion of one, even if there’s none).

Context! There’s this thing called .. well, that. If I perform an action in a depicted world and it doesn’t reflect there, I get annoyed, miffed and irritated to bits. Example: You have this wonderfully graphic character you’ve paid attention to, guided him/her through the world that has presented him/her with new skills and whatnot. Then you walk against a wall and there it goes, stupid mindless videogame avatar doing a videogame walkcycle, standstill and unaware of the bloody brickwall scrubbing his face.

All of a sudden, your character is reduced into a representation of player navigation mistake. Ta-ta, it was nice seeing you, miss Believability and mister Immersion. Sorry about the stale wine. Oh, and if I change the world, I expect the change to be permanent and propagate with ripple effects, depending on how it affects other things / NPCs / whatnot connected with it in the gameworld.

Immersion in faked out world built using stiff-at-best mechanics is a bitch to implement. Mainly it becomes a swamp that has no bottom – as you hone in some important detail that colors the world that much more, it creates a dependency or requirement to do another to support it, and so forth. You’ll start to realize how much you miss on the real world when you begin breaking things to their elements. Just a moment in your own time, even if you’re not doing a thing. It’s insanely complex, and you can’t simulate it.

You just have to try your best to fool the player to think he’s immersed, when you’re just really drawing his attention away from flaws.

Walk, walk, walk, nothing out of ordinary, walk to a staircase and if your eyes are keen and lively, you might notice your character grab the handrail casually .. Or strum his fingers against the radiator in a room if he’s close enough. Glance at something, being natural. Something surprising happens – look! Nothing to act by, just birds taking to flight. Tilt your head slightly at a sound of distant rock falling. Little things your character should be doing. What you’d do. Context-aware.

Okay, bit thin cookie-cutter examples considering the depth of subject matter. However, it’s still about the context and how living and breathing the world around you seems. Everything should happen within context of the world and surroundings, and there should be parts of the world represented to the player even if they’re not important, or even required. As you, the player, observe the world, the world should observe you back, unashamedly. Giving you context when you don’t expect.

Think of the very moment your character is in. What’s happening in the world that doesn’t give a flying wack about your character, a pebble beneath the bedrock trying to make a change? What sounds does that world make? What defines the local space around him at that very moment? What does it look like? How it all bounces off of him? What gets sucked in? What’s the string that connects YOU there?

Say. How about a character that reacts to the player? Not a blind representation of your actions, but more like companion. Did you guide him to a thorny bush? Is he pissed off? Wait, what, did he just throw a rock up in your direction and shout obscenities?! Well, at least he still follows your mouse clicks. Maaaybe.. If you promise to behave. You find yourself in some strange semi-conversation, just without voice. Oh, you do get commented on, so tread carefully. Especially since it’s multiplayer. Other players companion character trots by, laughs with your char about the idiotic failure you, the player did just some time ago. Semi-public shame! But you’re so immersed in the living commentary of your actions in the world that you just stare, bewildered. Then you hear the other character taunt affectionally his player, as if he was a puppydog who just wasn’t housetrained yet. Characters momentarily take over and become the players themselves, just from outside perspective. It all becomes delightfully confusing, wondrous and profoundly different.

Would that create the necessary string between the player and world? Or something completely different? Could it be possible to build some multilayered insanitychains on tabletop RPG using this idea? I expect Alvan to wear some feathers and run to the woods to meditate on this.

Now, why the hell did I focus on character issues only? Why not hints of context and surroundings in Web2.0 where you, the social browser, need to know there are other people present, not just minute “lol my cat hiccupd” lines and some bling on screen? It’s not just games. How to drive advertisements deeper into people now that they’re so accustomed to them? Hell, these days marketing guys need to come up with  bloody big campaigns to launch a new advertisements. Jeeves, could you let me know at what point do we need to start figuring out how to sell ourselves the idea of real world around us? You know, with people becoming so superficial, shallow and black/white? What has made them so distant from it?

Meh.