MusFX

http://kotaku.com/5730637/ aka, The Year I Gained The Courage To Ignore Video Game Music.

Two things: multitasking and dullness of games today. One feeds the other and vice versa.

We don’t multitask. We simply don’t. True, we can process music in the background and we definitely can listen to something else than the in-game music. Today’s games’ dullness allow us to do something else meanwhile but games requiring more input, more thoughts, need our complete attention. Then, you pause it and check Twitter or kick the dog.

Also, game designers know about this bad trend of doing multiple micro tasks at the same time. “Yeah, this phase can be annoying and useless but after the wow effect being gone, the player will probably be all over his smartphone or taking a crap so whatevs man; plus it looks like a cool screen saver”.  One feeds the other.

Daniel Cook has an interesting take on game audio:

I play most games with the sound off. The fact that I’m missing the ‘best experience’ means little to me. Such a claim is a red herring goal promoted by the immersion nerds, but isn’t a meaningful goal for most players. First and foremost, I need a game that fits into my life. Music, 9 times out of 10 is a distraction due to how I play games. It is a distraction for most people playing games on phones. It is a distraction playing games on the computer. It is a distraction if there are other people in the room. It is only not a distraction for the small portion of the population who has isolated themselves in man caves. For the anti-social man cave dwellers: Enjoy your game music. I put the option in there just for you.
Disrespecting the developers is also a BS argument. A game is an entertainment tool that I will use as I desire. And when a designer choice hurts the tool’s utility, I will either use it in a different way or move onto something else that doesn’t have an unfortunately design flaw like relying on music to create the main experience of play.
The best games happen in my head and that really requires no external soundtrack.

It’s funny because Spryfox, his company just launched Triple Town on Facebook. I tried it and there wasn’t any sound at first. Absolutely tasteless feel to me. Somehow, they quickly managed to put some sound fxs and ambient noise, and it’s so much more addicting this way. I suspect players asking for audio feedback. Otherwise it’s just sad, just about numbers and game mechanics for which of course, you don’t need audio (or angry bears). But only a game designer like Daniel can appreciate that.

Steambirds from Andy Moore, had a surprisingly low amount of people muting sound, 11% on Steambirds Survival and only 6% on the original, which had at first a mere 1.3% of players hitting the mute button. I suspect the rate going up because of the same players playing new versions of the game and knowing the music already. Still, 11% is much less than what I thought.

People expect sounds in computer games because it’s always been this way, almost. Even more for younger generations.

Sound and controls ARE the feel. They are triggered and processed by your brain before visuals. Visuals are the conclusion of the first ones. For instance in SFIV, you think about a move and hear if it hit, missed or has been blocked before looking at it. You actually don’t really care about the visual feedback and don’t have the time to process it at this point, you think moves and you listen to if they worked or not. You don’t even think that you are listening! Except when you play without the sound and that your response time gets much slower. Also,  you carefully get a sense of the health bar red/yellow ratio when you hear a big SMASH, not how Ken’s kimono moves. Seriously, playing SFIV without hearing fists impacts -and only real world arcade stick clickety clicks- doesn’t even make sense to me.

Sound triggers action faster than visuals, because of the way these organs are connected to our brain. We survived on this planet for so long, thanks to our ears, not our stupid blurry diurnal vision. Sound is a really low level access to the brain. No sweet and easy API like visuals, but access to the raw power of emotions that you can’t get with anything else, but sound.

So for most multi-player and competitive computer games, sound is very much needed.

For single games, it depends largely on what the game is about so the sound fxs or music or both are important or adding something. Even on casual single player games on Facebook, people want, appreciate something for their ears.

Sound is a really weird asset and a difficult beast to drive. But you’d be a fool to not take care of it in your computer game development plan.