作者：Caleb Bridge

“沉浸性”已成为一个司空见惯的词语。这通常是谈及游戏优秀之处的另一流行术语，但这些游戏鲜少深入探究构成沉浸性的必要元素。

和所有游戏设计要素一样，音效必须同图像和游戏机制相互配合，方能促使玩家沉浸于各式各样的玩法体验中，这主要通过向玩家传递众多细节内容，通常是在他们没有意识的情况下。

Visceral Games的J White、Playdead的Martin Stig Andersen以及Freshtone Games的Thom Kellar都是音效设计师，他们在制作音效体验上经验丰富。

这属于精神层面

《地狱边境》的音效设计师及作曲人Martin Stig Andersen表示，“若你创造出音效循环及恼人内容，这种媒介就会自彰其丑。当游戏揭示机制时，这些元素背后的媒介及装置就会遭到破坏，玩家就会跳脱体验之外。”

《地狱边境》是2010年的一款杰作，深受粉丝喜爱，虏获众多年度大奖。

游戏突出的视觉画面备受赞誉，但作品之所以取得成功部分归功于它让玩家有种与世隔绝及不祥之兆的感觉，这主要源自于优质的音效设计。

Andersen及《地狱边境》总监Arnt Jensen的合作契机始于Andersen在看完游戏的最初预告片后，觉得自己的独特音乐（电声乐，非商业性，完全基于融资形式）能够有效强化体验。

Andersen表示，“看过预告片之后，我就非常着迷于男孩的表达方式。它让我回想起光与声的美感；这些内容颇具辨识度，非常逼真，但同时也很抽象。”

“这就是我所欣赏的音效运用方式。这是着眼于模糊性的少量引用，所以更多涉及听众的想象，而非我想传递的东西。”

audio limbo from gamasutra.com

很多人会回想起如下的《地狱边境》情境：他们因男孩在这一地点的行为而萌生某种感觉。但《地狱边境》并未让玩家完全把握具体发生的情况。Andersen通过有意扭曲物体的音效，促使玩家更多思考所发生的情况以及如何要做出回应，做到这点。这带来一定程度的模糊性，让玩家能够“置身其中，做出自己的诠释”。

Andersen表示，“音效特性越鲜明，我越会扭曲它们。所以我不会融入带来更多联想的音效。如果我们添加带来鲜明特性的内容（游戏邦注：如语音或动物），那它就会破坏氛围。所以通过这一风格，《地狱边境》呈现能够深入玩家脑海中的音效和视觉氛围，让他们感觉到恐惧、担忧或紧张情绪。”

《地狱边境》围绕恐惧主题，但在这一题材中，合理音效设计在激发玩家共鸣及吸引玩家眼球方面必不可少。

一个典型例子就是《死亡空间》。J White（LucasArts元老，是Visceral Games《死亡空间2》的音效设计负责人）因团队能够做到这点而颇感自豪。

在谈到《死亡空间2》的音效时，White表示，“在制作过程中，我们会遇见这样的人士——他们来到这里，从未看过眼前的内容。我们正在体验内容，他们会直接跳到椅子上。这着实吓到大家。在我看来，这有些低劣，但我从中获得许多乐趣。”

我们投入许多精力思考要如何通过游戏音效元素吸引玩家眼球，有时甚至是在毫无意识的情况下。

“促使玩家忍不住做出回应的一个基本要素是，人类的声音，更准确来说，是人类遭遇困境时所发出的声音。这是人类无法避免的深刻反应。所以我们会用作音景的一个元素是，人类置身痛苦中时发出的声音。这也许被深深潜藏起来，但人耳和人类思维都习惯于人类所发出的声音，因此他们会做出回应，即便这只是整个音效设计的亚声音。”

情感元素在更小规模游戏（甚至是iOS游戏）中的运用方式和AAA作品类似。举个例子，iOS平台的《只有一条命》赋予玩家角色一次从系列屋顶跳至另一屋顶的机会。Freshtone Games音效设计师Thom Kellar希望带给玩家这样的感觉：他们真的置身屋顶上，准备进行跳跃。

他表示，“我想要运用各种能够让你感到紧张的音效，所以你在屋顶上会听到风声及各种声音，如小鸟拍打翅膀，飞机从头顶上飞过。但这总是会回到这一问题：‘这带给我什么感觉？’这也许是最棒或最酷或最精彩的声音，但若这没有配合游戏的情感或氛围，那么很遗憾，我们也只能将其弃置一旁。”

进行操纵

“操纵”是个肮脏字眼，用来指开发者用于激发玩家情感共鸣的糟糕举措。但实际情况是，音效设计师试图利用他们的技巧以全新不同方式进一步操纵玩家。

许多游戏会利用激动人心的分数强化玩家某个时刻的情感状态。虽然音乐有其作用，但它并非影响音效设计游戏的关键因素。

Kellar表示（游戏邦注：尽管他的最初角色是创作游戏音乐），“我们初期融入更多惊动人心的音乐，但我们觉得，从情感方面来说，仅让高分出现在玩家濒临绝境的末尾阶段效果更显著，他们已在游戏空间确立自己的位置。”

因此《只有一条命》对于音乐的高效及选择性运用让游戏呈现额外的紧张感。同样，Andersen也在《地狱边境》中追求类似感觉。

他表示，“我和Jensen鲜少将音乐比作操纵玩家情感或操纵任何东西的工具。我们都觉得，所有内容都应该让玩家自由诠释，玩家要能够将自己的感觉和情绪映射到体验中。当你提供这一空间，同时创造能够吸引玩家眼球的内容时，他们就会释放这些感觉和情绪。所以在他们感到恐惧的情况下，如果没有音乐引导他们，告诉他们如何去感受，他们将更加恐惧。”

《地狱边境》这类的游戏非常富有美感，因此具有可行性。相反，《神秘海域》或《质量效应》若没有通过音乐则很难传递情感高潮，因为这是动画体验风格的组要要素。

当然，这并不意味着，《地狱边境》丝毫没有配乐，只是音乐元素更加抽象，就和Andersen自己的音乐一样。他表示，“这是对男孩及其‘地狱边境’之旅的个人诠释，而非执行操作，突出既有内容，我们尝试添加其他尺寸。在我看来，男孩承受所有这些暴力非常悲惨。他已经习以为常，因此音乐存在宽恕情感。”但这也用于并置动作和情感，例如“当你首次遇到加特林机枪时，背景会出现神圣音乐，但若你添加动作音乐之类的元素，这就变得非常肤浅。”

《死亡空间2》采用更加传统的音乐和音效混合模式。自始至终，Isaac Clarke前女友Nicole的幽灵经常萦绕在他身旁。在随后章节中，这一关系发生变化，在他们达成和解之后，她出场的音效由唐突和不安（因为玩家对此毫无意识）转变成这样的效果：提示玩家她的出现能够带来促进作用。

White表示，塑造这一效果的一个方式是通过兼容幽灵特有的音效，在“空间中的一次性出场”进行多元化运用（游戏邦注：能够让人联想到角色或事件的音效），随着玩家逐步靠近幽灵，音效会越来越清晰。

配乐和音效的混合最终带来协调的体验。White列举如下例子：在某房间中，玩家对抗成群尸变怪，这些尸变怪赶走政府军队，而Nicole幽灵则尾随其后。

他表示，“我们寄希望于这些竞争性元素。我们设置这些背景音效，旨在让你有追随此大型战斗的感觉，但同时，你获得一个辅助角色，那就是Nicole。组合所有这些元素完全就是舞蹈设计问题，在此你获得有关战斗、逃亡、宁静及女友的感觉。”

音效设计还能够带给玩家地域感觉，游戏音效能够奠定游戏体验的基础。留心此基础环境音效能够强化游戏效果。

Andersen表示，“我们通过较大脚步声告知玩家，环境非常寂静。当然你无法在整款游戏中都融入较大脚步声。它们的层次非常重要，所以我们添加不同参数，例如男孩奔跑多久，若这已持续特定时间，那么情况就会出现变化。内容需要持续变化，否则持续听到这些脚步声，你将非常抓狂。”

audio ds2 from gamasutra.com

同样，精心设计背景音效能够带来独特的玩法体验。White表示，《死亡空间2》运用其背景音效“预示未来发展情况。如果玩家在清理房间或打败boss后回到同个地方，那么音效将截然不同。用华丽词藻来表述，《死亡空间2》的背景音效本身就是个角色。这是用户体验及游戏心理体验的内在组成要素。”

沉浸性

White表示，“杰出游戏机制能够自然吸引玩家眼球。《Pong》包含很棒的boops & beeps游戏机制，玩家着迷其中，因为这非常有趣。如今，作为音效设计师，我们能够获得令人满意的核心机制，但依然存在许多微妙元素有待我们深入挖掘。”

White表示，音效是整体体验中的重要沉浸性元素，音效设计师的部分职责是协助强化这些游戏机制和环境，进而吸引玩家眼球。

Andersen（游戏邦注：他除涉猎游戏外，还涉足电影行业）就游戏音效的沉浸性特性发表自己的看法。

“体验游戏和观看电影截然不同，因为在游戏中你只有在重要时刻才会听到音效。通常在游戏中，你可以置身音效的上下左右位置， 你可以靠近它，跳过它，但当你跳过它时，你依然会在前进过程中听到它。”

最后，Andersen表示，对于某些音效设计师来说，创造或打破沉浸性是项艰巨任务。“你创造的是富有粘性但同时维持幻想性的内容，那么这就是强有力的东西。但这操作起来非常棘手。”（本文为游戏邦/gamerboom.com编译，拒绝任何不保留版权的转载，如需转载请联系：游戏邦）

Creating Audio That Matters

by Caleb Bridge

“Immersion” has become cliché. It’s often just another buzzword when talking about how great a game is, but it’s all too infrequent that those discussing games will actually break down the finer details of what that immersion entails.

Like all pieces of the puzzle that is game design, audio must work in concert with graphics and game mechanics to help immerse the player into gameplay experiences of all shapes and sizes through its ability to convey vast amounts of the detail to the player, often without their knowing.

J White, Martin Stig Andersen, and Thom Kellar, of Visceral Games, Playdead, and Freshtone Games respectively, are three sound designers who have ample experience in creating such audio experiences.

It’s Mental

“It can be easy for the media to reveal itself if you’ve got a sound loop or something that becomes annoying. As soon as the game reveals the mechanics, the media and the machinery behind these things is ruined and the player is thrown out of the experience,” said Martin Stig Andersen, sound designer and composer on Limbo.

Limbo was a critical success and fan favorite in 2010, putting many end-of-year awards under its belt.

It was lauded for its striking visual aesthetic, but part of its success came from its ability to make the player feel a sense of isolation and foreboding that is largely the result of top quality sound design.

Andersen and Limbo’s director, Arnt Jensen, teamed up after Andersen saw the game’s initial trailer and felt his unique area of music (electroacoustic music, a non-commercial, almost entirely funding-based form) would add to the experience.

“I watched the trailer and I was really captivated by [the boy's] expressions,” said Andersen. “It reminded me of the aesthetics of light and sound; you have something recognizable and realistic, but at the same time it’s abstract.

“It’s the same as what I love about how we use sound. We have all these slight references that focus on ambiguity, so it’s more about what the listener imagines, rather than what I want to tell them.”

Many can think back to sections of Limbo where they were struck by a certain feeling or sense for what the boy was doing in that place. But one thing Limbo never allowed the player to do was fully understand what was happening. Andersen achieved this by intentionally distorting the sounds of objects in an attempt to make the player think more about what’s going on and how they’re meant to react. This gave it a level of ambiguity that allows the player to “be there and make their own interpretation.”

“The more identity the sounds had, the more I would distort them,” Andersen said. “So I wouldn’t include sounds that gave too strong associations. If we added something that had a strong identity like a voice or an animal, then it would almost destroy the atmosphere. So with that style, Limbo offered an audio and visual atmosphere that can really get into the player’s mind, and make them feel scared, worried or on edge.”

Limbo toys with horror themes throughout, but it is in that genre that exacting sound design is essential in eliciting player emotion and getting inside the player’s head.

One series praised for its ability to do this is Dead Space. J White — a LucasArts veteran who served as sound design lead at Visceral Games on Dead Space 2 — took great pride in the team’s ability to do just that.

“During the course of production, there were meetings I would have with people — they’d come in and have never seen [the section] before. We’d be playing, and they would literally jump in their chair. It genuinely frightened people. It might be kind of mean on my part, but I took a lot of pleasure in that,” said White, when discussing the effects of the sound in Dead Space 2.

Much effort was put into thinking about how they could use the game’s audio elements to enter the player’s mind, sometimes without them even noticing it.

“A fundamental thing that people cannot help but respond to is the sound of the human voice and, even more specifically, the sound of human suffering. It’s just an unavoidable, deep reaction that people have. So one of the elements that we’ll use as part of our soundscapes are the sounds of people in misery. It may be deeply buried, but the human ear and human mind are so attuned to human vocalizations that they’ll respond to it even if it’s just a sub-audible aspect of the overall sound design.”

This sentiment applies to smaller games — even iOS games — in the same way it does to triple-A releases. One Single Life on iOS, which literally gives the player’s character a single life to jump from a series of rooftops to another, is one such example. Thom Kellar, Freshtone Games’ sound designer, wanted to give players the sense that they were actually on that roof, preparing to jump.

“I wanted to use a lot of sounds that would make you feel a bit on edge, so there was wind and a lot of noises you’d hear on a rooftop like birds fluttering and planes flying overhead,” he said. “But it kept coming back to ‘What did that make me feel?’ and it might have been the best or coolest or most wonderful sound, but if it’s not contributing to the emotion or atmosphere of the game, unfortunately it had to go into the basket.”

Manipulation

“Manipulation” can be a dirty word, and is generally used to call out poor attempts by developers to force emotions or reactions from the player. But the reality is, that audio designers try to use their craft to manipulate players in new and different ways as an enhancement.

Many games will use a rousing score to heighten the emotional state of a moment, and while music certainly has its place, it doesn’t have to be the crutch used for affecting sound design games.

“We experimented early on with putting dramatic music over the top, but we felt that emotionally, it was a lot more effective to only have that big score happening towards the end when players were getting to the very edge, and they’d established themselves in the world already,” said Kellar — despite one of his initial roles being to write music for the game.

As a result, One Single Life’s efficient and selective use of music gives it an extra sense of tension. Likewise, Andersen went for a similar feel with Limbo.

“[Jensen and I] rarely like music as an instrument to manipulate the emotions of the player, or manipulate anything really. We both feel that everything should be open to interpretation, and people should be allowed to project their own feelings and emotions into the experience,” he said. “When you allow for that space, and at the same time create something that’s captivating and immerses the player, it lets them let go of those feelings and emotions. So if they’re scared it will probably make them more scared when there’s no music to take them by the hand and tell them how to feel.”

Of course a game like Limbo is aesthetically such that this is possible. Conversely, Uncharted or Mass Effect would be less likely to convey emotional and energetic peaks without the use of music, as it’s such an integral part of the style of the cinematic experiences they’re trying to create.

Of course, that doesn’t mean that there’s no music at all in Limbo, it’s just more abstract, like Andersen’s own music. “It’s the personal interpretation of this boy and his journey through limbo, and instead of playing the action and emphasizing what’s already there, we’re trying to add another dimension… For me, it’s really melancholy that this boy has been subjected to all this violence. It’s just the idea that he’s been habituated to it, and there’s a kind of forgiveness in the music,” he said. But it’s also used to help juxtapose actions and emotions, such as “when you come across the Gatling guns for the first time, there’s this divine music in the background, but if you add something like action music, it becomes so one-dimensional.”

Dead Space 2 featured a more traditional mix of music and effects. Throughout, the apparition of Isaac Clarke’s ex-girlfriend, Nicole, haunts him. In the later chapters, that relationship changes and after they have a reconciliation, the audio relating to her presence transitions from being abrupt and uncomfortable as the player is unaware of what’s coming, to one which indicates to the player that her presence is actually a helping one.

According to White, one of the ways this was portrayed was by incorporating sound effects that became characteristic of her apparitions, and using them differently in ‘ambient one-shots’ — effects that elicit thoughts of a character or event – that would begin to play the closer you came to an encounter with her.

The mixture of music and effects ends up being an orchestrated experience. White gives the example of a room where the player has fought of a phalanx of Necromorphs, who were chasing off government forces, which was followed by another apparition of Nicole.

“We have these competing things we want to pay off on,” he said. “We’ve got these ambient sounds devoted to giving you the sense that you’re following this massive battle, but at the same time, you’ve got this helping presence that’s Nicole coming in. It’s really a matter of choreography to get all those kinds of elements to play together, where you’ve got this sense of the battle, the desertion, the quietness and the girlfriend.”

Sound design can also manipulate the player’s mind to give them a sense of place, for which game audio helps set the foundation of the game experience. Taking care with such base-level environmental effects is part of what can help make a game great.

“We had loud footsteps to tell the audience that the environment is really silent,” said Andersen. “Of course you couldn’t have loud footsteps through the whole game. Their level is very important, so we added different parameters like how long [they boy] has been running, and if he’s been going for a certain amount of time it starts to change. It needs constant variation, otherwise you’d go crazy hearing those footsteps all the time.”

Likewise, such meticulous care with environmental sound design can help give unique gameplay experiences. According to White, Dead Space 2 used its ambient sound to “foreshadow what’s coming next. If the player backtracks to the same place after they’ve cleared the room or beat the boss, it sounds different. In the most flowery terms, the ambient sound in Dead Space 2 is almost a character in itself. It’s such an intrinsic part of the player’s experience, and the psychological experience of playing a game.”

Immersion

“A good game mechanic will naturally immerse players. Pong has a great game mechanic with boops and beeps, and people are drawn into that because it’s fun,” said White. “These days, as audio designers, we still score that core mechanic in a satisfying way, but we have a lot more subtlety available to us.”

White recognizes that audio is an important, additive element to the overall experience, and part of the role of sound designers is to help enhance those game mechanics and environments in order to immerse the player.

Andersen, who has worked on films in addition to games, gives some perspective to game audio’s immersive nature.

“When I’m playing games it’s so different from films, because there you only hear sounds when it’s important to the viewer. Often in games, you can go up and down or around a sound, you approach it and you pass it, but when you pass it you still hear it as you progress.”

Ultimately, for some sound designers, walking the tightrope of making or breaking immersion is a tough one, says Andersen. “If you create something that’s engaging but at the same time keeps the illusion alive then you’ve got something that’s very strong. But it’s so difficult to do.”（Source：gamasutra）