Dead Space, Resident Evil, Fallout 3, Fallout: New Vegas, Bioshock, Mass Effect

Finally, there is Soundscape, which entails the atmospheric sound effects that don’t necessarily tell the story on their own, but reinforce the story being told through the dialogue and the music.  And in many games, they reinforce the story exponentially, to the point where it wouldn’t be the same narrative if they hadn’t.

For example, Dead Space (2008) makes the audible experience, not necessarily through the haunting soundtrack and desperate quips of your crew, but from the noise all around the player.  The desolate ship creaks and struggles against dying systems; the vents clang, crash, and echo as ungodly denizens skitter through; guided machinery screams against its rails, drowning out the rest of the noise, both a welcome reprieve and sever handicap; and a screeching shriek to a low grumble tells what kind of enemy awaits, how close they are, and if they might be behind you.  Mastery and good use of soundscape is what makes Dead Space a memorable experience and what fuels the survival-horror genre.

The same principle has held true since the consoles introduced Resident Evil (1996) on  the Playstation: the shuffling of a zombie or skulking of a Hunter all helped to make the experience, to say nothing of how the camera angles complimented the experience.  A particularly memorable experience involves the sharp, unsuspected shattering of a window as players walked through a hallway.

Many open-world games, when the setting allows, allow for the player to control the experiences background music via in-game radio; hence, this doesn’t apply to games like Skyrim (2012) where radios haven’t been created.  But Fallout 3 (2008) and Fallout: New Vegas (2010) give players to option to flip on the radio on their wrist-mounted management system, PipBoys, and listen to the tunes of their respective wasteland.  DJs, as separate, encounterable characters in the worlds play music that players can choose to listen to or not.  Of course, this makes it more of a sound effect, part of the world out of the player’s control; the radio doesn’t react to specific actions in-game, it doesn’t crescendo or die down with the arrival and end of conflict, it is purely a radio, its own device in the world, out of the player’s control.  Soundscape like this helps to make a player feel like a part of the world, that there are some aspects that are out of their control in the grand setting.

Similarly, Bioshock (2007) uses set, diegetic sources of music, mentioned in the previous section, as part of the soundscape.  As such, there is rarely a concrete ‘soundtrack’ going on, but rather music fading in and out depending on room, distance to source, and how much is going on around the player.  Aside from serving as a setting reinforcement, with the dated songs and quality placing Rapture squarely in the 1960s, the radios also give an ominous overtone to the setting; hearing an otherwise cheery tune in the middle of a city like Rapture is wildly disconcerting and unsettling, adding to the narrative experience.

Mass Effect and its sequels (2007-2013) take advantage of the soundscape by combining it, in a way, with speech.  As Commander Shepard walks around neutral hubs, they may be able to assist an ailing individual with their problem, but it’s almost as often that players can hear the conversational banter of people without having to get involved.  The conversation doesn’t stop when Shepard leaves, because it doesn’t concern them; they keep going about their lives as though nothing had happened.  It adds to the experience to hear about someone’s smaller troubles in a galaxy brewing with danger, or hearing about a soldier’s post-traumatic stress induced tour to hostile territory.  None of it is necessary to Shepard’s narrative, and none of it is required to be heard, but sometimes it’s good to just sit down and listen for a little while.