Sound and music in games

Authoring General Design Discussions
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I read a game review recently for Apartment Story. At some point they mentioned that it had no voice acting, only subtitles. It felt like a silly statement - game doesn’t have unnecessary feature x. I haven’t played the game, but it looks like a pretty low budget project, in the common IF/indie apartment genre.

It reminds me of some of my own thoughts. For low/no budget games and games with a single author, adding music and sound effects and voice acting is going to be a lot of extra work. Doing a really good job, making it subtle and stylistically appropriate and everything else would require a ton of additional work and expertise.

I’m not sure if I want it either or that it makes for a better game. I don’t listen to music when I read, or when I’m thinking about things. Music is a double edged sword - it is powerful and atmospheric, but maybe so powerful that it overwhelms everything else. Sound effects in a turn based text based adventure game feel a little out of place to me, like you’re adding real time elements to a non real time medium.

But maybe I’m being delusional. Have there been successful games without music, outside of maybe Infocom? Am I the only person who mutes the repetitive background music in strategy games? If you made a really good game without music, would the first line of every review be “the music wasn’t working”? Would they be right to be disappointed?

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ChoiceofGames. Tons of text-only no-sound titles. Some making a bit of bank. VERY popular. Multiple releases under its 3 labels every month.

It’s a preference thing. Some people like it, some people hate it. That’s why there are usually music controls/mute in games.

I’d see more people asking to include music as a comment (or asking if there was music) before stating that, imo. If sound isn’t mentioned in the game page, and the conventions of the type of game doesn’t really include music (like text-only IF), people don’t expect it.

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It’s all pretty subjective like you say. I feel like my thinking about it is kind of fuzzy. What types of games fit better with music and which don’t? Do you think all types of games benefit from music and sound effects? And there are many different types of music in games too - melodic music, ambient music, dramatic music, quiet music, …

I like your point about Choice of Games. Are they all silent? Has the Choice of Games community had many discussions about music?

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I’m of the opinion that any game can be enhanced with music, and that music fits any game (it can make the absence of sound very memorable). It’s just a matter of getting the right kind for the right ambiance (which is painstaking work, that some creators enjoy and some don’t - but also, this is why games are made with multiple people rather than one solo dev).

There are no sound in the official releases (afaik - I know a couple of WIPs with sound files). I think it’s a matter of accessibility/keeping the app/game size small so it can be used with any device? But it’s more something that @dfabulich could answer better.
Sorry for the ping

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I’m not sure I understand the question.

Choice of Games has multiple publishing labels:

  • Choice of Games: Our main commercial publishing-house label. We have editors who work with authors to deliver the best games we can make.
  • Hosted Games: Users submit us whatever they want (with some limitations). Quality varies wildly, with some fantastic games, and some, uh, not so fantastic
  • Heart’s Choice: Like Choice of Games, but specifically for interactive romance novels

CoG and HC have no music at all. A few HGs have music, but it’s very rare.

ChoiceScript is not designed for music. There is a *sound command, but it’s intended for short sound effects. Occasionally, folks have used *sound for long musical effects… it kinda sorta works.

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I think manon was trying to guess at reasons why Choice of Games would not include sound and music. Maybe to continue with that, I would ask if you feel any pressure to include music (or the ability to include music) in the games. Do you think it would make the games more successful?

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I’d say that we’ve heard way more demand to create graphical visual novels than we’ve heard demand for background music. (But maybe the folks asking us for VNs implicitly meant voice acting + OST music as well…)

I have put some thought into the market for visual novels. Some of the bestselling visual novels of the last few years have made millions of dollars in their opening year. So, you could say, “If we were making visual novels, we could be making more money.”

But visual novels miss, too, and sometimes they miss quite badly. It’s not uncommon for teams of dozens of people (writers, artists, art directors, composers, voice actors, producers, etc. etc. etc.) to work together for more than a year, full time, on a visual novel that “only” makes ~$100K after fees.

Our games are designed to be written in the voice of a single author, which allows us to take creative risks that we couldn’t otherwise take, and to be a sustainable business (we’ve been operating since 2010).

So, we can always take more steps to be closer to a visual novel, but each time we do, we take on more risk, and each time, the risk may or may not be worth it.

Should we add background music? Should we pay to compose an original soundtrack, or license someone else’s music? Should we add voice acting? How many actors? Should we add background graphics? Character portraits?

We probably will experiment with some of these over the next few years. But there are no clear “right answers” when it comes to how much (or how little) to do here.

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My experience with game jams (not IF-specific, just general game jams) is that if you don’t have music (or at least ambient background noise) then people absolutely will comment on it as a missing feature, even for short zero-budget amateur games. But that’s the mainstream gaming audience, not necessarily the core text-only IF audience.

Personally, I frequently mute the music in games as I find it distracting, especially if it’s a game with a lot of reading or thinking involved. But I also can’t for the life of me listen to music while working or studying, which seems to make me an outlier.

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There are so many factors as to when and why people like or dislike what music. Neuroscientific ones. Cultural ones. Physiological ones. Personal evolution ones.

Reading’s a full bandwidth activity for most people, hence the low popularity of IF soundtracks.

Music is definitive in nature, which doesn’t go with the activity of reading in which your brain produces your own version of the experience from the words. The same reason book covers for adults lean abstract and/or don’t show specific characters or incidents. The definitive and non-definitive fight each other. You can annoy readers if pictures don’t match what they thought up.

Music played over a non full-bandwidth but otherwise definitive activity can work as an additional element of it. In films, the music element is judged and carefully controlled. In games (or behind games, if you listen to your own music) it can work as a more abstract element, because the definitive content still varies per game. A heavily prejudiced abstract element in most cases, but still abstract in nature.

If I think of the evolution of music in games, the main reason a particular 8-bit game might not have had music was because (a) the hardware couldn’t manage it, or (b) the same reasons as today; the music didn’t suit the activity.

As soon as gaming hardware and CPUs could easily support music, pretty much all games had music if there was any question about whether they could, and no reason not to. I’d say that broad tradition has continued to the present. And yeah, I find people coming from mainstream games to anything outside that are more initially conservative in their expectations than, say, mainstream filmgoers who watch a less mainstream film. Maybe it’s an age thing, and because young people now feel they know an absolute ton about gaming very early. I don’t know.

-Wade

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I’ve been trying to map out some of the different options and their pros and cons. Maybe a text game can get away with no sound, but as soon as you add graphics or character illustrations you have started down the path to a full sensory experience and the lack of sound will be criticized. You could just add a few interface and maybe some other sound effects, but I think people would see that for what it probably is - a pretty limited attempt. Sometimes I think there’s a doable way, but then it grows much more complicated. Maybe you can add a single short ambient song that repeats the entire game? That’s not going to work if you have significantly different areas that shouldn’t sound the same. And my main priority is - what makes the best game? Like I’ve said my own preferences make me wonder if adding sound even makes the game better; maybe this is a tragic character flaw. Then there is the business strategy side of things. Maybe release a silent game, then get funding to add sound later? Create a trailer with sound, but the game is silent? That’s probably going to backfire. Emphasize from the start that the game has no sound to try to manage people’s expectations?

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[The young] are high-minded because they have not yet been humbled by life, nor have they experienced the force of circumstances.
[…]
They think they know everything, and are always quite sure about it.

— Aristotle, “Rhetoric”, Part 12 (~4th century BC)

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I feel like one can generally get away with no sound in a text-only game, but once you add graphics, unless it’s something super simple for PC like Solitaire card games or traditional board games where you can easily have whatever music playing in the background on your mediaplayer app of choice, it’s kind of a baseline expectation the game will feature background music and sound effects of some sort, and this has been the status quo since at least Super Mario Brothers and probably longer(I’m not familiar enough with the Atari 2600 and other pre-NES consoles to know if music was common in those early days and by the time I got into video games seriously, Arcades where already on their way out in the US and I know arcade classics like Pac-Man, Space Invaders, Donkey Kong, etc. through home console ports and flash-based clones, not playing the original cabinets.

As for voice acting, I think Triple-A studios making narrative heavy games where even minor NPCs have voice clips has skewed the perception of gamers too young to remember the days when games had to fit on a single DVD or CD and voice acting was reserved for games with relatively little dialog or just the most important scenes and many lacking an appreciation for what goes into fully voicing a dialog heavy game using professional voice actors.

And, let’s be honest, it’s nearly trivial to satisfy those who don’t like music/sound effects/voice acting, just let them mute them. But to please those who expect them, there’s no choice but to do the hard work.

Personally, I’d consider nearly any video game without sound to be incomplete, even if I’d end up muting whatever sound it had. And for me, ideally all in-game text would be read by a human and mixed to be easily heard over the music and sound effects. Then again, I’m blind, and as long as tactile graphics displays are on par with ancient dot matrix displays and as expensive as a discount new car, a game has to be playable through its sound design alone if it isn’t text-only, and while a game having built-in TTS is nice, I still prefer proper voice acting to TTS in most cases.

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I have the impression that screen reader users speed up the playback rate - do you also do this with voice over?

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Some speech-dependant blind people do crank their TTS up to things like 500 or even 800 wpm, resulting in speech that sounds like gibberish or even noise to the untrained ear.

I, unfortunately, have very slow ears and have enough trouble keeping up with the default speech rate for my chosen synth, which I understand to be about 180 wpm, the average speech rate of a person in normal conversation.

Also, I’ve never owned an Apple product as far as I know, and thus have no experience with either iOS Voiceover nor OSX Voiceover.

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Personally I find sound effects and music hard to reconcile with a text-based or barely animated game. Sound is the product of motion, so sound doesn’t mesh with a static picture for me. Once there’s sound or music I want to see something dynamic on the screen as well. It doesn’t have to be complex animation. Showing a smaller amount of text and changing it often can be effective.

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I don’t think many people expect you to use sound in a text game, so it can be a pleasant surprise when done right.

My experience creating a parser game centered around music and its effects on the PC (detailed here) got me thinking about the effect of music on the player.

Sounds are woefully underused in text games! In some instances, they may be more effective than pictures at enhancing the experience. But there have to be boundaries. The most important thing an interactive fiction author wanting to insert sound can do is be polite about it.

In my hubris, based on what others have said and my own experience, I came up with Robert’s Rules of Sound:

  • A text game should never start with sound. (Playing sound on the first turn is an excellent way for players with young children to hate you and can also make the user’s browser automatically mute the game.)

  • As soon as possible, the author should warn the player that the game has sound and ideally provide an option to mute it.

  • The game should be playable without sound. Puzzles and story should be centered on what the player reads, not on what the player hears.

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As a player I’d appreciate (optional) music that suits the mood the game puts me in, but I’d object to music that does not support that mood. As an example from outside the IF bubble, in the GTA games you have radio stations that play different kinds of music, and you can switch on one that caters your current mood, or you switch off the radio entirely. In terms of IF (where as an author you don’t have the resources to cater every taste), make it optional. You may argue that a specific track is exactly what you as the author want the player to listen to right now, but chances are the player has a completely different taste.

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Happy to see our rules are identical. :grin:

Something I’d like to put out there, without responding to anyone in particular:

If you are adding music to something which requires reading, a conjecture I’ve come up with and have been experimenting with is that the music should be mixed for reading.

Part of this conjecture is to strongly dampen frequencies below 100 Hz, and mildly dampen frequencies above 20 2 kHz (with stronger dampening above 40 4 kHz).

The reason is these are likely frequencies which catch a lot, and the higher ones also overlap with screen reader consonants.

I don’t have any papers to cite as backup or anything; it’s just a conjecture, but if anyone else wants to try this too, let me know your findings.

Of course, audio should always be optional for the same reason why it’s optional in visual games. However, for those who opt in for music, I feel like the music should be designed with not only the story and gameplay in mind, but also with the fact that the player is reading, too.

EDIT: Maybe I should have made this a new thread…

EDIT 2: My higher frequencies were off by an order of magnitude, lol. Good catch, @severedhand!

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Did you mean something lower? Almost nobody can hear usefully above the CD audio nyquist frequency of 22khz.

-Wade

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I can only speak for myself but I like hearing everyone’s conjectures, opinions about what they like and don’t like, theories about what works and doesn’t work, various strategies, lessons from people who have tried it.

That’s interesting to me. A lot of non text only games have music in the title page, and I’ve never noticed people complaining about it.

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