Playing With Auditory Environments in Audio Games

Abstract

Audio games highlight audio as the major narrative, ludic, and interactive element in the process of gaming. These games enroll the players in the process of gaming and distribute agency by translating auditive cues into interactive “pings” and provide a potential for an auditory virtual space. Designed for either blind persons or as “learning software” for hard-of-hearing people, audio games dismiss graphical elements by using the auditory ludic elements and foreground auditory perception as a main condition for playing the game. Spöhrer demonstrates this by using the example of 3D Snake, which needs to be played with headphones or surround speakers. The game uses verbal instructions and different sound effects to produce an auditory image of a snake that can be moved with the computer keyboard. In this auditory environment, the relation of both human and non-human elements (e.g., controller devices, the arrangement of speakers, cultural practices of gaming, aesthetic devices, and software configurations) produce and translate a specific mode of auditory perception.

Twitching Laborious Play or: How Game-Streaming Changes Modes of Playing

“…Inspired by ANT and STS, recent academic discourse on digital games and gaming increasingly focused the processual, relational and agential nature of digital gaming arrangements and their related actors (cf. Giddings 2008;Conway und Trevillian 2015;Waldrich 2016;Spöhrer 2018;Huuhka 2019). This consequently means to move away from analyses of games as cultural artifacts, systems or narrative structures to a conceptualization of digital gaming as socio-technical and sensory 'events' (Giddings 2008).…”

“…Rather, Giddings along with others conceives of digital gaming as a situated practice that is entangled in an inseparable arrangement of heterogeneous "part(icipant)s" (cf. 2008. p. 8-10;Conway und Trevillian 2015;Waldrich 2016;Spöhrer 2018) enacted in the event of playing. It is the task of the researcher to identify those practices, agencies, and heterogeneous actors and link them back together, in order to (re-)create a 'gaming event'.…”