Playing with Sound: A Theory of Interacting with Sound and Music in Video Games by Karen Collins (review)

Like most films and television programmes, video games are audiovisual experiences, rather than purely visual experiences. Yet video game sound remains a largely neglected aspect of sound studies. Arguably, game sound suffers from a double marginalisation, with video games generally disregarded as serious objects of academic inquiry, coupled with widespread ‘deafness’ to sound. However, in the last decade or so, a few scholarly works have emerged to address this deficiency, and in particular Karen Collins’s work has spearheaded the serious study of game sound. Having declared a call to arms within the pages of the first issue of this very journal (Collins 2007), she subsequently published a monograph, Game Sound: An Introduction to the History, Theory, and Practice of Video Game Music and Sound Design in 2008, in addition to numerous book chapters and articles.

While her earlier monograph focused on the production and development side of gaming and game sound, Playing With Sound focuses on the player’s experience. The introduction stakes out the territory that the book covers, refreshing and challenging many assumptions regarding sound and digital media. Rather than adopting one central theory or methodological approach, Collins borrows from a wide variety of theories and disciplines, which is a particular strength of the book. Putting the player at the centre of her discussion, Collins lays out the key differences between game audio and audio in other media, namely the interactive capacity of game audio, and the role of the player’s body. Though always important, the body has become particularly central to the gaming experience with the popularity of consoles such as the Nintendo Wii, which are partly controlled by players’ gestures using the Wii remote. This is not, however, a quantitative survey of gamers’ experiences; rather Collins combines theoretical speculation of the player experience based on existing academic literature, contextualised by opinions expressed by players on web forums and her own experiences of gaming.

In the first chapter, ‘Interacting with Sound’, Collins postulates interaction with sound as an embodied encounter. As a retort to sound studies pioneer Murray Schafer’s anxious concept of the ‘schizophonia’ of contemporary human experience, she asserts that sound recordings are not merely ‘detached’ or ‘split’ from their sources. Rather, corporeal listening bears little connection with sight, given that sounds are not only heard but are also felt, resonating within the body. Reassessing key film sound literature such as the writings of Michel Chion, Collins provides a fresh perspective by theorising embodied encounters with audio and audiovisual media, a perspective the literature has traditionally ignored. Conversely, seminal past work on embodiment and corporeality in encounters with cinema, such as that of Laura Marks, Jennifer Barker and Vivian Sobchack, has tended to emphasise the visual at the expense of the sonic (for example, Barker’s book is entitled The Tactile Eye, as opposed to ‘the tactile ear’). Bringing together these two sets of literature leads to a powerful synthesis, with Collins positing game sound as multimodal, ‘involve[ing] the interaction of more than one sensory modality and usually contain[ing] three (vision, audition and haptics – action, image and sound)’ (22). It is this multimodality that distinguishes the experience of interacting with sound in video games from merely listening to sound.

Though haptic, corporeal encounters with non-interactive media such as cinema have previously been theorised, Collins intervenes by identifying the key difference between our experience of interactive sound in comparison with film sound – in game audio, sound is fused to action, not image, and sound is player-generated. The added dimension of the player’s action (as opposed to the audioviewer’s passive inaction) is summed up as follows:

Sound in film can be congruent, incongruent, or neutral in relation to the image. In games, however, there is the added modality of the player’s events, meaning that sound may be congruent with the image or may be congruent with the action of the player...