The Game Audio Tutorial: A Practical Guide to Sound and Music for Interactive Games (review)

On 11 November 2011, the worldwide launch of the first-person shooter video game Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 developed by Activision Blizzard, set a new record for the biggest-ever entertainment launch in any format. In less than 24 hours it generated $400 million and surpassed by far the record held by the film industry at $80 million with Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2. Despite the increasing worldwide popularity of video games, the amazing technological advancements of the field, and, more importantly, the exciting new possibilities and directions in the world of sound and music, game audio has only just recently started to attract noticeable attention from the academic community. During the last decade, there have been a handful of books and a small volume of articles published, mainly by specialists of different fields ranging from psychology and sociology to informatics and musicology. Nevertheless, some understanding of the complex and fast-paced concepts of interactive audio has started to emerge; therefore, an analytical book that focuses exclusively on interactive game audio is certainly a welcome addition, especially when it is written by two senior lecturers in the field who have previous industry experience.

The Game Audio Tutorial, as is suggested by the title, is intended to be a practical, hands-on guide to the subject of sound and music for games. As will be shown in this review, this book is truly a useful and detailed step-by-step guide to many important concepts of audio design and implementation in games; however, the choice of title is not accurate and can potentially mislead the reader, mainly for two reasons. First, the term ‘game audio’ implies that this study will focus on the audio aspect of games in general and not only on a specific genre. The vast majority of examples and situations that are examined in this study specialise entirely in the genre of first- and third-person shooters (FPS). The authors argue that these genres are the highest-selling ones and that they bring the highest investments in the advancements of game audio (xvii). Regardless of the validity of this point, the FPS genre makes up no more than a small percentage of a medium that contains an ever-expanding list of more than 40 types of game. Moreover, the argument that the explored techniques and concepts could potentially be applied in other genres (xvii) is only partially solid; it has been shown that in many cases the role and function of audio heavily depends on genre. Thus, since the entire book uses a specific genre as a case study, it is inevitable that a number of concepts and techniques will be left out.

The second reason the title is misleading is that it fails to communicate the fact that this study and all the practical examples and exercises that accompany it focus exclusively on a single piece of software, the Unreal Development Kit (UDK) developed by Epic Games. UDK is undoubtedly a great choice for a book of this kind, since it is widely used as a core engine in the gaming industry, and, more importantly, it can be downloaded for free and used for any non-commercial purpose. This allows readers to participate in the exercises and actually observe their ideas come to life in a real game environment. The authors claim that the concepts explored are easily transferable to other game engines (xvii), an argument that again is not entirely true. As this book is meant to be a practical guide, all the exercises are naturally very technically oriented and the step-by-step processes are designed for this specific software. Consequently, despite the potential applicability of the book’s concepts in other game engines or audio middleware, the majority of the exercises will not be transferable to other software tools, unless the reader is already an expert in the field.

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