TED Talks: Gaming

Two inspirational and interesting TEDtalks about gaming - Effects on human health and Reward Systems:

1. Jane Mcgonigal on 'The game that can give you 10 extra years of life'. 
www.ted.com/talks/jane_mcgonigal_the_game_that_can_give_you_10_extra_years_of_life.html

2. Tom Chatfield on '7 ways games reward the brain' 
www.ted.com/talks/tom_chatfield_7_ways_games_reward_the_brain.html

Cited from Talk two by Tom Chatfield:

We evolved over hundreds of thousands of years to be satisfied by the world in particular ways; and to be intensely satisfied as a species by learning and problem-solving. Perhaps the most amazing thing about the virtual arenas that games create is that we are now able to reverse-engineer that, and to produce environments that exist expressly to tick our evolutionary boxes and to engage us.

When it comes to games themselves, the “fun first” principle is an absolute: before anything and everything else, a game must be fun. Not everything can be made into a game, though; and it’s simply misleading to think of games as potential solutions to all our ills. So I’ve come up with seven larger ideas for motivating and engaging people on the basis of observing many games’ stunning power as engines of human engagement:

1. Using an experience system. This is something that Jesse Schell has talked about brilliantly in this last year, and that is actually being done in places like Indiana University. Don’t have grades, for example: give students an avatar or a profile that levels up steadily based on things like attendance and performance. Everything should count in some way towards this precisely-measured, steady individual progression: a far more intimate, involving and nuanced way of measuring progress over time than most conventional means. 

2. Multiple long and short-term aims. You break something down into many parallel tasks. You don’t just to say to someone, do 5,000 sums, or 100, or even 50: you create a whole spectrum of larger and smaller objectives that help people take take ownership of their progress, and keep them feeling they are progressing and succeeding – as well as targeting particular sets of skills. 

3. You reward for effort. People should be credited for everything they try and do. Don’t punish failure. Instead, reward and reinforce, and make everything count towards a clear measure of progress. As I’ve said elsewhere, one of the most profound transformations we can learn from games is how to turn the sense that someone has “failed” into the sense that they “haven’t succeeded yet.” 

4. Rapid, clear, frequent feedback. This is absolutely central to all forms of learning and engagement. With many of the most intractable problems in the world today, like global warming and pollution, it can be almost impossible to learn or understand something when consequences and feedback are distant from causes. Showing a clear link between things, and allowing people to experience this experimentally, allows learning to take place: you need to be shown and to experience exactly how an action plays out, what it caused, whether your attempt worked or not. 

5. Uncertainty. This is the real neurological gold mine so far as gaming is concerned. Dopamine elevates when you get a little prize for doing something, but what really lights up the brain is the unexpected reward: the one that couldn’t be predicted. And so the right amount of well-calibrated uncertainty can create intense engagement in all manner of tasks. 

6. Windows of enhanced attention. This is about using the emerging field of neurological modelling to identify those moments when attention and memory are enhanced in the brain by an elevated dopamine level, and putting learning into them – literally dropping the nugget of fact into those few seconds when attention is elevated. It’s early days here, but the potential of the field is vast. 

7. Other people. If games should remind us of one crucial aspect of our evolutionary natures more than any other, it’s that reward is not just money or personal achievement points; and it’s not just solitary individuals slumped in front of screens: it’s the intense validation of doing something in comparison and in collaboration with others. 

Collective engagement can be transformed by the unprecedented laboratory that virtual worlds offer for observing group psychology and motivation; from analyzing Guild structures in games to exploring how the public visibility of participants’ levels of achievement can encourage both competition and collaboration. This is, for me, perhaps the most thrilling area of all.

Sound propagation and the 'Stealth' Genre

'Sound propagation' is the term used to explain the behavior of sound in an environment. When creating a game, we want to accurately reproduce the acoustics of the virtual environment as it would sound in reality. This is no only so that the player can have an understanding as they relate it to the real world, but also to help increase immersion into the game. Accurate reproduction of sound propagation in games consists of multiple aspects, such as Reflection (Reverberation), Refraction (Re-direction of wave) and Attenuation/spatialisation (Where the sound is situated and its drop-off properties).

Reflection and Refraction
See the link below and select 'sound from air to water' to get a basic idea of how it propagates:

www.phys.hawaii.edu/~teb/java/ntnujava/propagation/propagation.html

Essentially, this behavior can be reproduced through using the correct reverb. In UDK, it would require too much CPU to run an accurate propagation model within a map. So to prevent this problem, it provides pre calculated reverb effects in which you can choose from. You can apply one of these presets which seems appropriate using the [Reverb Volume].

Attenuation and spatialisation

Spatiailisation is basically the realisation of the sound in a 3D environment, it allows a sound to emanate from 3D space. A lot of the things we hear in games are off screen due to our field of vision and spatialisation of sounds helps inform us of our surroundings. Attenuation and sometimes filtering when designing games can give a sense of distance from the object to the player. There are many types of distance algorithms to consider when designing attenuation and in games, these are:

• Linear - Unrealistic in the real world, but can be used for crossfading between looped audio and room tones.
• Logarithmic - For sounds more suited to be heard at a closer distance.
• Inverse - Good for loud and distant objects. Quiet at max radius but can be heard from far away.
• LogReverse - Loud at the max radius.
• Natural Sound - Realistic attenuation curve.

In UDK, these algorithms can be selected using the 'Attenuation' node.

Sound Propagation in the stealth genre

Accurate reconstruction of sound propagation is crucial in more genres of gaming than others. One example of this is the stealth genre, in which the player relies on sound for the most part to receive information on NPC whereabouts and the geometry of the environment. 'Dishonored', a recent release from Bethesda Softworks looks into this idea carefully:

http://vimeo.com/45113835#at=0

The sound changes when the player is in another room and the NPC is behind a door, also when the NPC walks in to the same room, the sound informs the player of this through adding clarity to the audio.

Another game which springs to mind is 'Thief', a similar game to Dishonored which used the same idea of accurate and carefully considered sound propagation. It seems essential in stealth games to accurately reproduce the behavior of sound dependent on the geometry of the game.

A final example taken from a fun 2D game called 'Mark of the Ninja' demonstrates the importance of sound within the stealth genre:

Sound is so important to the flow of the game,that it is emphasized through the ability to see it.

Aspects taken from:
The Game Audio Tutorial - (Book by Richard Stevens and Dave Raybould)
The Propagation of Sound - http://www.jhu.edu/virtlab/ray/acoustic.htm
UDK Documentation -http://udn.epicgames.com/Three/SoundCueReference.html

Non Repetitive Design - Why it matters

Non-Repetitive Design – Why it matters

One of the main aspects that game developers set out to achieve when creating games is that the experience of playing it remains immersive throughout. The idea of immersion is that you can play the game without being distracted towards something that seems unnatural in its context. This is achieved not only through the game itself but also through the audio. With the audio, we ideally want realism and spontaneity in its design, much like the ‘real world’. Having minimal repetition with the audio in a game can help to indulge the gamer into complete immersion and fulfil their expectations, without interruption.

RAM budget and streaming allowance

Something that can be considered responsible for repetition within games, is the streaming allowance and RAM available for the audio content. As a sound designer in games, keeping to the correct memory usage whenever possible and ensuring you are saving space whenever possible can help to keep the size of the audio to a minimum.  A couple of ways of achieving this are as follows:

• Using audio compression to decrease the size of a file. (UDK has an in built compression available, named ‘Vorbis’.)
• Editing out silence in a sample. Silence takes up just as much space as audible sound does, so by carefully editing it out of samples you can save on file size.
• Being meticulous with Sample Rates and down-sampling files when necessary. A concept known as the ‘Nyquist Shannon Sampling Theorem’ states that you only need to sample a sound at twice its frequency in order to accurately reproduce it. For example, if the frequency content of a sound peaks at 22 khz then you would need to sample it at 44khz in order to ensure fully audibility of the sound. These method of memory saving can give promising results.

Non-repetitive design considerations

Once the above rules are adhered to, you can begin to look at ways in which you can create an unpredictable and non-repetitive soundscape for a game. The following are a couple of ideas that can be considered:

• You can use pitch shift to determine the weight or size of an object instead of using multiple samples. In most cases, a higher pitched sample can be used for a smaller object and vice versa. In terms of footsteps you can vary the pitch dependent on the surface or size of the character.
• Re-modelling a sound using pitch shift to create something else fit for another source. For example pitching a drum hit down to create a low frequency rumble.
• Pitch up/Play down – Pitch it up in your DAW and play it at half the speed in UDK to save half the size.
• Non Standard Randomization – Sound playback system that has a bias against recently triggered sounds.

In UDK, you can randomise sounds using [AmbientSoundNonLoop] or SoundCues. You can apply slight pitch, filter and volume variations to create many outcomes. Furthermore, if you deconstruct a sound of its various qualities, you can then split these qualities into individual categories, and this then allows more control over both sounds and they can be randomised and played back simultaneously. This significantly increases the combinations of playback and therefore decreases the repetition in the sound heard. An example of this could be proposed with the fundamental sounds within an explosion ; you have the sound of the initial explosion, followed by falling debris (and some other stuff). Consider that there are multiple samples of the explosion and multiple samples for the falling debris, each branched off into different randomised nodes. Using a concatenator the sounds can then be mixed and matched creating a numerous array of combinations to significantly decrease repetition.

Middleware can be used in this nature aswell, to randomly playback sounds to create different combinations. This FMOD tutoral video demonstrates on a basic scale how you can get sounds to playback differently each time to prevent repetition, in this case an explosion debris sample.

References:

-  R. Stevens, D Raybould (2011). The Game Audio tutorial. Oxford: ELSEVIER