ABSTRACT
This chapter examines production practices in which sound, music and dialogue are over-compressed. It focuses on the challenges of getting narrative tension into game-play and being able to leverage this for sound. The chapter concentrates on how realtime digital signal processing effects and in-game mixing can be used to dynamically remove, reduce and prioritize sound in an interactive environment. Lack of dynamic range, over-compression of sound and music assets, not to mention narrative notions of tension and release, are among elements that video game sound can more deeply exploit in order to achieve a more cinematic feel. One possible cause for this loss of dynamic range is that the expected playback environment for popular forms of music and entertainment and for video games is, or was relatively similar. Primarily, from an aesthetic standpoint, a competent use of subtlety and silence is distinctly missing from video game audio.
