- Joined
- Mar 10, 2013
In other incarnations, I have been an Audio Guy, so when I figured out what the hell these people were thinking it blew me away.
To wit:
My boss way back when at the flight simulator company didn't mind anybody moonlighting. A lot of places don't let you, because they figure you're spending energy + time that you should be wasting at your Real Job, but the boss knew it always paid off in the end. You wind up with people who know how to do things they wouldn't know how to do otherwise.
So I took a gig subcontracting for a computer graphics outfit in Pasadena that was subcontracting to someone else, who was subcontracting to Perceptronics, who was subcontracting (a couple layers up the line here) to Lockheed, who had a contract with the Pentagon. Such are the ways of defense contracting; a gazillion layers with everyone taking a cut, and the taxpayers wonder why it costs so much.
The job had to do with building an M1A1 tank simulator. Being a government-funded gig, everything was totally Cadillac. It ran sixteen channels of 44.1 kHz audio, sat on a six-axis motion platform, had state-of-the-art computer graphics, linked into what was at the time DARPA SIMnet for large-scale wargames, and would do everything but blow you. Except for one thing that it didn't even try to do.
In a tank, the low guy on the totem pole is the loader. His job is to hit a lever that opens the breech to expel the spent shell, pick up a fresh round, slam it into the breech, close the lever, and yell at the gunner that it's OK to fire. In the simulator, they didn't even give him a lever. The dude was just supposed to wave his arms around in the air, pretending to expel the old shell, etc., then yell at the gunner. My initial reaction was "how stupid is this? They pump in sixteen channels of CD-quality audio, but don't even give the dude a lever to pull?"
. . .
And then I thought about it for a few months, and what the hell, they were right.
The loader has practiced with live rounds in real tanks. The simulator isn't going to teach him anything about loading the breech. He knows how to do that. Besides, from a simulation point of view, it'd be practically impossible to insert something that feels like a live round, expel something that feels like an expended round, deal with the recoil, etc., etc.
What the simulator was meant to do was make these people feel comfortable in combat.
Audio hits you on a level far, far below the visual. Also below the conscious mind. When the dude gets to Iraq (or wherever) and is in a real tank with real bad guys shooting at him, his subconscious will be at peace if it sounds exactly like training. "I've been here before." It's not going to be a bizarre, out-of-reality experience he's never dealt with. The conscious mind is freed up to concentrate on doing the job when there's not a lot of panicky "what the hell is going on" signals coming from the lizard hindbrain.
The best game designers know this. You'll be in an environment that (at a subconscious level) becomes familiar, so changes later on will jangle your mental balance in ways you don't expect nor can explain. When working on Mech 2, I was told to replicate what the pilot of a 'mech would experience ("to really put the player inside the 'mech, with a little willing suspension of disbelief") so that's what I tried to do -- so my question about the music they'd choose was always "well, what kind of music do you think plays inside a Battlemech in combat?"
Point being, audio can be a powerful tool to get the player to feel like you want them to feel, without them realizing you're yanking their chain. (The same goes for haptic peripherals, though they've practically disappeared in the last few years -- your controller's "rumble" doesn't count.)
Most decent audio rigs have a subwoofer, and that's largely an unexplored avenue. Frequencies below your conscious threshold of hearing are still perceived and hit straight in the emotional primitive brain without you knowing what's going on. Too few games exploit this, and more should.
To wit:
My boss way back when at the flight simulator company didn't mind anybody moonlighting. A lot of places don't let you, because they figure you're spending energy + time that you should be wasting at your Real Job, but the boss knew it always paid off in the end. You wind up with people who know how to do things they wouldn't know how to do otherwise.
So I took a gig subcontracting for a computer graphics outfit in Pasadena that was subcontracting to someone else, who was subcontracting to Perceptronics, who was subcontracting (a couple layers up the line here) to Lockheed, who had a contract with the Pentagon. Such are the ways of defense contracting; a gazillion layers with everyone taking a cut, and the taxpayers wonder why it costs so much.
The job had to do with building an M1A1 tank simulator. Being a government-funded gig, everything was totally Cadillac. It ran sixteen channels of 44.1 kHz audio, sat on a six-axis motion platform, had state-of-the-art computer graphics, linked into what was at the time DARPA SIMnet for large-scale wargames, and would do everything but blow you. Except for one thing that it didn't even try to do.
In a tank, the low guy on the totem pole is the loader. His job is to hit a lever that opens the breech to expel the spent shell, pick up a fresh round, slam it into the breech, close the lever, and yell at the gunner that it's OK to fire. In the simulator, they didn't even give him a lever. The dude was just supposed to wave his arms around in the air, pretending to expel the old shell, etc., then yell at the gunner. My initial reaction was "how stupid is this? They pump in sixteen channels of CD-quality audio, but don't even give the dude a lever to pull?"
. . .
And then I thought about it for a few months, and what the hell, they were right.
The loader has practiced with live rounds in real tanks. The simulator isn't going to teach him anything about loading the breech. He knows how to do that. Besides, from a simulation point of view, it'd be practically impossible to insert something that feels like a live round, expel something that feels like an expended round, deal with the recoil, etc., etc.
What the simulator was meant to do was make these people feel comfortable in combat.
Audio hits you on a level far, far below the visual. Also below the conscious mind. When the dude gets to Iraq (or wherever) and is in a real tank with real bad guys shooting at him, his subconscious will be at peace if it sounds exactly like training. "I've been here before." It's not going to be a bizarre, out-of-reality experience he's never dealt with. The conscious mind is freed up to concentrate on doing the job when there's not a lot of panicky "what the hell is going on" signals coming from the lizard hindbrain.
The best game designers know this. You'll be in an environment that (at a subconscious level) becomes familiar, so changes later on will jangle your mental balance in ways you don't expect nor can explain. When working on Mech 2, I was told to replicate what the pilot of a 'mech would experience ("to really put the player inside the 'mech, with a little willing suspension of disbelief") so that's what I tried to do -- so my question about the music they'd choose was always "well, what kind of music do you think plays inside a Battlemech in combat?"
Point being, audio can be a powerful tool to get the player to feel like you want them to feel, without them realizing you're yanking their chain. (The same goes for haptic peripherals, though they've practically disappeared in the last few years -- your controller's "rumble" doesn't count.)
Most decent audio rigs have a subwoofer, and that's largely an unexplored avenue. Frequencies below your conscious threshold of hearing are still perceived and hit straight in the emotional primitive brain without you knowing what's going on. Too few games exploit this, and more should.
