Playing with sound and gesture in digital audio games

This article introduces the genre of a digital audio game and discusses selected play interaction solutions implemented in the Audio Game Hub, a prototype designed and evaluated in the years 2014 and 2015 at the Gamification Lab at Leuphana University Lüneburg.1 The Audio Game Hub constitutes a set of familiar playful activities (aiming at a target, reflex-based reacting to sound signals, labyrinth exploration) and casual games (e.g. Tetris, Memory) adapted to the digital medium and converted into the audio sphere, where the player is guided predominantly or solely by sound. The authors will discuss the design questions raised at early stages of the project, and confront them with the results of user experience testing performed on two groups of sighted and one group of visually impaired gamers.

Audio games: investigation of the potential through prototype development

This article discusses the potential of audio games based on the evaluation of three projects: a story-driven audio role-playing game (RPG), an interactive audiobook with RPG elements, and a set of casual sound-based games. The potential is understood, both in popularity and playability terms. The first factor is connected to the degree of players’ interest, while the second one to the degree of their engagement in sound-based game worlds. Although presented projects are embedded within the landscape of past and contemporary audio games and gaming platforms, the authors reach into the near future, concluding with possible development directions for this non-visual interactive entertainment.

BitBox!: A case study interface for teaching real-time adaptive music composition for video games

Real-time adaptive music is now well-established as a popular medium, largely through its use in video game soundtracks. Commercial packages, such as fmod, make freely available the underlying technical methods for use in educational contexts, making adaptive music technologies accessible to students. Writing adaptive music, however, presents a significant learning challenge, not least because it requires a different mode of thought, and tutor and learner may have few mutual points of connection in discovering and understanding the musical drivers, relationships and structures in these works. This article discusses the creation of ‘BitBox!’, a gestural music interface designed to deconstruct and explain the component elements of adaptive composition through interactive play. The interface was displayed at the Dare Protoplay games exposition in Dundee in August 2014. The initial proof-of- concept study proved successful, suggesting possible refinements in design and a broader range of applications.