Sound and Immersion in the First-Person Shooter

Abstract

One of the aims of modern First-Person Shooter (FPS) design is to provide an immersive experience to the player. This paper examines the role of sound in enabling such immersion and argues that even in ‘realism’ FPS games, it may be achieved sonically through a focus on caricature rather than realism. The paper utilizes and develops previous work in which a conceptual framework for the design and analysis of run and gun FPS sound is developed and the notion of the relationship between player and FPS soundscape as an acoustic ecology is put forward (Grimshaw and Schott 2007a; Grimshaw and Schott 2007b). Some problems of sound practice and sound reproduction in the game are highlighted and a conceptual solution is proposed.