Category: Interaction Design

What does a sound designer actually create?

For much of the history of recorded media, the answer has seemed relatively straightforward. A sound designer creates sounds. Those sounds are edited, arranged, mixed, and eventually delivered to an audience in a finished form. Whether working in film, television, radio, or theatre, the result remains largely fixed. Every audience member encounters the same sequence of events in the same order. A soundtrack may be replayed thousands of times, though the sounds themselves do not change. Sound design, in this traditional sense, is largely concerned with creating and refining artefacts. The work may be extraordinarily complex, though the outcome is ultimately stable. Once completed, the audience receives the experience that the creators intended.

Games operate according to a different logic. During her guest lecture at Edinburgh Napier University, Mariana Botero, Sound Designer at Criterion Games, repeatedly returned to a challenge that sits at the centre of interactive audio. Players are unpredictable. They may rush through environments that designers expected them to explore carefully. They may spend an hour in a location intended for a few minutes of gameplay. They may repeat actions endlessly, ignore carefully placed cues, or discover solutions that nobody anticipated. A sound designer may spend weeks refining a particular moment, only for players to experience it in a completely unexpected way. This unpredictability creates a fundamental difference between games and most other forms of media. Film sound designers can assume a degree of control over audience experience. A scene unfolds at a predetermined pace. Music enters at a precise moment. Dialogue arrives exactly when it is needed. Sound and image progress together through a carefully authored sequence. Games surrender much of that control. Designers can establish possibilities, though they cannot determine exactly how those possibilities will be experienced. Every player creates a slightly different path through the material.

Botero illustrated this distinction through a deceptively simple analogy. Traditional sound design can resemble baking a cake. Once the ingredients have been combined and baked, they become a finished object. Individual components can no longer be separated. The audience receives the completed result exactly as intended. Interactive audio often works differently. The ingredients remain available. They can be rearranged, adjusted, recombined, and reshaped while the experience is unfolding. What players hear depends not only on what the designer created but also on what they choose to do. A player who rushes through an environment may hear one version of the experience. Another who explores every corner may encounter something quite different. Neither experience is incorrect. Both emerge from the same underlying system. At first glance, this may appear to be a technical distinction, though throughout the lecture it became clear that something more significant is taking place. Interactive audio challenges assumptions that have shaped sound practice for decades. Rather than creating a finished soundtrack, game audio designers increasingly create systems capable of generating many possible soundtracks. The question is no longer simply what a sound should be. The question becomes how a sound should behave.

Implementation sits at the heart of this shift. Students often encounter implementation through software platforms such as Wwise and Unity, where attention naturally gravitates towards events, switches, parameters, states, and scripting. Botero encouraged a broader perspective. These tools are not merely technical requirements added after the creative work has been completed. They are part of the creative process itself. They provide mechanisms through which sound can respond to player actions, environmental conditions, narrative developments, and changing game states. Once audio becomes interactive, implementation ceases to be a final stage of production. It becomes one of the primary ways in which experiences are designed. Many of Botero’s examples reflected this movement from sounds to systems. Consider something as apparently mundane as footsteps. Few sounds occur more frequently in games. A footstep that appears a handful of times in a film may occur thousands of times during a single play session. What initially feels satisfying can quickly become repetitive. Players generate these sounds through their own behaviour, meaning designers cannot simply assume that repetition will remain unnoticed. Botero discussed several implementation strategies designed to address this issue. Different recordings can be selected randomly. Pitch and volume may vary subtly between repetitions. Heel and toe impacts can be separated and recombined dynamically. A relatively small collection of recordings suddenly produces a far wider range of perceived outcomes. Yet what makes these techniques interesting is not their technical sophistication. Their significance lies in how they reveal a different philosophy of authorship. Rather than crafting every individual event directly, designers create rules governing how events are generated. They design the behaviour of the system rather than the precise form of every outcome.

Her observations about footsteps led naturally into a broader discussion about attention. Not every sound deserves equal prominence throughout an experience. Early in a game, clearly audible footsteps may help players understand movement and control. Later, those same sounds can begin to dominate the soundscape unnecessarily. As players become familiar with core mechanics, environmental details often become more valuable. A distant owl, subtle weather activity, a passing vehicle, or an unexpected environmental cue may contribute more to a sense of place than another clearly articulated footstep. This may seem like a relatively small design decision, though it reveals an important principle running throughout the lecture. Sound design is not simply about creating sounds. It is about shaping attention. Designers are constantly deciding what players should notice, what they should ignore, and how their awareness should be directed through an experience. Interactive audio therefore becomes inseparable from broader questions of perception.

Several examples from Botero’s work on Star Wars Battlefront II illustrated this relationship particularly clearly. One challenge involved creating a convincing sensation of speed during space combat. Space provides surprisingly few visual reference points. Without roads, buildings, or passing landscapes, players can struggle to judge how fast they are moving. From a purely visual perspective, extraordinary speeds can sometimes feel unexpectedly slow. Audio therefore assumes a more active role. Changes in acceleration, orientation, proximity, and manoeuvring can all be reinforced through sound, encouraging players to feel faster than they actually are. Importantly, the objective is not deception. The objective is alignment between what players see, what they hear, and what they believe they are experiencing. Sound helps bridge the gap between game mechanics and player perception. A related challenge emerged around spatial awareness. Players navigating complex three-dimensional environments often need information that visual displays cannot always communicate efficiently. Botero described examples where reflections, pass-bys, and environmental responses helped players understand their relationship to surrounding structures. Those sounds functioned as navigational aids as much as sound effects. Players may never consciously notice them, though their absence would make environments feel less intelligible. Such examples reveal another important aspect of interactive audio. Sound is not simply representing the world. It is helping players interpret the world. A successful design often communicates information, directs attention, reinforces emotion, and supports decision-making simultaneously. The most effective implementation frequently becomes invisible. Players simply feel that the game responds naturally to their actions.

The same principles appeared again in Botero’s discussion of interactive music. Traditional composition assumes a relatively stable structure. A beginning leads towards a middle before eventually reaching an ending. Although composers may create complex and highly sophisticated works, they generally retain control over the order in which events occur. Games rarely provide such certainty. Players may linger in one location, interrupt events unexpectedly, revisit spaces repeatedly, or trigger narrative developments in unusual orders. Music must therefore accommodate possibilities that cannot be fully predicted in advance. Rather than composing a single linear sequence, designers often create collections of musical elements capable of being reorganised dynamically while preserving coherence. Botero compared the process to building with Lego bricks. Individual pieces remain consistent, though their arrangement changes according to context. Introductory passages, transitions, loops, and endings can be connected in different ways while still feeling musically coherent. Once again, the designer is not creating a single outcome. The designer is creating a framework capable of supporting many outcomes. What matters is not only the material itself but also the relationships that determine how that material behaves under changing circumstances.

This way of thinking extends beyond music. One particularly revealing example discussed during the lecture involved a student project built around a time-slowing mechanic. In a traditional medium, slowing time might simply involve applying predetermined processing at specific moments. Within an interactive environment, however, the relationship becomes dynamic. Real-time parameter controls allowed player actions to influence audio behaviour directly. As gameplay changed, the soundscape changed alongside it. The mechanic was not merely accompanied by sound. The mechanic became part of the sound design process itself. Audio no longer functioned as a layer added on top of gameplay. It became woven into the behaviour of the system. Examples such as these help explain why programming increasingly occupies an important place within contemporary game audio. Throughout the lecture, Botero described learning through experimentation, tutorials, practical projects, and professional experience. Programming was presented not as a replacement for creative thinking but as a means of expanding creative possibilities. The more deeply designers understand systems, the more effectively they can connect audio to player experience. Technical knowledge becomes valuable not for its own sake but for the opportunities it creates.

One of the more interesting consequences of this shift is that game audio designers increasingly resemble system designers as much as traditional sound designers. Much of the language surrounding audio production still reflects assumptions inherited from film, television, and music. We often speak about creating sounds, mixing sounds, or arranging sounds. Botero’s examples repeatedly pointed towards a broader form of practice. Designers create relationships between sounds, player actions, environmental conditions, and game states. Their work involves determining how sounds respond, adapt, and evolve rather than simply deciding what those sounds should be. The resulting experience emerges through interaction between the player and the system. In this sense, implementation is not something that happens after sound design. Implementation is increasingly part of sound design itself.

This spirit of exploration appeared throughout Botero’s account of her own development. Long before working professionally in games, she was already engaging deeply with sound through recording, listening, and experimentation. Growing up in Colombia, she developed a fascination with environmental sound that later evolved into a broader interest in audio design. Looking back across the lecture, one of the most striking aspects of her career trajectory is how consistently curiosity appears as a driving force. New tools, new techniques, and new technologies repeatedly emerge, though progress often begins with a simple willingness to investigate how things work. Throughout her account there was little sense of a fixed pathway into game audio. Instead, learning appeared as an ongoing process of exploration in which technical knowledge, creative practice, and experimentation continually informed one another.

That same curiosity remains visible within professional practice. One of the most memorable examples came from Criterion’s “Sound Design Thursdays”. Team members temporarily step away from production work and undertake creative challenges built around unusual constraints. Designers exchange recordings, limit themselves to small collections of source material, or pass sounds between colleagues with each person applying a single transformation before handing them on. The outcomes can be surprising, humorous, and occasionally absurd. A camel recording may gradually evolve into something resembling a bird. Familiar sounds acquire entirely new identities. Yet beneath the humour lies a serious lesson about creativity. Unexpected results often emerge when designers deliberately create conditions that encourage experimentation. Limitations become opportunities. Constraints become creative tools. In many respects, these exercises mirror the philosophy underlying interactive audio itself. Both involve constructing systems, establishing rules, and allowing surprising outcomes to emerge from interactions between different elements. Neither depends upon complete control. Both depend upon creating environments in which interesting possibilities can arise.

Looking back across the lecture, what emerges most clearly is a view of sound design that extends well beyond the creation of individual sounds. Footsteps, adaptive music, spatial cues, implementation systems, real-time parameters, and creative experiments all point towards the same conclusion. Interactive audio requires designers to think in terms of relationships rather than isolated assets. Sounds gain meaning through how they respond to players, environments, and changing circumstances. The challenge is no longer simply to create a soundtrack. The challenge is to create a framework capable of supporting many different soundtracks.

Perhaps this is what makes game audio such a distinctive area of contemporary sound practice. Film sound designers craft experiences that audiences receive. Game sound designers craft possibilities that audiences help create. Every play session unfolds differently. Every player encounters a slightly different combination of events. Every interaction generates new relationships between sounds, systems, and behaviours. The sounds matter. What matters just as much are the rules that determine what those sounds might become.

In game audio, the work is never truly finished. It simply waits for the player to decide what happens next.

Many games strive for realism. They aim to reproduce the sound of the world as accurately as possible, carefully modelling spaces, materials, physics, and behaviours so that players feel immersed in a believable environment. Don’t Starve takes a rather different approach. Its world is filled with living scarecrows, walking trees, giant spiders, impossible creatures, and surreal landscapes that seem to have escaped from the pages of a dark storybook. Very little about it appears realistic in any conventional sense. Yet despite this, the game feels remarkably alive.

Matthew Marteinsson’s guest lecture explored how that happened. Although the talk covered specific technical systems, recording techniques, production challenges, and implementation details, a broader idea repeatedly emerged beneath them. The sounds of Don’t Starve do not feel convincing because they imitate reality. They feel convincing because they remain connected to physical performance, playful experimentation, and a constant willingness to explore unexpected possibilities.

During the early development of Don’t Starve, Marteinsson was effectively the sole audio designer working alongside two composers, with no dedicated audio programmer and no substantial audio department behind him. Development moved rapidly, content changed constantly, and there was little opportunity for elaborate production pipelines. Rather than treating these limitations as obstacles, the team repeatedly used them as opportunities to find simpler and more creative solutions. Constraints were not merely something to overcome. They actively shaped the character of the game’s sound world.

The game’s character voices provide an excellent example. Traditional voice acting would have required large quantities of dialogue recording, scheduling actors, and continuously updating content as the game evolved. Such an approach was difficult to reconcile with the speed at which the project was being developed. Yet the characters still needed personality, emotional expression, and identities that players could immediately distinguish. Instead of using spoken language, Marteinsson turned to musical instruments. Inspired partly by the adults in Peanuts cartoons and partly by Peter and the Wolf, where different instruments represent different characters, each character in Don’t Starvereceived its own instrumental voice. Wilson’s distinctive muted trumpet became the starting point, with subsequent characters developing from their own carefully chosen instrumental identities. What began as a practical solution ultimately became one of the most recognisable features of the game.

Human vocal performance appeared repeatedly as a creative tool throughout the lecture. Many memorable sounds originated not from extensive libraries or complex synthesis chains but from experimentation with the voice itself. The spiders, for example, were largely built from Marteinsson’s own vocal performances combined with processing. The Gobbler, one of the game’s most beloved creatures, began with attempts to gather suitable turkey recordings. After examining the animation, however, he found himself instinctively making a strange vocal sound that immediately felt more appropriate than any authentic turkey call. The library recordings were discarded and the vocal performance became the creature. As he noted, the deliberately exaggerated human performance communicated personality far more effectively than realism alone could have achieved.

Realism and believability emerged as distinct ideas within Marteinsson’s approach to sound design. A perfectly accurate turkey recording might have sounded more realistic, though it may not have felt more alive. The Gobbler succeeds precisely because it occupies an unusual space between animal, caricature, and performance. Players are not simply hearing a creature. They are hearing a performance of a creature. The sound communicates character as much as biology.

Personality often seemed more important than realism throughout the lecture. Many of the creatures in Don’t Starveexist within a visual world that is intentionally exaggerated, stylised, and slightly absurd. Conventional fantasy sound design might have felt strangely out of place. Marteinsson instead described grounding many creatures in a “weird reality”, where recognisable physical behaviours remain present but become filtered through performance, humour, and experimentation. Human vocalisations proved especially valuable in this regard. Audiences are extraordinarily sensitive to nuances in human expression. Even heavily processed vocal sounds can communicate intention, emotion, vulnerability, aggression, or curiosity in ways that are difficult to achieve through purely synthetic or animal-based recordings.

Environmental audio presented an equally interesting challenge. Procedurally generated worlds create difficulties that traditional environmental sound design rarely encounters. Designers cannot assume where players will travel or which environments they will encounter. Marteinsson described a system that continuously examines the terrain surrounding the player, identifies the dominant biome types within the immediate area, and dynamically blends the corresponding ambiences. Grasslands, forests, marshes, and other environments continuously mix together according to what the player is actually seeing at that moment. Rather than creating a fixed soundtrack for a predetermined world, the system responds to the world being generated in real time.

What makes this system particularly interesting is that the underlying idea remains remarkably simple. Players should hear the world they are looking at. Technical sophistication only becomes valuable when it strengthens the player’s experience. Systems matter not because they are complex but because they help players understand the world around them. Throughout the lecture, Marteinsson repeatedly demonstrated a preference for elegant solutions that serve a clear experiential purpose.

The broader design philosophy became especially clear during the discussion following the lecture. Marteinsson argued that game audio should generally perform one of two functions: it should either build the world or inform the player. If a sound accomplishes neither, its value becomes questionable. Such a statement sounds straightforward, though it carries considerable implications for design practice. Many games accumulate audio over time, layering additional sounds onto already crowded mixes. The result can be confusion rather than clarity. Marteinsson instead advocates careful consideration of why a sound exists and what purpose it serves. Sound is not decoration. It is communication.

Small details often became surprisingly important within this design philosophy. During the lecture, he discussed how player feedback during early access revealed complaints about a particular pickup sound. Some players even requested a dedicated option to disable it. Rather than immediately changing the sound itself, Marteinsson investigated further and discovered that the underlying issue was simply that the sound was mixed too loudly. Once its level was adjusted, the complaints disappeared. The lesson was not that players were wrong. Rather, it highlighted the importance of identifying the underlying problem rather than accepting proposed solutions at face value. Players are often very effective at identifying areas where something feels wrong. Determining why it feels wrong remains part of the designer’s responsibility.

Recording sessions often sounded closer to scientific experiments than conventional sound production. Music boxes, improvised instruments, jelly, pudding, toys, unusual household objects, mines, and novelty items discovered in shops all found their way into Marteinsson’s recording collection. A music box originally intended for composing melodies eventually became the basis for the unsettling sounds associated with the Shadow Hand. A visit to a local mining museum produced unique underground ambience recordings for the game’s cave systems. Strange objects were collected not because a specific project required them, but because they might become useful in the future.

Playfulness often appeared not as a break from the work but as part of the work itself. Making strange noises while watching an animation, experimenting with unusual objects, collecting sounds without a specific purpose in mind, or exploring unexpected combinations of recordings all reflect a willingness to follow curiosity wherever it leads. Listening to these stories, it became increasingly clear that creativity often depends upon creating opportunities for surprise. The value of an unusual object or recording does not necessarily become apparent immediately. A sound designer may encounter something intriguing, record it, store it away, and only discover its purpose years later.

Technical decisions rarely appeared separate from creative ones during the lecture. Recording techniques, implementation systems, middleware, debugging tools, and production constraints were all discussed in detail. Yet none of these elements were treated as separate from creativity itself. Debug tools existed to facilitate experimentation. Procedural systems existed to strengthen immersion. Recording techniques existed to discover new forms of expression. Technology remained important throughout the talk, though it rarely appeared as the primary source of innovation.

Reflections on game development brought many of the lecture’s themes together. Marteinsson acknowledged the challenges facing the industry, including long hours, instability, and periods of significant uncertainty. Yet his reflections consistently returned to enthusiasm, curiosity, and the joy of creating experiences that players genuinely care about. That optimism felt closely connected to the ideas that had surfaced throughout the lecture. The sounds of Don’t Starve emerged not from a search for perfection but from a willingness to experiment, adapt, collaborate, and occasionally embrace absurd ideas simply to see where they might lead.

Perhaps that helps explain why the world of Don’t Starve feels so distinctive. Its sounds rarely seem trapped by expectations about what things ought to sound like. A spider may begin as a human vocal performance. A terrifying shadow creature may emerge from a modified music box. An iconic turkey may owe more to an impulsive noise made while watching an animation than to any field recording. Throughout the lecture, Marteinsson repeatedly demonstrated that memorable sound design often emerges when curiosity is allowed to guide the process.

Rather than attempting to recreate reality exactly, Don’t Starve constructs a world that feels alive through performance, experimentation, and play. Many of the sounds discussed during the lecture began as accidents, improvisations, constraints, or strange ideas that simply seemed worth exploring. What emerged from that process was not merely a collection of sound effects but a coherent sonic world. Listening to the lecture, it became difficult to separate the sound of Don’t Starve from the spirit in which it was created. Both are defined by curiosity.

In doing so, Marteinsson offered a useful reminder that some of the most memorable sounds are not discovered by following established rules. They emerge when designers remain willing to ask a simple question: what happens if we try this?

Many forms of media depend upon controlling attention. Films decide where audiences look through editing, framing, and camera movement. Theatre guides attention through staging and movement. Conventional games frequently do something similar through interface design, visual effects, or camera behaviour. Important information rarely appears entirely by accident. Designers often decide where attention should go long before audiences realise those decisions are being made. Most of this guidance becomes invisible precisely when it works well. Players rarely stop to think about how often games quietly redirect their attention from one place towards another. Experiences simply feel natural. Objectives appear at appropriate moments, important events seem difficult to miss, and information arrives when required.

Kenny Young’s guest lecture explored what happens once some of these assumptions begin disappearing. Virtual reality introduces a relatively simple change that gradually creates much larger consequences. Players control the camera continuously. Looking left means physically turning left. Looking upwards requires physically raising the head. Looking away from something important may simply mean missing it altogether. Initially this sounds like a relatively minor alteration, though the consequences begin spreading surprisingly far once control over attention starts shifting away from designers themselves.

Imagine hearing something important happening behind you in a conventional game. Designers possess numerous methods for ensuring that players notice it. Cameras may shift automatically, indicators can appear around the screen, and control may even be briefly interrupted. Decades of game design have produced increasingly sophisticated methods for solving these problems. Virtual reality complicates many of these solutions. Fixed interface elements become intrusive, large overlays can weaken immersion, and information existing outside the player’s field of view can remain entirely unnoticed. Questions therefore begin emerging around how players discover important information once designers can no longer simply place it directly in front of them.

Young suggested that sound changes role at precisely this point. Human vision behaves selectively. We actively choose where to direct our eyes and ignore much surrounding information. Hearing functions rather differently. Sounds continue arriving whether or not we intentionally seek them out. A player may choose not to look towards something important, though hearing something nearby can still trigger an immediate response. Sound therefore begins moving away from a supporting role attached to visible events and towards something more active.

Players do not simply hear sounds in games. They gradually learn them. Initially a sound may exist only as another event occurring within a larger environment. Yet repeated exposure slowly changes its role. Through familiarity, sounds begin accumulating meaning. This process often happens without players consciously noticing it. A sound that initially appears neutral gradually becomes linked with expectations, actions, and outcomes. Eventually hearing the sound no longer involves interpreting something unfamiliar. Players instead recognise patterns they have already learned.

Young discussed the familiar alert sound from Metal Gear Solid as an example. During early encounters players hear a brief cue alongside visual information, though repeated exposure gradually changes the relationship. Eventually players stop hearing the sound as a sound effect at all. Instead, it begins behaving almost like language.

Language may not be entirely the right word, though the comparison becomes useful. Words themselves do not naturally contain meaning. People gradually learn relationships between sounds and ideas through repeated experience until recognition becomes almost immediate. Something similar begins happening within games. A short musical cue or brief sound effect acquires meaning through use rather than explanation. Players are not consciously translating sounds each time they hear them. Recognition simply becomes increasingly automatic.

Nobody pauses a game to explain that a particular sound means danger. Players learn these relationships through repeated experience. Over time certain sounds become linked with expectations, actions, and outcomes until responses begin occurring almost automatically. Listening changes in subtle ways once these associations form. Players stop consciously analysing what they hear, as attention begins shifting before deliberate thought catches up. Sound therefore becomes something more than feedback occurring after an event. It starts creating expectations about what might happen next.

Music introduces another layer to these learned relationships. Discussions around game music frequently focus on emotion, atmosphere, and immersion. Players may notice tension increasing during combat, emotional themes returning around familiar characters, or changing musical textures supporting movement through a world. Young explored another possibility entirely. Under certain conditions, music may also begin operating as information.

Much of his work on Tethered explored whether these kinds of relationships could be developed within virtual reality environments. Strategy games already involve unusually large amounts of simultaneous information. Resources require management, environments continue changing, threats emerge unexpectedly, and events occur across multiple locations at once. Conventional interfaces frequently solve these problems visually. Players monitor maps, indicators, menus, and notifications distributed around the screen. Translating these expectations into VR introduced a more difficult question. How can players remain aware of a world once they can comfortably see only part of it at any given moment?

Rather than functioning purely as atmosphere or emotional support, musical phrases could gradually become learned signals recognised through repeated interaction. Certain sounds became associated with changing conditions, important events, or emerging situations. Initially these sounds carried little meaning beyond existing as recognisable musical gestures. Over time something rather different happened. Players were not simply listening to music accompanying a world. They were gradually learning the world itself.

Listening consequently begins developing an unusual relationship with navigation. Physical landmarks help people orient themselves within real environments, though players may also begin constructing sonic landmarks. Certain sounds become associated with places, behaviours, or changing conditions. Listening therefore starts becoming part of understanding how a world behaves. Particular musical phrases began functioning almost like landmarks within an environment. Certain combinations of sounds became associated with emerging threats or opportunities requiring attention. Over time players could respond before consciously thinking about what had changed. Listening therefore became intertwined with understanding the behaviour of the world itself.

Examples such as these begin shifting the discussion slightly. Rather than asking whether music sounds appropriate or emotionally effective, another question begins appearing. How do people learn sonic environments? Under what circumstances do sounds stop behaving like sounds and begin behaving more like information? Underlying processes of this kind may already exist across many forms of game audio, even if virtual reality makes them easier to recognise.

Extending these ideas into working systems introduced additional challenges. Sounds needed to remain distinctive while fitting comfortably alongside underlying music. Delays had to remain short enough that players still connected events with their causes, while multiple simultaneous events could create confusion or dissonance. Initial solutions often resolved one issue only to reveal another elsewhere. Technical constraints, musical decisions, and player behaviour continually interacted throughout development. Creative work therefore emerged less as a process of executing perfect ideas and more as a continual process of adjustment.

Running throughout the lecture was a broader observation concerning the role of sound itself. Discussions surrounding game audio frequently emphasise realism, emotion, and atmosphere. These remain important concerns, though Young’s work suggested something slightly different. Once familiar methods for directing attention become less reliable, sound begins taking on responsibilities traditionally associated with cameras and interfaces.

Virtual reality may therefore reveal something that has existed quietly within games for much longer. Sound has rarely functioned only as decoration or atmosphere. It has also shaped where players look, what they notice, and how they organise experiences around them.

Perhaps the more interesting question is not whether sound helps players understand virtual worlds. It may instead involve asking how much of our experience has always depended upon sound guiding us in ways we barely notice. Once designers lose many familiar methods for directing attention, sound begins moving from the background towards the centre of interaction itself.