In a dimly lit basement, half a dozen blindfolded players are edging cautiously around the room, crunching over tortilla chips scattered on the floor and occasionally dinging tiny bells suspended from the ceiling. Two of them seem to collide briefly, there's a whisper and then a bloodcurdling scream as one of them 'dies'.
This isn't a scene from Silence of the Lambs but a Mexican game called Sangre y Patatas ? or 'blood and potatoes' ? now part of the genesis of a powerful and inventive new mobile game played entirely through sound.
Papa Sangre, which was released through the iTunes App Store store today, is described as "the first binaural real-time, 3D audio engine implemented on a handheld device". Too often the silent partner in film and gaming, Papa Sangre's ambitious horror game shows how sound has the highest fidelity of any gaming experience ? the fidelity of your own imagination.
It's also a consuming first-person thriller. Players navigate Papa Sangre's world through five palaces - brass, strings, wind, bone and finally the palace of Papa Sangre himself - each with seven levels and missions to gather musical notes that often nestle just behind a monster. Those monsters, including the much-feared snufflehogs, respond to sound - so if you accidentally crunch through broken bone on the floor of the Palace of Bone and watch your back. Navigation is through the phone's screen, so tap left and right on the screen move step by step through the game, and swipe the top of the screen to change direction.
"We're not the first to do a game entirely in sound but others have tried and realised it was a bat-shit insane thing to do," said a clearly exhausted Paul Bennun, director of digital at games studio Somethin' Else. "But sound is hugely under-rated and brings a massive amount to gaming. Even in a mass-market game like Silent Hill, some of the interface of the game is communicated through sound like radios that crackle when zombies are nearby. Sound is often far more important than people give it credit for."
Papa Sangre took 73 weeks to create, with a core staff of five and extended team of 10 that included Tassos Stevens, Margaret Robinson, Peter Law Adam Hoyle and Ben Cave, as well as Bennun and Ryan. It also received some funding from 4ip, Channel 4's now defunct innovation fund ? or 'paramilitary wing', as Somethin' Else has labelled it.
Pictures are better in sound
Perhaps inevitably, the game took three times longer than the team had planned but gathered a wealth of new insights during the project. "We realised that pictures are far better in sound than in graphics," said Bennun. "Stuff that takes place in your head is far more profound and personal than it is in visual graphics ? it enables the ultimate first person game because you are in the moment in a way you aren't with visual graphics. Your senses map exactly into the game play."
Somethin' Else also worked with the RNIB and a team of visually impaired testers. While they didn't set out to specifically design a game for the visually impaired, a game that was mechanically accessible for all players was an objective. "One of them described the game as 'a sighted person's idea of what a sound game should be like', though I'm not sure I entirely agree with that." said Bennun. "We set out to make a horror game before anything else. But blind people perceive the dark in a different way, perhaps one that isn't inherently terrifying for a horror game."
Visually impaired players picked up the game far faster than sighted players, he said. "Sighted players typically start a new game by running around straight away and exploring. In Papa Sangre, they weren't able to do that because you can't skip levels ? you have to learn how to play. Blind players started playing in a much more considered fashion which is the only way you can play the game. Every step counts."
How to sonify players' behaviour
Nick Ryan, Papa Sangre's sound designer, said storytelling techniques had to be simplified for the game. "In radio there are things you can't tell without exposition or things you can't achieve without pictures," he said. "We discovered lots of techniques to sonify the space, but found that what we thought would sound like a river didn't sounds like that at all, so ended up simplifying the space massively.
"We were limited by audio cognition ? our ability to perceive the directionality of a sound and space. To imagine ourselves to be in an audio environment we can only understand a number of sound sources at one time ? we had to cut that down to three otherwise it was too confusing."
Ryan won a Bafta for The Dark House, an interactive Radio 4 drama aired in 2003. That work has informed much of the spatial description and storytelling in Papa Sangre, where the team had to try and sonify objects, like keys, that players needed to collect. In total, the game uses 1,700 audio files and the team had to work hard to make sure those did not sound repetitive, but also didn't overwhelm the player.
Is this the breakthrough moment for sonic games?
Does Papa Sangre indicate the rise of sound as an interactive medium in its own right? Has it been 'overlooked' for too long? "There's an interesting disconnect between sounds which are associated with the thing that makes them. About 120 years ago you could guarantee that when you heard a sound you would be in the same place and time as when it happened. The idea that you could hear something that wasn't here and now is a fundamental change in our navigation of space. We're now able to associate sounds with things that don't make them."
Ryan gave the beep-beep-beep of a reversing lorry as an example, but also said it's interesting to see how many people favour using the ringtone of an old phone on their mobile because it reminds them of an object that makes a sound that really belongs to it.
"We've started to fill our world with sounds that tell us things but not in the language of themselves. There's a new language of interaction that starts with telephones and ends with navigational sound design because people want to put physical navigation back into sounds."
For Papa Sangre, the next challenge will be to more fully exploit the sensors on the iPhone including the gyroscope, which would mean players could navigate through real-world movement that might be walking or turning on the spot. New environments could be explored, like an underwater palace or anti-gravity in space.
The game is on sale today through the iTunes App Store for �3.99, and though Bennun said he's be disappointed if it didn't make a profit for the team, he concedes it's a challenge to market. "We're well aware we've created something that isn't easily communicated, certainly graphically, but at the same time it is genuinely new and ambitious and we hope word of mouth will carry it through."
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/pda/2010/dec/20/papa-sangre-game-audio
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