in relation to the use of Stealers Wheel’ s upbeat song Stuck In The Middle With You during a torture scene in Quentin Tarantino’ s film Reservoir Dogs,“ the emphatic centrality and heterogeneous functionality of popular song” leads to“ ironic distance”. This applies to We Happy Few, where the use of‘ ironic distance’ is central in giving the gamer a sense of the morality of the game world that they are about to enter, regardless of the nursery rhyme’ s incongruence with the game world’ s culture.
Whilst Cheng questions“ whether music can any longer be contextualised in a truly ironic or shocking manner”( 2014), the use of London Bridge Has Fallen Down in We Happy Few, and its simplistic, childlike orchestration is still juxtaposed with the images of violence regardless of its shock factor. It still grabs the player’ s attention, with the‘ media factors’( the music and image) and‘ user factors’( the player’ s preconceptions of the music) combining to produce a primary level of immersion where the player is being drawn in to the dystopian world( Bocking et al., 2015).
Video games that require prolonged cognitive
SotA Anthology 2015-16
attention, such as puzzle games, can also create immersion, but of a different kind. Rather than requiring the player to feel a part of the game world, the music needs to create an environment that is constantly sonically stimulating so that it blocks out the real world during these cognitive tasks. Csikszentmihalyi( 1975) describes this kind of immersion as flow theory, believing that optimum flow is achieved when a task is challenging enough that the solution provides intrigue and reward, but not so challenging that it greatly surpasses our ability. Douglas and Hargadon( 2000) used schema theory to expand on the existence of flow, suggesting that:“ Our enjoyment in engagement lies in our ability to call upon a range of schemas... immersion stems from our being completely absorbed within the ebb and flow of a familiar narrative schema.” This works alongside Brown and Cairns’ s( 2004) theory of engagement and engrossment leading to total immersion; the idea that the player must first be totally comfortable with a game’ s controls before the game can begin to have an impact on the player’ s emotions. However, to keep the player immersed and to keep flow within a game, the game tasks must become more challenging for flow to continue, otherwise the player will become bored and therefore will not experience immersion. For music to aid immersion through game flow, it needs to seamlessly loop so that no time pressure is felt by the player. Storm8 Studios’ Jewel Mania is a mobile puzzle game requiring the player to move jewels in a grid to create lines of three or more matching jewels in order to score points. The music that accompanies this task aids immersion through its light and unobtrusive pizzicato string melody that rises and falls, moving from an A major chord to a G major chord by using A major in first inversion and G major in second inversion. This gives a sense of rise from bar 1 into bar 2 as the C # moves up to a D but harmonically moves downwards, giving the illusion of movement without creating tension as the melody rises but harmony falls. The turn in bar four leads seamlessly back into bar 1 as it finishes on a D that falls back down to the C # as the phrase repeats. Without a definitive beginning or end, this phrase can loop for as long as it needs to. This is vital in creating a game environment that facilitates immersion through flow because the lack of development in the music creates a suspended sense of time, allowing the player to become engrossed.
However, sound effects are also important in adding to the player’ s sense of achievement during cognitive tasks. Reward stingers sit much higher in the mix than the looping music because they are a