A way Destiny excites me

by RC , UK, Saturday, March 16, 2013, 07:26 (4058 days ago) @ Kermit
edited by RC, Saturday, March 16, 2013, 07:44

You seriously don't see a difference between a fixed piece of art, and a game you're supposed to play / use / interact with?

Not with regard to audio mix, no. The audio is not an interactive portion.

Actually it is.

No, it's not. Don't confuse getting a response from a your stimulus with being able to control the response from your stimulus.

This is seriously bemusing. Tell me: why do people explicitly write music they call interactive for games?

Have they? I haven't heard that. I've heard Marty call his music dynamic. That's a different word with a different meaning.

Something can be both dynamic and interactive. They're not mutually exclusive meanings.

Unless you've got some definition of interactivity that I am unaware of.

Or maybe it's the other way around.

Marty designs the audio so that you step across a threshold (stimulus) and the music swells (response). The audio is dynamic, like thousands of other things in the game, such as lighting, shadows, animations--way too many things to list. You can't affect these things, so they aren't interactive, but they are dynamic.

If the audio had the sliders you want, it would be interactive, but it doesn't, so it's not.

The part that makes it interactive is that it changes on YOUR stimulus. If you never hit a certain trigger, it might just loop forever (this has happened). The music does this, as well as many other elements of audio. You pull the trigger, this fires a gun, it makes a sound. You find the sound cool, you want to fire it again. The system affects you and you affect the system to produce a moving tapestry of visual and audio content and emotions unique to that moment.

Lighting and shadows can be interactive. See the phrase: playing with shadows. You don't need to 'control the response' to have an effect on the result of the system. Having a dynamic shadow for the player character is common in Halo. People can affect how that shadow looks and where it is cast, by their control inputs.

EDIT:
Something can change on it's own and get along very happily (dynamic). That same system can also change on some external input and is also interactive (and this can be to varying degrees). In Science, the simple act of trying to observe something can be enough to interact with the system and affect it's result.

Therefore, audio already is interactive in many games, and certainly is in Halo specifically, and adding more ways to interact with that system would not be a huge paradigm shift. It would most likely not make it worse, and may even make it better.