You have excellent arguments, and I'm far from capable of refuting them. I have one last thought to add to this discussion, and that pertains to the comparison to other forms of art. More than any other medium, the videogame is a gestalt of all the other art forms. It is composed of traditional 2d art, 3d art, visual effects, music, sound design, voice recording, the motion of the human body . . . anything that falls under the umbrella of art can be found there. The experience is incomparable to purchasing or viewing a painting; a painting is only a piece of a videogame.

Beyond that, more than any other art form, the videogame is a piece of technology. That's what makes it so marvelous. It is, as folks say, more than the sum of its parts. A lot of excellent games are good because the package is more than what the developers buit. The Source engine and the Unreal engine are just two examples of games which were just as strong as platforms for others to use to create as they were as standalone products. Both of those were used originally to build games which gave the user an enormous amount of control over the content of the game; you can play Half Life 2 with every setting on default, or you can literally access the dev console and change every variable the creators had access to. When you have a game like Halo, you've been given an excellent package which is useful only for the experience the developers intended. When the user is given control, you can enjoy the developer's project, and then you can use the platform for myriad other worthwhile experiences.

Huh? If you could correct for not having a badass surround sound system, why would anyone need or want a badass surround system?

so they could have surround sound? so they could brag about it?

Things like brightness, contrast, equalizer settings and so on provide a different level of control than controlling a mix. You're adjusting to account for differences in equipment and settings, as you said, with the ideal being hearing and seeing what the creators intended you to see and hear.

That's the same thing we're talking about here.

That's why high-end audio/visual dealers have experts who come to your house with reference equipment and so on. They calibrate and adjust your setup so that it delivers something closer to this ideal that the creators intended.

Firstly, I don't have the money for high-end audio/visual anything, let alone that and having people come out to set it up for me, and secondly, because I doubt everything is going to be working from the same reference equipment and setup, will they come out and do that every time I play a different game or watch a different movie or change the channel on the TV?

Finally, if you have no problem with the default settings, you can leave them alone. You literally cannot suffer from the inclusion of these options, but there are people who are affected negatively by their exclusion.

It's a small group that's negatively affected. These options give the impression that these things should be adjusted, and many people will adjust them just because they can, which could lead to a lot of people having a suboptimal experience of the game.

They don't give the impression they should be adjusted, at least not to me or a whole lot of other people. I thought it was common knowledge most people don't adjust things like that. So you're OK with a small group of people being negatively affected by not having these settings available, but you're not OK with a small group of people being negatively affected by having these settings be available?

You're missing out on some great stuff, but the game is still the game.

Debatable. You said "I'm not arguing that the music isn't part of the game." Good. I think it is, too. You mentioned paintings. You paint your masterpiece, and some dude comes up and says, "I like the left corner. Just give me the left corner." You have every right to say, "No, thanks. It is what it is. It's fine if you don't like it. Others will. I painted this for them." You have no obligation to accommodate said dude.

Yeah, but in the real world if the painter or painting is well-known that guy will fairly easily be able to get a copy of just that corner framed on his wall, and no one will probably try to stop him and tell him he's messing up the artist's vision. I mean heck, what about this? I doubt a lot of what you see on the first pages of results is what da Vinci had in mind, but I think if he somehow knew what people made of his work he wouldn't really mind, or at least he wouldn't be mad.

As I said, we have the ability to adjust brightness and contrast, which are the visual equivalent to adjusting audio levels.

No, it's not the visual equivalent.

Well, what would be then? Seriously, I'm curious what you think would be equivalent.

I've stayed out of this discussion, because it seems like the two sides are arguing about totally different things, but this seems like a pretty straightforward question.

I think everyone in this thread understands we're talking about changing the volume of the music and possibly other audio components independently from each other and the overall volume.

You already HAVE the audio equivalent of brightness and contrast for any game you want - just mess with the bass or treble, or whatever. That's not what the 'Audio Mix' is talking about, though - it's talking about relative volume levels of different pieces of the total audio output. It would be like a visual 'Brighten Humans' button on your TV - which doesn't exist. (Yes, you used to have RGB controls on your TV - but that was to compensate for faulty cathode ray tubes; those controls no longer exist on LCD or plasma TVs.)

I just went into the options on my monitor and it turns out I can adjust red, green, and blue (which I don't remember any old TVs letting me do, actually), plus hue and saturation, and a lot of people play console games with a monitor. BTW this is a (presumably cheap since it came with the computer) Dell monitor from 2007. I'd imagine a lot of TVs now would have similar options. Also I've seen one, maybe two TVs in my entire life that let you adjust bass and treble.

You're asking the game developer to give you control over WHICH PIECE OF AUDIO you hear - and that's not something they're required to do, and it's not something you have in other realms. (I guess there's nothing wrong with wanting it - but all of the arguments that it's just the equivalent of buttons you already have for visual adjustments are based on faulty analogies.)

Can you deny it would be expected based on other games though? (if "other games" is too vague we can narrow it down, I think you'll still find at least half of them allow for this kind of adjustment)

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.