Play and Sound
How do hallucinations feel?
A person suffering through trauma or having a psychotic episode feels delusional and hears voices inside their head, cannot concentrate, behaves out of character, and lingers in the past, (https://www.sane.org/information-stories/facts-and-guides/psychosis).
I came across a game that recreates similar emotion in a virtual environment, (Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n7qFzlzvLqs), where the protagonist constantly hears her own voices coming inside her heard that tell her to do things or not to do things, also giving the player some aural cues about how to interact with the environment. Playing this for hours, makes the player to actually feel this trauma because of the constant hammering of voices. It is quite amazing to know that very simple use of sound can be this impactful on the player.
What if these voices come from objects? What if these objects have 'feelings'? What if the objects long for a human connection?
The idea of 'longing' inspires me to create a virtual environmental experience that enables the player to feel the emotions of various objects.
Develop a small virtual space using sound as the main component of interaction between the player and the environment, where the player navigates through various objects and on proximity, the objects try to make contact with the player abstractly through voice (maybe not necessarily human voices) but they do serve a purpose, and when leaving their proximity, they'd feel depressed and try to re-establish the connection with the player by calling back.
This exercise is focused on the use of sound and being experimentative/playful with the concept.
I liked the idea of objects having emotions; hence, I spent the time to develop this mechanic of 'calling back'. The object needs to give an aural cue to the player in order to regain a connection that should also clearly communicate the expression of 'calling back'. For that, I had to skim through many samples of sound on freesound.org to select two specific sounds for each object that correlates with each other. For example, a violin looks for a musician, a radio tries to find a signal when someone's close otherwise it glitches out.
I aimed to associate these sounds with emotions in the objects by creating a simple mechanic based on proximity in Unity.
I was surprised to see that even a simple idea can become very playful if used multiple times. It also posed many questions, such as where else can this mechanic be utilised? Can it be used for a different purpose? What is the scope of growing this mechanic?
This exercise was also an attempt to experiment with this mechanic that I later plan to incorporate in my Studio 2 project. However, I would like to consider other possibilities of this concept and see how I can make it a bit more interesting by applying some complexity.