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Borderless Sound
Abstract For various technical and practical reasons, many games that are available on the PC platform allow the user to switch between different display modes. One of these is the windowed mode, where the visual side of gaming—in contrast to the constantly occurring spatial diffusion of sound—becomes an evidently framed experience through the sight of a screen within a screen. This particular situation calls to mind Michel Chion’s theoretical musings on the spatial relations between image and sound in film, according to which sounds are of a more expansive nature than the moving image. In this article, I will pose the question whether the same can be said regarding audio-visual situations in video games. Keeping in mind that digital games are software and thus prone to all sorts of unintended relationships between image and sound, I will pay special attention to such faulty configurations. Rather than putting these in a negative light, however, I argue for a greater consideration of sound bugs in perceptual analyses of games.
Keywords Audio-visuality, spatial relations, analysis, sound bugs
