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I purchased Aquaria after frequently coming across it in indie gaming websites. The singing gameplay mechanic in the game is definitely an interesting one (see video after the break). It got me thinking how audio game mechanics - i.e. 'verbs' of a game based on sound, music, or rhythm - have been so prominent if we look back on the recent couple of years. Is there a particular human affinity in responding to sound and interacting with it, and what would be the design angle to this? Let's have a quiet reflective moment.

First of all, the metaphor of 'play as music', which Aquaria also takes advantage of, is highly accessible. Toys making sounds are with us from day one, basically, and many kids proceed to learning instruments, and so on. Singing is omnipresent as well. Both are something that attract the pleasure of virtuosity - taking pleasure of one's own performance or appreciating someone else's aptitude and skill. Hence, they suit games.

To an extent, audio is about repetition, or at least it can be made to follow patterns, which means that it is suitable for application into core mechanics of a game: what the players do repeatedly over the course of the game. Notes are also fundamentally emergent; that's why songs are composed - and therefore gameplay as notation is an interesting idea for a game design specification method. (That's a research idea of mine I hope to work on in the near future.)

Michael Kubovy is an experimental psychologist who has written about the phenomenon of how, e.g., a piece of music is able to repeatedly elicit emotions from its listeners, and how does the pleasure change through repeated listening. So we return to repetition. Kubovy offers a solution through theories on enjoying music: individuals’ tendency to ‘ascribe agency, sentience and emotionality’ to a piece of music increases as the music becomes more familiar, ‘thus reinforcing our ability to construe the music as providing objects of emotion’. (See more on my thesis, chapter 9 on 'Motives and Pleasures in Game Play'.)

If we translate this into the terms of stargazing, players’ tendency to experience emotions by playing a game repeatedly is due to them getting familiar with its eliciting conditions, i.e. those play elements and scenarios which trigger emotions. This goes hand in hand with players' increased knowledge about how the game behaves, through progression and exploration. The repeated enjoyment, or expectation of it, is based on players’ predictions of emotions, i.e. predictions of future emotional episodes. As the outcome of the game is - well at least it should be - more or less uncertain, curiosity is another motivational factor as a source of pleasure.

So, at its best, music can amplify the repetitive pleasure from gameplay, with emotions related to both the music, and the player executing the core mechanic. How well this applies to Aquaria, is a matter of another post, I guess...based on early observations, the singing mechanic is a spell mechanic, rather than the core mechanic (the latter being swimming about).

Design takeaway:... in the form of a hypothesis: music or sound effects that follow and emulate the pattern of gameplay can amplify the emotions of a player, as her predictions of emotions are geared towards both what happens in play, and what kind of audio aesthetics she will engage with. This can lead to increased replayability, depending on the genre.

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