On the desire to not kill your players: Rethinking sound in pervasive and mixed reality games

A commonly encountered argument for using sound in games is that sound increases the sense of immersion of a game. Immersion refers to an experience of being drawn into the game world, a process is centrally dependent on the players’ simultaneous removal from everyday life also called disassociation. The immersive power of sound has been linked to its capacity to disassociate: to transport the player into a virtual reality which feels more real, more plausible and more consequential than his/ her real physical surroundings, which is problematic especially for in mixed-reality and pervasive gaming. This paper draws on literature to trace exactly how sound contributes to immersion, and proposes how sound design can create immersion without disassociation. It also identifies engaging aesthetic opportunities that require non-immersive sound, which are currently being overlooked because of the assumption that good sound needs to be immersive.