The Dark Side of Game Audio: The Sounds of Mimetic Control and Affective Conditioning
It’s an all too familiar movie trope. A bug hidden in a flower jar. A figure in shadows crouched listening at a door. The tape recording that no one knew existed, revealed at the most decisive of moments. Even the abrupt disconnection of a phone call manages to arouse the suspicion that we are never as alone as we may think. And although surveillance derives its meaning the latin “vigilare” (to watch) and French “sur-“ (over), its deep connotations of listening have all but obliterated that distinction.
This month, SO! Multimedia Editor Aaron Trammell curates a forum on Sound and Surveillance, featuring the work of Robin James and Kathleen Battles. And so it begins, with Aaron asking. . .”Want to Play a Game?” –JS
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It’s eleven o’clock on a Sunday night and I’m in the back room of a comic book store in Scotch Plains, NJ. Game night is wrapping up. Just as I’m about to leave, someone suggests that we play Pit, a classic game about trading stocks in the early 20th century. Because the game is short, I decide to give it a go and pull a chair up to the table. In Pit, players are given a hand of nine cards of various farm-related suits and frantically trade cards with other players until their entire hand matches the same suit. As play proceeds, players hold up a set of similar cards they are willing to trade and shout, “one, one, one!,” “two, two, two!,” “three, three, three!,” until another player is willing to trade them an equivalent amount of cards in a different suit. The game only gets louder as the shouting escalates and builds to a cacophony.
As I drove home that night, I came to the uncomfortable realization that maybe the game was playing me. I and the rest of the players had adopted similar dispositions over the course of the play. As we fervently shouted to one another trying to trade between sets of indistinguishable commodities, we took on similar, intense, and excited mannerisms. Players who would not scream, who would not participate in the reproduction of the game’s sonic environment, simply lost the game, faded out. As for the rest of us, we became like one another, cookie-cutter reproductions of enthusiastic, stressed, and aggravated stock traders, getting louder as we cornered the market on various goods.
We were caught in a cybernetic-loop, one that encouraged us to take on the characteristics of stock traders. And, for that brief period of time, we succumbed to systems of control with far reaching implications. As I’ve argued before, games are cybernetic mechanisms that facilitate particular modes of feedback between players and the game state. Sound is one of the channels through which this feedback is processed. In a game like Pit, players both listen to other players for cues regarding their best move and shout numbers to the table representing potential trades. In other games, such as Monopoly, players must announce when they wish to buy properties. Although it is no secret that understanding sound is essential to good game design, it is less clear how sound defines the contours of power relationships in these games. This essay offers two games, Mafia, and Escape: The Curse of the Temple as case studies for the ways in which sound is used in the most basic of games, board games. By fostering environments that encourage both mimetic control and affective conditioning game sound draws players into the devious logic of cybernetic systems.
Understanding the various ways that sound is implemented in games is essential to understanding the ways that game sound operates as both a form of mimetic control and affective conditioning. Mimetic control is, at its most simple, the power of imitation. It is the degree to which we become alike when we play games. Mostly, it happens because the rules invoke a variety of protocols which encourage players to interact according to a particular standard of communication. The mood set by game sound is the power of affective conditioning. Because we decide what we interact with on account of our moods, moments of affective conditioning prime players to feel things (such as pleasure), which can encourage players to interact in compulsive, excited, subdued, or frenetic ways with game systems.
A game where sound plays a central and important role is Mafia (which has a number of other variants like Werewolf and The Resistance). In Mafia, some players take the secret role of mafia members who choose players to “kill” at night, while the eyes of the others are closed. Because mafia-team players shuffle around during the game and point to others in order to indicate which players to eliminate while the eyes of the other players are closed, the rules of the game suggest that players tap on things, whistle, chirp, and make other ambient noises while everyone’s eyes are closed. This allows for the mafia-team players to conduct their business secretly, as their motions are well below the din created by the other players. Once players open their eyes, they must work together to deduce which players are part of the mafia, and then vote on who to eliminate from the game. Here players are, in a sense, controlled by the game to provide a soundtrack. What’s more, the eeriness of the sounds produced by the players only accentuate the paranoia players feel when taking part in what’s essentially a lynch-mob.
The ambient sounds produced by players of Mafia have overtones of mimetic control. Protocols governing the use of game audio as a form of communication between bodies and other bodies, or bodies and machines, require that we communicate in particular ways at set intervals. Different than the brutal and martial forms of discipline that drove disciplinary apparatuses like Bentham’s panopticon, the form of control exerted through interactive game audio relies on precisely the opposite premise. What is often termed “The Magic Circle of Play” is suspect here as it promises players a space that is safe and fundamentally separate from events in the outside world. Within this space somewhat hypnotic behavior-patterns take place under the auspices of being just fun, or mere play. Players who refuse to play by the rules are often exiled from this space, as they refuse to enter into this contract of soft social norms with others.
Not all panopticons are in prisons. “Singing Ringing Tree at Sunset,” Dave Leeming CC BY.
Escape: The Curse of the Temple relies on sound to set a game mood that governs the ways that players interact with each other. In Escape, players have ten minutes (of real time) where they must work together to navigate a maze of cardboard tiles. Over the course of the game there are two moments when players must return to the tile that they started the game on, and these are announced by a CD playing in the background of the room. When this occurs, a gong rings on the CD and rhythms of percussion mount in intensity until players hear a door slam. At this point, if players haven’t returned to their starting tile, they are limited in the actions they can take for the rest of the game. In the moments of calm before players make a mad dash for the entrance, the soundtrack waxes ambient. It offers the sounds of howling-winds, rattling chimes, and yawning corridors.
The game is spooky, overall. The combination of haunting ambient sounds and moments where gameplay is rushed and timed, makes for an adrenaline-fueled experience contained and produced by the game’s ambient soundtrack. The game’s most interesting moments come from points where one player is trapped and players must decide whether they should help their friend or help themselves. The tense, haunting, soundtrack evokes feelings of high-stakes immersion. The game is fun because it produces a tight, stressful, and highly interactive experience. It conditions its players through the clever use of its soundtrack to feel the game in an embodied and visceral way. Like the ways that horror movies have used ambient sounds to a great effect in producing tension in audiences (pp.26-27), Escape: The Curse of the Temple encourages players to immerse themselves in the game world by playing upon the tried and true affective techniques that films have used for years. Immersed players feel an increased sense of engagement with the game and because of this they are willingly primed to engage in the mimetic interactive behaviors that engage them within the game’s cybernetic logic.
These two forms of power, mimetic control and affective conditioning, often overlap and coalesce in games. Sometimes, they meet in the middle during games that offer a more or less adaptive form of sound, like Mafia. Players work together and mimic each other when reproducing the ambient forms of quiet that constitute the atmosphere of terror that permeates the game space. Even the roar of bids which occurs in Pit constitutes a form of affective conditioning that encourages players to buy, buy, buy as fast as possible. Effectively simulating the pressure of The Stock Exchange.
Although there is now a growing discipline around the production of game audio, there is relatively little discourse that attempts to understand how the implementation of sound in games functions as a mode of social control. By looking at the ways that sound is implemented in board and card games, we can gain insight of the ways in which it is implemented in larger technical systems (such as computer games), larger aesthetic systems (such as performance art), economic systems (like casinos and the stock market), and even social systems (like parties). Furthermore, it is easy to describe more clearly the ways in which game audio functions as a form of soft power through techniques of mimetic control and affective conditioning. It is only by understanding how these techniques affect our bodies that we can begin to recognize our interactions with large-scale cybernetic systems that have effects reaching beyond the game itself.
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Aaron Trammell is co-founder and Multimedia Editor of Sounding Out! He is also a Media Studies PhD candidate at Rutgers University. His dissertation explores the fanzines and politics of underground wargame communities in Cold War America. You can learn more about his work at aarontrammell.com.
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Featured image “Psychedelic Icon,” by Gwendal Uguen CC BY-NC-SA.
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REWIND!…If you liked this post, you may also dig:
Papa Sangre and the Construction of Immersion in Audio Games- Enongo Lumumba-Kasongo
Sounding Out! Podcast #31: Game Audio Notes III: The Nature of Sound in Vessel- Leonard J. Paul
Experiments in Aural Resistance: Nordic Role-Playing, Community, and Sound- Aaron Trammell
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I Been On: BaddieBey and Beyoncé’s Sonic Masculinity
This September, Sounding Out! challenged a #flawless group of scholars and critics to give Beyoncé Knowles-Carter a close listen, re-examining the complex relationship between her audio and visuals and amplifying what goes unheard, even as her every move–whether on MTV or in that damn elevator–faces intense scrutiny. Last Thursday, you heard our Beyoncé roundtable podcast featuring our first two writers, Priscilla Peña Ovalle (English, University of Oregon) and Kevin Allred (Women and Gender Studies, Rutgers)–as well as Courtney Marshall (English, University of New Hampshire) and Liana Silva (Editor, Women in Higher Education, Managing Editor, Sounding Out!). In the remaining weeks of the series, we will hear from Liana and Madison Moore (Research Associate in the Department of English at King’s College, University of London and author of How to Be Beyoncé). Today, Regina Bradley (writer, scholar, and freelance researcher of African American Life and Culture) introduces us to the sonic ratchetness of Baddie Bey.–Editor-in-Chief Jennifer Stoever
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My husband is low key in love with Beyoncé. While he has yet to admit to any type of commitment to Mrs. Knowles-Carter – I’ve interrogated him thoroughly after each “I can appreciate her craft, babe” commentary – he holds her latest album hostage in his car. Beyoncé played in my car only once, but I enjoyed our brief encounter. I listened to the album as a testament of Beyoncé on her grown woman shit: a smorgasbord of vulnerability, independence, and [good] sex. “***Flawless” is my favorite track, a testament to the complexities of performing (black) womanhood in popular spaces.
However, I’m more so interested in the sampled track that didn’t make the final cut, “Bow Down.” “Bow Down/I Been On.,” released in March 2013, shows Beyoncé’s responses to idealistic black womanhood (i.e. quiet lady-hood that is not assertive), deeply rooted in her southern upbringing. The sonic tensions between Beyoncé’s ‘normal’ performance voice and the introduction of performance identities such as BaddieBey point to Beyoncé’s increasing unwillingness to cater to a type of sonic respectability that parallels the conservatism of the black middle class. As I write in a previous essay, BaddieBey is a sonic invocation of ratchetness – a performance of black women’s contemporary (dis)respectability politics – in which Beyoncé distances herself via sound from the established ideas of womanhood that she visually satisfies.
Thus, in “Bow Down/I Been On” Beyoncé builds a layered sonic narrative to destabilize the concrete sexual politics she grapples with in her music. While “***Flawless” shows Beyoncé’s evolution of self-consciousness and ultimately women’s empowerment, in “Bow Down” I hear her conduct the grittier and more controversial work of questioning gender norms in popular culture. “Bow Down/I Been On” presents and blurs useful tensions of gender and consciousness in an ever-present conversation of what and who dictates respectable womanhood in popular culture.
“Bow Down/I Been On” features the production work of hip hop producers Hit Boy and Timbaland. The first half of the track, titled “Bow Down” and produced by Hit Boy, sounds like a bass heavy Nintendo video game. The aggressiveness of the track – hard-hitting snare drums and synthesizers in addition to the video game sonic aesthetic – complements a high-pitched, autotuned voice introducing Beyoncé. Beyoncé introduces BaddieBey as her hip hop masculine bravado persona on the second half of the song “I Been On” produced by Timbaland. (Beyoncé’s “BaddieBey” persona stems from a YouTube video by Atlanta, Georgia Girl group The OMGirlz talking about why Beyoncé is bad.) The second half is a stark departure from the first half: a slower tempo that accompanies a deeper voice. Unlike Sasha Fierce, a visual characterization of the hypersexual and hyperindependent aspect of Beyoncé’s performances, BaddieBey is unequivocally southern, sonic, and ratchet.
The auto tune in the first half distorts immediately recognizable touchstones of Beyoncé’s femininity. The voice’s ambiguity points to Beyoncé’s nickname of “King Bey,” an intentional collapse of gender performance as the foundation of her influence and power as an entertainer. The “Bow Down” announcer doubly signifies the arrival of Beyoncé’s verse on the track and the destabilization of available cues of respectability. It is from this perspective that I ground Beyoncé’s emphatic use of bitch in her demand for those around her to “bow down bitches!” Rather than remaining attached to the definition of bitch as directed at women, Beyoncé uses the sonic tropes at play to decentralize gender norms.
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BaddieBey also forces the (mis)understanding of what it means to think about Beyoncé as “sounding like a good girl.” Her vocalization, reminiscent of Houston’s chopped and screwed production style – the extreme slowing down of a track and the resulting slurring and distortion of voice – dismounts Beyoncé from international recognition and makes room to (re)claim space to experiment with the boundaries of her womanhood and its recognizable aspects. The deepness of her voice does not fit within the more recognizable and established feminine context of Beyoncé as an R&B diva. Criticism of the track denounced her use of the word “bitch” and those unfamiliar with chopped and screwed denounced it and in the most extreme comments called it “demonic.” The (hyper)masculinization of Beyoncé’s voice in this track signifies her attempt to situate herself not only in hip hop’s masculine discourse but southern hip hop and its renderings of the south as a similarly masculine space.
BaddieBey gestures towards what I suggest is a type of sonic drag – using sound to bend markers of gender performance in order to blur characteristics of black masculinity and womanhood. The sonic intonations of chopped and screwed give Beyoncé a pass to dabble in ‘ratchet-speak,’ sonically alluding to images of “gold fangs” and “smacking tricks.” In the track she sonically blends hip hop bravado and misogynistic representations of black womanhood, and in that way stretches what is considered respectable. In other words, BaddieBey signifies Beyoncé’s awareness of hip hop as a space of (exaggerated) gender performance.
This awareness is also rooted in a specific place: her hometown of Houston, Texas. As I previously stated, BaddieBey centralizes Houston as a departure point for Beyoncé’s hip hop sensibility and as a space for excavating the complexity of her gendered identity. Conceptualizing place as an element of southern black women’s respectability helps situate it as a cultural aesthetic. In this instance, respectability as a tangible discourse is situated within [southern] hip hop. Beyoncé’s remembrance of Houston’s “cultural essentials” – i.e. Frenchy’s Restaurant, Boudin sausages, dookie braids, and “candy paint” – signify a simultaneous existence with her usual declaration of finer, higher classed possessions like high priced labels, global jet setting, and jewelry.
From Wildfox Couture, Beyonce in a “Property of Texas” v-neck tee
Beyoncé’s declaration of returning to “H-town” and its cultural “essentials” within a sonic space re-situate her within not only Houston but a larger southern hip hop narrative that overlaps with her higher-classed — and therefore more respectable – celebrity status. Thus, “Bow Down/I Been On” becomes a sonic space that enables the listener to become aware of Beyoncé’s complicated performance narrative in ways simple lyricism does not allow. Building upon Guthrie Ramsey’s observation of music as a working space where the ‘invisible function’ of ethnic performance is panned out, “Bow Down/I Been On” challenges the listener to reconsider how Beyoncé’s (sonic) identity politics and performances intersect with racial performance. Hip hop, especially in its commodified form, speaks best to these tensions between gender performance and lived experience.
In the tension between gender performance and lived experience lies BaddieBey. Her alter ego is a kind of sonic female masculinity. With Kai Azania Small’s “genderqueer” reading of Beyoncé in mind, BaddieBey is a possible extension of Small’s hypothetical question of if Beyoncé had a penis. (Small presented a paper entitled “The Specter of Sasha Fierce and the Scopic: Freighting of Beyoncé’s Trans/Genderqueer Body” at the 2012 Queerness of Hip Hop Conference at Harvard University.) Because sound is capable of working as a gray performative space, Beyoncé ruptures conservative gender roles that are frequently treaded in popular spaces like hip hop by establishing her (dis)respectability.
BaddieBey manifests within the interstitial spaces of sexual performance and gender norms seen in hip hop. She is the sonic manifestation of Beyoncé’s hip hop sensibility that allows her to permeate if not penetrate hip hop as a hypermasculine space. BaddieBey is most demonstrative of Beyoncé’s ability to navigate “Bow Down” as her rendition of a hip hop ‘diss track,’ dismissing her haters and those overly criticizing her position as a pop singer. Beyoncé’s performance of hip hop female masculinity allots her room to present herself not as a braggart but as a dominant force.
In this context then, the use of “bitch” in the chorus and later “trick” is doubly bound by hip hop’s gender specific misogynistic outlook on women of color and the gender-neutral use of bitch as an adjective to describe lack of talent or weakness (i.e. “bitch made”). BaddieBey forcefully treads the line of respectability through those words. For example, she sonically parallels her pimping of “the game” to the pimping of women heard in Texas rap. This occurs in her rendition of lines from Texas rap duo UGK’s track “Something Good.” BaddieBey raps: “Didn’t do your girl but your sister was alright, damn/In ya homeboy’s Caddy last night man, ha ha/Hold up, Texas trill.” The UGK version, much more explicit, is toned down in BaddieBey’s rendition. Still, in quoting UGK BaddieBey establishes herself as an entity separate from Beyoncé and even Sasha Fierce. She is an Othered representation of Beyoncé’s otherwise conservative sexuality. Yet the “tone down” of the lyrics can be read as Beyoncé’s awareness of (hip hop) masculinity as a misogynistic performance of black sexuality. BaddieBey’s laugh at the end of the verse marks the blurring of performance and reality.
“Bow Down/I Been On” provides insight into the clever ways Beyoncé uses instrumentation and sound production to fragment her persona limited by investments in her visual image. It blurs clean-cut negotiations of black women’s identity and respectability as literal discourse by introducing the concept of sound as an agitator of black women’s expression and its analysis. The fluidity of sounding gender makes room to confront the static and heteronormative discourses through which the performances of these aesthetics manifest. Reliance on sonic narratives complements visuality in ways that usefully problematize how we negotiate contemporary race and gender politics in hip hop and ultimately popular culture.
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Regina Bradley recently completed her PhD at Florida State University in African American Literature. Her dissertation is titled “Race to Post: White Hegemonic Capitalism and Black Empowerment in 21st Century Black Popular Culture and Literature.” She is a regular writer for Sounding Out!
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REWIND!…If you liked this post, check out:
Thrills, Chills, and Safe Sexuality: The Sounds of Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” – Osvaldo Oyola
– Yvon Bonefant
“Fade to Black, Old Sport: How Hip-Hop Amplifies Baz Luhrmann’s The Great Gatsby“ –Regina Bradley
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