Center for Science and the Imagination | CSI Skill Tree: Sound and Worldbuilding in Video Games with Amos Roddy and Tochi Onyebuchi @imagineASU | Uploaded July 2022 | Updated October 2024, 1 hour ago.
CSI Skill Tree is a series that examines and celebrates how video games envision possible futures, build rich and thought-provoking worlds, and engage people as active participants in unfolding and interpreting stories. In this episode, we consider how sound design and music in games contributes to worldbuilding, storytelling, and immersion. We look closely at "Inside" (2016), a moody adventure game with environmental puzzles and grim, industrial aesthetics, as well as "Sonic the Hedgehog 2" (1992), and discuss how sound shapes our experience of interactive, imaginary worlds, and helps them express emotion and feel immediate and viscerally thrilling.
About our special guests:
Amos Roddy (he/him) is a composer, sound designer, and producer primarily working in video games. His credits include the Kingdom series, "In Other Waters," "Cloud Gardens," and most recently "Citizen Sleeper." Learn more at https://www.amosroddy.com.
Tochi Onyebuchi (he/him) is the author of the novel "Goliath." His previous fiction includes "Riot Baby," a finalist for the Hugo, Nebula, Locus, and NAACP Image Awards and winner of the New England Book Award for Fiction, the Ignyte Award for Best Novella, and the World Fantasy Award; the Beasts Made of Night series; and the War Girls series. His nonfiction has appeared in The New York Times and NPR, among other places. Learn more at https://www.tochionyebuchi.com.
CSI Skill Tree is a series that examines and celebrates how video games envision possible futures, build rich and thought-provoking worlds, and engage people as active participants in unfolding and interpreting stories. In this episode, we consider how sound design and music in games contributes to worldbuilding, storytelling, and immersion. We look closely at "Inside" (2016), a moody adventure game with environmental puzzles and grim, industrial aesthetics, as well as "Sonic the Hedgehog 2" (1992), and discuss how sound shapes our experience of interactive, imaginary worlds, and helps them express emotion and feel immediate and viscerally thrilling.
About our special guests:
Amos Roddy (he/him) is a composer, sound designer, and producer primarily working in video games. His credits include the Kingdom series, "In Other Waters," "Cloud Gardens," and most recently "Citizen Sleeper." Learn more at https://www.amosroddy.com.
Tochi Onyebuchi (he/him) is the author of the novel "Goliath." His previous fiction includes "Riot Baby," a finalist for the Hugo, Nebula, Locus, and NAACP Image Awards and winner of the New England Book Award for Fiction, the Ignyte Award for Best Novella, and the World Fantasy Award; the Beasts Made of Night series; and the War Girls series. His nonfiction has appeared in The New York Times and NPR, among other places. Learn more at https://www.tochionyebuchi.com.
