Next up, I headed over to the sister Game Audio Conference for the keynote from Charles Deenen (Sr. Audio Director, Electronic Arts).

Charles started with his values, ("enjoy what you do, play within the system, work hard be direct play fair, and your best tools are your staff"). I really appreciated this grounding as to why he does what he does.

He left the game industry for a while, and came back, and his goal was (and is) to create emotionally engaging audio in games.

He made a point about realism, and we're good, but not good enough, and too much attempt at realism will fall short, jerking gamers out of the experience (he used them film, Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within as an example).

Charles did an interesting differentation of "emotion" (the cross cultural reaction), and "feeling" (the cultural/individual response to emotion.

Game audio, he contends, can generate (or destroy) emotions, and "more emotion leads to less judgement", and possibly addictive behavior.

He broke out 4 critical components to audio:

• Music
• Dialog
• Sound Effects
• Mix

We then did a brief table exercise where each table picked something that quickly emotionally enhances a game (appropriate quality music was the common answer here), and something that can emotionally destroy a game -- "repetition" and "poor voice acting" were the common answers.

Poor voice acting. That's part of why I got into voice acting -- I'm tired of poor voice acting.

Charles did say that even bad acting and bad writing can be overcome, if audio is well-recorded, well-edited, and well-implemented to enhance believability.

The QA was a mixed bag, but some good discussions.

He said the audio directors at EA often don't have a lot of control over writing and voice acting -- external producers are hired for the efforts.

He said we should also cater to gamers. Always. Not to audio professionals.

On orchestral scored music, he said it depends on whether they're doing it to get specific emotional response, or "because we have budget to blow, and Hollywood does it".

Got to chat with Charles briefly afterward. Nice fellow.