Article
Exploring the Influence of Different Types of Sounds on Various Aspects of Player Experience in League of Legends (en)
* Presenting author
Abstract:
Modern videogames usually feature an elaborate sound design consisting of music, ambient sounds (sounds depicting the surrounding game world) and character sounds (elicited by actions of the character). Previous studies have found differing effects of these sound conditions on the gaming experience. In a puzzle-platformer game, ambient sounds were found to increase subjective immersion into the game, while character sounds seemed to increase identification with the avatar (Haehn et al., 2023). However, these results could not be replicated using the multi-player-online-battle-arena League of Legends (LoL) (Haehn et al., 2023). Given the previous task’s limited ambient sound types, this study aims to reexamine ambient and character sounds in a less restricted LoL gameplay-task. In the current laboratory study, participants (N = 32) were asked to explore the map in LoL’s single-player practice tool and we examine how different sound conditions influence the degree of self-reported subjective immersion and avatar identification. The correlations between these aspects were also calculated, to gain more insight on the composition of the gaming experience. We discuss the results in the light of earlier findings and reflect on possible implications for the design of interactive audio-visual experiences.