What does it mean to really listen to a game? Vadim Nickel is a researcher and game developer at Concordia University who studies exactly that question. His recent survey of sound-first games—titles where music and sound drive the action rather than just accompany it—turns up only 43 examples across nearly four decades of game history. That scarcity is itself the story. We talk about why the tools to make these games have only recently caught up to the ambition, what film sound theory can teach us about how players hear, and why the most interesting territory in game audio might not come from games at all—but from soundwalks, acoustic ecology, and the experimental music practices of R. Murray Schafer and Pauline Oliveros.

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• (00:00) - Listening to Games
• (00:54) - Vadim’s Origin Story
• (04:53) - Surveying Sound First Games
• (07:28) - Tech Barriers and Audio Tools
• (10:33) - Peripherals and Movement

Hosted by Jamin Warren. Music by Nick Sylvester.

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