It’s all in your head.

Whalen made a fitting parallel between how games and cartoons use sound/music to enhance the actions of the characters. When reading the article, I thought about how playing a game without music and watching a cartoon without sound compare. Firstly, you would be considerably lost with regards to the story if you were to watch a cartoon without noise. Sure you can see emotions on the cartoons faces, as well as get an idea of what they were going to do through the over-exaggerated action drawings; however, without the sounds you lose the narrative. In playing a video game without sound you would, at least in my opinion, also be lost. The sounds guide you and hint you through the game. Not only do the sounds let you know where you are, they clue you into whether you’re doing something right or if you’re heading for danger. Music and/or sound amplify actions.  I also wonder what aspect of the noise within a game is more important; would it be game music or game sound?

Another comment that grabbed my attention was music’s role in “aid[ing] in an audience’s perception of a spatial diegesis.” I never thought about how mickey mousing affected the way I perceived what I was viewing on the screen. Even when I played Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time ,  I just thought that the heavy use of music was a clever twist to an otherwise traditional game where you’re off to save the princess, but looking back on how I played the game I notice that I identify certain places with their theme music and characters with the song they taught Link. You would know when the sun was about to set or skeletons were going to pop out of the ground by a change in ambient music. I remember that Zelda was the only game to ever give me nightmares just because of the eerie and super intense music that played when I was trying to kill the spider in the tree of life. It made seeing the spider 10x’s worse, and killing the spider 10x’s harder to the point where I finally had to turn off the sound to get through it (I dislike spiders). A game that uses sounds to impress a certain meaning upon a shown action gives the game another dimension.