Storytelling across Games, Film and Digital Media

Before I started my internship at Virtuos Game, I had an interview with the sound department manager. She looked through my previous work and noticed that most of my experience was in film and documentary sound, rather than games.

She asked me a question that I didn’t really think about before:

both film and games can be immersive, but what’s actually different about sound design between them?

At that moment, I tried to explain it in a simple way. I said that in film, sound feels more like a connection. It helps the audience follow the emotional changes in the visuals, and supports the narrative flow. Sound is there to guide how we feel about what we see.

But in games, I think sound works quite differently. It’s more like a signal. The player is not just watching, but interacting, so sound needs to respond to actions. It gives feedback, information, and sometimes even instructions. For example, a small sound can tell the player they did something right, or warn them about danger. So it’s not just emotional, it’s functional as well.

After that conversation, I started to realise that even though both film and games are trying to create immersive storytelling, they do it in very different ways. Film is more linear, while games are interactive and unpredictable. This also changes how sound is designed and used.

Thinking about my own practice, I feel I’m somewhere between these different forms. I started with film-based sound work, but through my experience in game audio, I’ve become more interested in interactive sound. I’m still figuring this out, but I think this shift is important for how I see my future direction in multimedia production.

The power of convergence is not that it allows a single story to be told in multiple media forms, but that it enables new forms of participation and engagement with those stories.

Convergence Culture, Henry Jenkins