Fashioning the Immersive Fallacy at Five Nights at Freddy’s: A New Approach to Music, Sound, and Their Relationship to the Immersive Process in Moving Image Media

Hannah Capstick

doi:10.21428/66f840a4.4094707a

Abstract

Fashioning the Immersive Fallacy at Five Nights at Freddyâs: A New Approach to Music, Sound, and Their Relationship to the Immersive Process in Moving Image MediaHannah Capstick <#biography> , University of Oxford

Highlights

An analysis of Five Nights at Freddy’s applies pressure to the existing scholarship and forces us to reconsider how we define the concepts necessary to reach an understanding of immersion, and encourages us to seek new methods through which we can apply these to music in video games
I conclude with a suggestion of a new idea ‒ that of the “Global Music Box”: a new approach to the way in which we think of sounds in moving-image media, considering music and sound as important and mutually supportive, going as far as to break down the boundary between the two
The concept of the “Global Music Box” recognises that a simple transplantation of our understanding of the relationship between music and sound onto video games is problematic, as it does not consider that all sounds in media are artificial, whereas in “real life” we have a distinction between the natural and the artificial

Summary

Introduction

Through an analysis of the Five Nights at Freddy’s franchise, I will critically approach a selection of the key theories and methodologies in the study of music in video games and demonstrate the value of my concept of a Global Music Box. Placed onto this canvas are seemingly random aural occurrences, such as distant laughter, loud footsteps, or a pipe organ fading in and out This is to name but a few of the interesting sonic features of the series and I will discuss these instances in more detail below, but they have profound implications for the player’s experience and are a prominent reason as to why these games are so scary and immersive for the player. While there are Fashioning the Immersive Fallacy at Five Nights at Freddy’s: A New Approach to Music, Sound, and Their Relationship to the Immersive Process in Moving Image Media many common tropes in the horror genre which are frequently employed with great success, this subversion extends to the ‘double-bluff,’ wherein horror tropes are subverted to further the anxiety and uncertainty created within the horror experience

Current Academic Understandings

Media Cited