I'd love a way of filtering out the clutter in a game's soundscape without turning off sound completely. Let's take one soundscape that's very familiar to me (World of Warcraft). Some sounds are very useful as status updates: when I'm tanking a boss, it's really useful to know that my special attack has missed. It's less useful to know that my special attack has landed, but still useful. There's some use in knowing that my normal attack has missed, and generally almost none in knowing that it's landed. I don't want to know detailed status on other players' attacks at all - that's why I have a threat meter :-). I want some of the audio cues of the mobs hitting me, but they pretty much fall into the same categories.

Of course, that's a lot of customisation. I wonder instead whether there's a "soundscape clutter slider". During playtest, log the frequency with which each sound is played. Rank the sounds by frequency. As the slider is slid lower, mute (or, if you want to be *really* sneaky, reduce the volume before muting) of the common sounds, but keep the rarer ones at full strength.

I have no idea whether the idea would work in reality. I also assume it's been thought of a thousand times before. But it's an interesting use of automated data gathering, and it seems like it might warrant further thought.

Oh - two enhancements:

1) Two controls: where the "knee in the curve" lies, and how aggressive to be about reducing the volume of sounds that are more common than that "knee" value. The aggression might control the slope of the volume reduction, for example.

2) Dynamic data-gathering on the player's machine. Rather than filter out the things the testers experienced most frequently (which has a bias towards the most tested parts of the game, unless you corrent for that), filter out the things the player has experienced most frequently.

Your slider suggestion works in principle, but I'm unsure how it would work in practice.

So am I, but it would be very interesting to instrument a non-trivial game in that way and see whether it worked for all/some/none of that game's audience. Unfortunately I don't know of any non-trivial games with sufficiently complex soundscapes that are also freely available to instrument. That said, there are some Flash "casual" games that my wife plays where I'd dearly like to mute one or two very common sounds - possibly using the program manager's entrails as the muting medium, as the game really shouldn't have been released with such a dreadful soundscape.

I'm struck by the idea, for MMOs at least, of giving the player a tool which they can use to "tag" things they want to be muted in the soundscape - for something already database driven, that might work. :)

For MMOs, the problem is that you (OK, I, as I have no idea whether my requirements are universal) often want to mute an action or even a particular outcome of an action. I suspect these are rarely database-driven, or only very indirectly. I also suspect that the commonest ones map pretty much uniquely onto particular assets, so a tool to mute those might work.