Game Audio Network Guild

Nice post. It got me thinking about how the brain must switch modes from in game to cut scenes.

In game dialogue panning is important for positional information…and therefore perhaps registers in a more primal way. Cut scenes being more narrative, they probably register in a higher place.

I know that I tend to relax and have a different level of focus during cut scenes. Gives my old brain a chance to rest.

Thanks, Peter. I agree; to me a cutscene is a breather and a chance to just sit back and enjoy another piece of the story.

The problem with dialogue panning gets even worse when there are a lot of cuts in a cinematic, which means that the dialogue lines are jumping all over the place in the aural field, many times in mid-sentence, just to try and match the correct perspective.

In those cases, I'm not only taken out from the immersion, but I also have to concentrate to track all the dialogue and make sense of it.

I don't know - it bugs me, so I imagine it bugs other people as well :/

You make a good point and I agree with you.

One could wonder why so many games have this flaw which in many cases does, as already pointed out, distract from the narrative. Perhaps it nothing other than something of a goof in the mixing philosophy of games that has become widespread and to some degree standardised because of ignorance towards differences between game play and cut scenes.
On the other hand, and to be the devil's advocate, whereas 10 years ago the cut scenes could be one of the most exciting parts of a game and clearly separated from the game play (anyone remember Abe's Odysee/Exodus?), today it has become more of a fashion to blend gameplay and cut scenes into something that is not quite either (Oblivion springs to mind, but it's been a while since I played it) and perhaps there's sometimes even a (good or bad) ambition from a sound department to keep the sound "in play".

If I'm in a cinematic, I like my spatial differences and environmental fx to remain a constant. If the cinematic has one person in the foreground and one in the background, and *not* directly in the center I don't expect them to be either of equal volume, sans fx or panned exactly the same.
Then again I don't like the assertion 'dialog must be in the middle always' in either cinema or gaming. It seems based on a decades-old truism that it 'disorients the audience' which may 'look around to find who is speaking'. Which is as absurd. That's just my opinion and my taste, it's not commonly shared.
Asserting "...it detracts from the experience..." so reflexively isn't quite fair because it's subjective.

@Daniel- This decision isn't "ignorance" or a goof, mixing dialog to the center has been the standard mantra, standard dogma even for decades and I think it's ripe for evolution. What I've noticed is that games these days get better and better (by and large, the crap games of these days are even hugely better than the crap games of yesteryear) and I've been absolutely blown away by the work of videogame sound designers these days.

TJ - I respect your opinion, but I will still side with psychoacoustics. There are some dogmas that are ripe for evolution, indeed, but there are also some conclusions that have been reached through many years of trial and error. I believe dialogue panning techniques in linear audiovisual media fall in the latter category. That's why wheels are still round, for example.

When there is radical dialogue panning, we don't "look around to see who is speaking", as you put it. That would be absurd, of course. We are merely taken out of the illusion of immersion, which is as fragile as a house of cards. That to me is a direct result of a failed approach in mixing. When there is no immersion to begin with, that is a separate problem, but I'm talking about a decent mix that gets marred by a bad decision.

I agree in that game audio gets better and better, and some of the things in it are truly mind blowing. Sadly, mixing is still not one of them. One can play "Call of Duty" and then watch "Saving Private Ryan" and see it plain as day. I hope it soon gets to the point where there is no difference.

the 'look around while speaking' was one of those irritating things from the school days that always irked me. As if the audience was a pack of mouth breathers.
Yeah radical panning isn't my cup of tea either. I don't like static center, but I'd easily take center over 100>R. I can dig it.

I wonder if this discussion is the result of trying to mix two media that are fundamentally different.