Research / Game audio

Full paper · 2022

The Effects of a Soundtrack on Board Game Player Experience

Farkas, T., Denisova, A., Wiseman, S., & Fiebrink, R.

ConferenceCORE A*Proceedings of the 2022 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI'22), 2022

Teaser figure: Board games with a soundtrack. Photos of the cooperative board game Fuse and its timer app. Fourteen players compared silence, time announcements, and a full soundtrack. The full soundtrack brought more enjoyment and tension than announcements alone, announcements gave no gain over silence, and players described sound as creating atmosphere.
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In short

Board games are increasingly augmented with apps and soundtracks, but little is known about how this changes play. We ran a mixed-methods study of how music and sound effects affect the experience of playing a board game.

Key findings

  • The soundtrack increased players' enjoyment and sense of tension.
  • It created atmosphere, but players did not necessarily feel it improved the game's world-building.
  • The findings can guide the design of new board games and their soundtracks.

Read and cite

PDF (accepted version) Publisher's version (DOI)

APA citation

Farkas, T., Denisova, A., Wiseman, S., & Fiebrink, R. (2022, April). The Effects of a Soundtrack on Board Game Player Experience. In Proceedings of the 2022 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI'22) (pp. 1-13).

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