The unfortunate thing about current thinking in game-audio, with all its allusions and aspirations to film-sound, is that it seems to have consistently neglected one essential element - that of subtlety.

The dynamic peaks and troughs of film sound have such power in drawing in an audience that the impact of the louder, more spectacular sequences in a film are dramatically magnified by preceding silence.

Perhaps the problem does not lie with the actual thinking behind game-audio, which is on the whole ambitious and creative, but rather with the practice of producers and developers forcing audio to be as loud as possible at all times. How many times have phrases like "more bangs per buck", "beef-it-up", "more, louder, faster, harder" been heard at audio meetings? It is these notions that reflect a trend in evidence since arcade machines had to audibly play for gamers' attention next to one another in crammed arcades, a trend that literally aims to overwhelm the senses, the unfortunate results of which today have the effect of flattening the entire game sound track to a constant normalised level. Unfortunately this direction shows no signs of abating, and allows for none of the dynamism evident in film sound.

Well placed silence and subtlety will allow the parts of the game that need to be larger-than-life to be more powerful due to their contrast next to these areas of silence. Also the ability to wander around a virtual environment in the sections of a game where not much is happening and to simply listen to the subtle environmental sounds is extremely enjoyable and engaging. A few games have achieved this; Sony's Ico maintains superb subtlety throughout, even in the combat sequences, sound and music are never over the top or too 'in-your-face' and one is never tempted to reach for the volume control.

Again, in terms of purely subtle sound design, Final Fantasy X offers a stunning example of low-key sound effects. The visual magic effects are quite frenetic, yet rather than go in for overkill in underscoring these visual effects with a pyrotechnic equivalent the player enjoys subtle whooshes and beautifully enveloped explosions.

Clearly the producers, sound designers and musicians need to see the entire game as a whole, and need to be aware of this macro-structure at whatever stage is being produced.

The Maximisation and over compression of sounds and music is another area that represents a move towards the elimination of any headroom for subtlety and dynamism. If we were to generally compare how the waveforms from a film soundtrack and a game soundtrack look, the visual difference is striking. Of course games are not films, we are dealing with a medium in its own right which should be allowed to develop in new directions unchartered by cinema. Just as cinema moved away from theatre and opera, so interactive entertainment must find its own aesthetic path. But that is not to say that the influence of film is not present, and being felt more and more each day. There still remains a dramatic difference between these two media in terms of sound, one only has to compare the rich subtle and yet brutal dynamics of the cut scenes in WarCraft III to the same game's flat-lined in-game effects to realise how far there is to go.

Cleverly constructed montage of silence potentially has more dramatic effect than the biggest and loudest sounds. The structuring of how silence works in conjunction with sound is similar in a way to the film editing practices espoused by Eisenstein nearly a hundred years ago: in that expressive power is only gained when these elements are edited together and deliberately played against one another. These techniques can be clearly seen in the horror genre of films, in what one could call the oldest trick in the book, where a lone teenager creeps through a creaky house, the high pitched strings build and build and - phew it was only a cat - then, in that moment where the audience is catching their breath with relief, THAT is when the enemy strikes. It is this playing with silence and tension, building and releasing that helped define the horror genre in the 1980's.

One of the most under quoted uses of silence is in TV advertising, whenever a commercial comes on that uses complete silence, the contrast with the rest of the over-compressed sound output is intense (ever noticed that TV commercials are generally a lot louder than the programmes?). Invariably an audience will stop what they are doing, and stop their conversations when a silent commercial comes on, and all their attention is given to the TV. Perhaps it's because we think that there is something wrong with the set, the fact it has gone silent, but the psychology behind this has been fully exploited by only the most daring ad agencies. And although Interactive entertainment is championed as distinctly 'non-linear' there is still a great deal of opportunity to design and play with these kind of tensions.