Navigation in an Audio-only First Person Adventure Game

Navigation in audio-only first person adventure games is challenging since the user has to rely exclusively on his or her sense of hearing to localize game objects and navigate in the virtual world. In this paper we report on observations that we made during the iterative design process for such a game and the results of the final evaluation. In particular we argue to provide a sufficient number of unique sound sources since players do not use a mental map of the virtual place for navigating but instead move from sound source to sound source in a more linear fashion.