One of the best things about teaching the course-- at least for me, with the way I set it up-- is that there's plenty of time for student discussion and comments. These moments are the ones where I learn the most from the students. It's that classic "several minds are better than one" scenario.
On the first day, we surveyed game audio in four brief examples: Pong, Super Mario Bros, Final Fantasy VII, and Journey. When I played the Pong video example and asked for reactions, one of the students mentioned that he found it interesting that the designers had decided to celebrate the loss in Pong, rather than the win.
Have you ever thought about that? I certainly hadn't! Instead of a "good" sound that clearly celebrates the point earned by the winning player, the sound is abrasive and harsh, seemingly related to the ball being out of bounds. Some of this is dependent on the version of Pong you're listening too, but here's a pretty close version to what we heard in class.
This decision to have that sort of sound play may have simply been pragmatic, based on what Al Alcorn could coax out of the machine at the time. Still, I had never considered the fact that the scoring point audio highlights the out of bounds loss rather than the crafty win.
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