Fashioning the Immersive Fallacy at Five Nights at Freddy’s: A New Approach to Music, Sound, and Their Relationship to the Immersive Process in Moving Image Media

Abstract

Music is a key factor in creating the immersive environment of a film or a game. There is much scholarship exploring this fact, and as a result there are many different terms and emphases in use. To attempt to move closer to an understanding of the specific ways in which music and sound contribute to the immersive experience, we must probe into the terms that we use, our current theories and the mechanics thereof, and explore differing methodologies across a range of genres and formats, to bring us closer to a more full understanding of these immersive processes, and why we seek them out and enjoy them. An analysis of Five Nights at Freddy’s applies pressure to the existing scholarship and forces us to reconsider how we define the concepts necessary to reach an understanding of immersion, and encourages us to seek new methods through which we can apply these to music in video games. I conclude with a suggestion of a new idea – that of the “Global Music Box”: a new approach to the way in which we think of sounds in moving-image media, considering music and sound as equally important and mutually supportive, going as far as to break down the boundary between the two. The concept of the “Global Music Box” recognises that a simple transplantation of our understanding of the relationship between music and sound onto video games (and other forms of moving image media) is problematic, as it does not consider that all sounds in media are artificial, whereas in “real life” we have a distinction between the natural and the artificial. In turn, this has repercussions for our understandings of related concepts, including the diegesis, interactivity, and more broadly definitions of sound and music themselves.