The Importance of Sound to the Formation of Presence

Mark Grimshaw-Aagaard uses his chapter to highlight the importance of sound in the formation of presence in video games and to provide a conceptual model for understanding the formation of presence. Following some terminological clarification, the chapter outlines some of the debates on presence and immersion in the fields of virtual reality and video games using first-person perspective. Grimshaw-Aagaard provides a model of externality and self and uses this to show how sound waves from externality lead to the initial other-presences of a perceptual environment—it is against these other-presences that the self is defined and within this environment that the self is present.