ERICK VERRAN Negative Ecologies, or Silence’s Role in Affordance Theory ABSTRACT Through critical appropriation of J. J. Gibson’s theory of ecological affordance, this speculative article broadens our understanding of ludic ecology as that which virtual environments offer players in anticipation of their use: a sort of inside-out niche. Adapted to a study of diegetic and nondiegetic sound, this adjacency of ecology to video games is applied to an understanding of silence as negative affordance; that is to say, as a nondeterminative opportunity for the player to express themself aurally as well as kinetically against a soundtrack’s absence. Whether included by a video game’s creative director as dramatic segues “inside of” the traditional, top-down soundtrack or as part of the industry’s shift away from film-esque sound design toward one that has begun to approach the ambience of naturalist theater, the role of silence in digital entertainment is argued to be strictly a dramatic one that allows body- and environment-related noise to be appreciated in vacuo. On the basis of these assertions, I claim that the player’s magnified ability to puncture the auditory equilibrium of a storyworld with a shout or offensive lunge at monsters, a form of manual intervention symptomatic of cultural products in general, is newly emboldening. As the musical fullness of the soundtrack age is replaced by a diegetic soundscape equal in sonic lushness, the autonomous game player is thrown into all the greater phenomenal relief. KEYWORDS affordance, silence, music, ecology, space, autonomy ISOLATING THE LISTENER As Michael Liebe points out, “The very first computer games, Tennis for Two (1958 ) and Spacewar! (1962 ), were silent.” 1 The commercial failure of the Magnavox Odyssey, recognized now as the original home console and also soundless, is attributed in Liebe’s essay “Interactivity and Music in Computer Games” to the Odyssey’s lack of even rudimentary sound, while the popularity of Pong (Atari, 1972 ) in arcades came down to the machine’s hollow pong sound as the ball ricocheted from a paddle. The haptic nature of Pong, as with many of the hand-eye games released in its wake, emphasizes an important fact: sound is the primary desideratum of realism, functioning as a kind of phenomenological proof for causal relationships. Roland Barthes called this the “grain” of a singer’s voice or violinist’s limb. 2 While the truth of phenomena in ordinary life is generally taken at face value, we know the situation in televisual media to be a composite one. In a choreographed onscreen duel between knights, an audience’s gaze is hijacked by 1 . Michael Liebe, “Interactivity and Music in Computer Games,” in Music and Game: Perspectives on a Popular Alliance, ed. Peter Moormann (New York: Springer, 2013 ), 41 . 2 . Roland Barthes, “The Grain of the Voice,” in Image-Music-Text, ed. and trans. Stephen Heath (New York: Hill and Wang, 1977 ), 188 . 36 Journal of Sound and Music in Games, Vol. 2 , Number 4 , pp. 36 –54 . e-ISSN: 2578 -3432 .  2021 by the Society for the Study of Sound and Music in Games. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press’s Reprints and Permissions web page, https:// www.ucpress.edu/journals/reprints-permissions. DOI: https://doi.org/10 .1525 /jsmg.2021 .2 .4 .36