Enhanced Sonic Doom: Extended Evaluation of Sound Design and Accessibility in a First Person Shooter
Ibrahim Khan, Thai Van Nguyen, Mustafa Can Gursesli, Daniel Fernández Galeote, Juho Hamari, Antonio Lanatà, Ruck Thawonmas · IEEE Transactions on Games · 2026
This paper presents Enhanced Sonic Doom, a substantial extension of prior conference study, which delivers a comprehensive accessibility framework for first-person shooter (FPS) games. The novel contributions of this research are fourfold:(1)a large-scale human validation with 56 sighted participants (47 male, 8 female, 1 non-binary, aged 18-44), substantially expanding upon initial findings;(2)a dedicated investigation demonstrating the generalization of our auditory design principles to spatial navigation;(3)the introduction of an AI-driven ablation framework to deconstruct the impact of isolated sound cues; and(4)the observation of performance trade-offs suggestive of cognitive load thresholds for effective sonification, where simpler auditory schemes consistently outperformed complex ones. Results demonstrate that our enhanced sound design significantly improves navigation and combat performance. Furthermore, while an automated aim-assist achieved superior objective performance, users strongly preferred a less intrusive, audio-based system, underscoring the critical balance between assistance and user autonomy. This work provides empirically validated design principles advocating strategic minimalism in accessible sound design and introduces a scalable, fine-grained methodology for its evaluation.