Bad Vibrations: The Auditory Experience of Digital Dark Tourism

This paper examines how audio design shapes the dark tourist experience in digital environments, focusing on The Town of Light (LKA 2016), a video game set in the derelict Ospedale Psichiatrico di Volterra in Italy, where conditions were especially harsh under the fascist regime of the late 1930s and early 1940s. The author argues that while digital dark tourism has received some scholarly attention, the role of music and sound in constructing such experiences has been comparatively neglected. Drawing on archaeoacoustics, the study treats the game's soundscape as an object of archaeological analysis, mapping sounds to specific locations and comparing them with other games that share similar themes.

The preliminary findings indicate that the game deliberately reconstructs the asylum's dark heritage through voice performance, sound effects, and atmospheric audio tropes such as creaking doors and indistinct noises borrowed from horror conventions. A notable observation is that audio glitches can produce unintended but affecting sonic contexts that deepen the player's engagement. The paper also contends that The Town of Light both rejects and reuses conventions of psychological horror, sensitively handling mental illness while still employing familiar unsettling techniques.

Methodologically, the study relies on a close, location-based mapping of the game's audio rather than large-scale player data, and its findings are described explicitly as preliminary. The analysis is positioned against typological models of dark tourism, which the author critiques as contrived and overly reliant on Western perspectives. Instead, the work proposes that digital dark tourist sites vary in their intensity of darkness and should be examined with attention to intersectional factors such as hardware and the physical act of play.