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[EnigmaticHat]

I had an interesting idea recently about using music to represent the sense of smell in games. Because games are usually unable to represent the player character's sense of smell except with ui elements and wierd glowing bits. Background music likewise usually doesn't have an in-universe explaination.
This would mean that your home sounds like cinnamon buns and your enemies smell like combat.
And you transition from sneaky music to fight music when the enemies spot you because they start sweating.

Why not just make a USB peripheral that releases those liquid scent packages, designed to work with some third party that already makes them?  Then you could represent unpleasant smells with third party scent packages like "burning wreckage" and "the sewer level".

[Reelya]

There was smell-o-vision that worked sort of like that in cinemas back in the 1950s. However the few "smell" movies were poorly written and gimimcky: e.g. "Scent of Mystery". The same way old "3D" movies with the glasses were  gimmicky with 3D action scenes. To be honest I can't see smell games going anywhere. Because you'll need to purchase physical smell refills etc.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smell-O-Vision

"Smell-O-Vision" ...  was to be deployed with the mystery-comedy Scent of Mystery, which would be the first film in which smells revealed certain plot points to the audience. ... Walter Reade Jr. was rushing to release Behind the Great Wall, a travelogue through China made by Italian director Carlo Lizzani, accompanied by a process called "AromaRama" to send scents through the air-conditioning system of a theater. ... Behind the Great Wall was released on December 2, 1959, just three weeks ahead of Scent of Mystery, and the competition between the two films was called "the battle of the smellies" by Variety.

the battle of the smellies

[Egan_BW]

Yeeeeah, I'm not going to buy a usb smeller for a game. And I'd certainly not go through the trouble of making them if I was making a game.

[EnigmaticHat]

I think it would be cool.  Not as an actual part of gameplay, but like.  Walk through a field of flowers, smell flowers.  I dunno, could be neat.  Would be another thing clogging up my desk tho.

Now, if I could also use it to deploy smells from my computer to save me the trouble of lighting a scented candle, that would be sick.  Never used one of the liquid pod scent dispenser thingies tho, not sure if they're any good.

[RAM]

Meh, let's face it, most games would just be filled with the smell of burnt ruins and would try to evoke the horror of war. You could try, and fail, to do that with some scent device that needs reloading and inevitably gets forgotten as a gimmick, or you can overwork the system and cause the computer to burst into flames, which will really catch that feeling of your whole world being devastated...

But yes, music as scent rather than music as dramatic cue could be great, but you would have to be careful of mixing scents that didn't go well together. And the volume could be all over the place too if you wanted to indicate pungency. I guess you could use frequency instead of volume? And you could just throw in some deliberately dissonant music to indicate scents that were just inherently hostile...

[bloop_bleep]

^ I agree with above. The Smell-O-Vision thing that was linked was used a grand total of 1 time. It just doesn't matter that much to be memorable or commercially feasible.

[Reelya]

I don't like the idea of a Smell-O-Vision version of Resident Evil. That's sort of a game I'm glad doesn't exist.

But another issue is: ask yourself when you walk down a street at night, looking for a fight. What are you hearing, what are you seeing, what are you smelling. Smells aren't relevant in most situations that are relevant in a game. It's only going to be a novelty in e.g. non-action VR games, e.g. a cooking game, or an exploration game such as "Gone Home" but the novelty is that when you're in the kitchen you smell baked cookies or something.

[RAM]

I would say that smells are very relevant, but also subtle, at least to humans, sort of like the background music of real life, which would be why making them the background music of a game would be sensible...

[JoshuaFH]

It certainly won't instantly culminate in a fart-centric game.

[Egan_BW]

Not all videogame characters are humans.
Note that I had this idea while thinking about Overgrowth, a game entirely about humanoid animals.

[EnigmaticHat]

Human's ability to smell seems to be their most varied sense.  Its like taste in that different people experience specific smells more or less intensely, but also a bit like eyesight in that for one reason or another a lot of humans suck at smelling.  I know someone who has only smelled a couple things in his life, all of which smelled like sulfur.

Add that to the natural variance in how humans experience sensory input (same sensation can feel different to two people), and I'm not surprised we're disagreeing about how important smell is.

[Egan_BW]

Smell is pretty strongly linked to memory, which I think is similar to music.

[Radsoc]

That new VR Pimax "8K" will support a smell module

Anyway, would like to see a game like HoI4 but set in modern times.

[LordBaal]

Smell would be awesome but unless you manage to make it in a way it's small and practical peripheral, and doesn't require that much constant and expensive recharges. Oh and the scents shouldn't be able to stick arround more than a couple of minutes at most.

I mean it would have to be relatively small, cheap system and the scent charges would need to last for at least an average gaming session (bare minimun) or maybe what a average control battery last.

Then there's the issue of around 99% of current games being either about zombies por cramming zombien somewhere just becuase... I really don't want my living room smelling like nurgle farts 4 hours straight.

If all that can be achived then, with good desing and employment it could be great.

[cider]

A proper text-based life sim would be neat. Not with the cartoonish and arcade feel of Sims, nor the bare-bones structure of Real Lives, but a proper life sim.

I doubt it'll ever happen, but hey, one can wish.

....You know you're on the Dwarf Fortress forums, right?

Not at all the kind of game I was thinking about. To be more specific, I was thinking of a life sim set in today's society where you play through a character's life, making his/her decisions.

A proper text-based life sim would be neat. Not with the cartoonish and arcade feel of Sims, nor the bare-bones structure of Real Lives, but a proper life sim.

I doubt it'll ever happen, but hey, one can wish.

Kudos 2 (2000s) and Alter Ego (1980s) might give you something to do for a little while. Alter Ego is surprisingly hard-hitting in places, it was written by an actual psychologist. Starts with you in the womb deciding what you want to do. If you're interested in life games it's defintely one to play. I think you can now play it online, too.

I've played both! Been looking for games like that for a while, so I've probably stumbled across all (?) of the solid ones. Kudos is pretty fun but fairly limited and constrained to a specific time period (from the age 20 to 30 if I recall correctly?). Alter Ego is more in the lines of what I was thinking, though really it's more of a CYOA than a life sim. It's a surprisingly good game, though, just not what I had in mind.