"I wanted you to feel bad": former Battlefield audio designer recalls punching himself to record more realistic gunshot screams

Arc Raiders audio director Bence Pajor has spoken on the Game Makers Notebook podcast about his earlier career at DICE, working on sound effects for the Battlefield FPS series. The discussion includes some insights about how Pajor – a former Swedish military sniper – created effects for soldiers getting struck by bullets. Amongst other things, he experimented with punching himself hard enough to elicit cries of pain. It's not clear whether the resulting recordings made their way into any Battlefield game - one of Pajor's designer colleagues found them so unpleasant that they asked for them to be removed.

Pajor spent 15 years at DICE, his first project being Battlefield 2, his last Battlefield V. In the podcast (as noticed by Julian), he chats about how DICE have cultivated a "documentary" feel for their shooters, taking inspiration from handicam footage of Second Gulf War combatants in the field. Asked by host Austin Wintory whether such closeness to the subject matter might become distressing for players, because very few people genuinely savour the feeling of getting shot at, Pajor acknowledged that "we had moral questions in our minds, when we were making those [games].

"I remember one thing, a moment like that," he went on. "I was recording all the Foley [ambient audio] for, was it Battlefield 4? Battlefield 3? And I was going to make all the sounds for getting hit by bullets. And I went into our little Foley room. And I put a blanket on myself – we had a window there, so there was a bit of an echo in the room, so I put a bit of blanket over me. And I started hitting myself, really hard. To the point that I screamed from real pain.

"Someone saw me, as well, and it was like, what's going on here, a guy under a blanket – what's going on?" Pajor laughed. "And I did that, and it was a super visceral experience. And I wanted to catch it. So I had one of those small recorders, and I had it under the blanket, and it made all those noises, because it scratched [against] my shirt, and I was screaming and hitting myself, and the recording was crazy, distorting – it was all mad."

Pajor tried out his recordings in development builds of Battlefield. "And when I listened it was like 'this feels crazy, this feels awesome, this is super-immersive'," he said. "I was really happy with the recording, even though it was completely broken, in a way. But then the designer who was designing all the guns came to me and was like 'I don't want to play the game. This is not good. I get anxiety attacks. I can't play the game. In our game you're going to get shot a thousand times. I cannot listen to this. I get panic attacks.' And I just felt like, yeah, mission accomplished! I wanted it to feel super immersive and visceral, I wanted you to feel bad. But then that was across the limit."

Sooooo. This is one of those incidents that is some combination of really quite awful and deeply silly. One question I have is whether the unnamed Battlefield designer was distressed less by the abstractable "viscerality" of the recorded sounds, than by playing a game that had effectively become a simulation of hurting a colleague – or worse, participating in his self-harm. Perhaps the designer was as concerned for Pajor's well-being, as their own? It's one thing to note that there's a cult of self-destruction among the frequently over-worked, 'passion-driven' creators of realistic war sims that are always straining for that extra layer of audiovisual finish; it's another thing to bottle the lightning by actually hitting yourself.

As Mark pointed out when we discussed this article in Slack, there's a comical parallel with the literal-mindedness of method-acting - or at least, of misapprehensions about method-acting as the fantasy of 'becoming your role'. *Extremely Brian Cox voice*: dear boy, have you considered... acting? It also makes me think of older artists who've incorporated their own injury into their work. In 1932, Itō Hikozō painted a portrait of Japan's probably fictitious first Emperor Jinmu using blood drawn from his wrist, proudly presenting the results to the Minister of War as evidence of his purity of soul and body.

His enthusiasm for viscerality notwithstanding, Pajor is happy to no longer be recording combat Foley at DICE. "When I left, I was relieved that I didn't have to do another war game," he told Wintory. "It felt really good. It was like, 20 years of killing people in a realistic fashion. So yeah, that was enough. And now, of course, I'm kind of there again, but the motivations are different." Which brings us to Arc Raiders, the extraction shooter in which you generally spend more time blasting robots than humans.

"The sound design is more or less the same," Pajor said of his new gig. "Record guns, make them sound super real. I think that's what I'm good at, just making things sound like it's happening. And ultimately I think that's my goal, to immerse players into forgetting that it's a game."