Hey Negative Gamers, How Noise Tolerant Are You?
I live in a ground floor flat with my partner and dog. Upstairs lives a single woman, ever silent though often present. For months, we bottom-dwellers believed our house to be reasonably sound-proofed. We’d hear our neighbour enter after work, ascend the stairs and then nothing. Relative silence save for running water and occasional washing machine grumble.
One day, a voice accompanied our acquaintance as she crossed the shared threshold and we realised, as they laughed and shared upstairs frivolity, just how thin our ceiling really was. With concentration, we could pick out words, then sentences, then dramatic pauses before it seemed that each casually gestural swipe of an arm echoed through their floor in amplified particle.
Pausing Rock Band, I turned to my partner in horror as I felt pangs of guilt over every post-watershed drum fill, every spent RC-P120 clip and most recently, each hour long session of Every Extend Extra Extreme with its gruelling volley of machine gun techno hand claps so obviously punctuating her floor like a sea of robotic applause.
To date, there have been no complaints, but my question is this. What would annoy you guys most when heard muffled through floor boards? I’m almost convinced that hearing the stop start trial and error of Rock Band drum practice would certainly prove the loudest and least tolerable, but is the thrummed consistency of a shooter like Modern Warfare or Bad Company 2 more irritating when pumped at near-realistic levels?
Yours,
An inconsiderate bastard.
There’s a guy on the opposite corner of my apartment building who likes to play techno really loud, with his bass turned up to a ridiculous degree. It’s pretty awful.
Semi-related side note- did anyone ever play Turok: Rage Wars on the N64? They should have just called it “Turok: Your Subwoofer Asplode.”
For first year uni I lived underneath a guy who played loud music all the time. I’m tolerant to noise, but they drove me beyond mad some nights. I used to end up throwing stuff at the ceiling to try top get them to shut up. Because of that year, I have a burning hate for loud noise coming from other people. So, to answer your question; not very :)
Like Wardrox I live in shared accommodation and below some stupid fucking dickhead plays loud music. I’m not really that bothered by that, but when he plays the shittest RnB and then plays the same song OVER AND OVER AGAIN, I want to kill something.
I might one day wrap a pair of headphones up in a bow with a note that reads: “Fuck you x”.
As for videogames, the V.A.T.S noise in Fallout can be annoying, especially as it happens a lot in the game.
@Sam: The only game my girlfriend has gotten into is Fallout 3. The VATS noise gets a lot more annoying when you watch someone else play for around 100 hours.
I don’t have the science to hand, but I think someone did a study and found out that noise from above is actually more intrusive than from below. Possible theory: humans are more adapted towards paying attention to noise from above since that is where threats are more likely to come from (than below.)
So the good news is that you might not be annoying the upstairs neighbour as much as you think. The bad news is that I can’t use my rock band drums because despite having pretty thick floors, the bass pedal transmits right through them and annoys the neighbours. SUCKS.
I’m somewhat tolerant, but I’m also mindful. I live in a second floor apartment, because I live on the second floor, I made the conscious decision to give up Dance Dance Revolution.
I’m pretty tolerant when it comes to noise; our next door neighbors have this strange connected door with us that you can hear anything through and I’ve learned to just ignore them. Last semester, though, this girl across the hall from me would leave her door open, watch tv, and howl with laughter at anything and everything that was said. She has the most distinctive, piercing laugh and would just go on and on into the early hours of the morning. Somebody must have said something to her, though because she leaves her door shut now. I guess it just comes down to how good you are at not letting it bother you; if you think about it all the time it’s going to get to you.
My E4 session yesterday lasted an unprecedented 1 hour and 45 minutes. I literally adjusted the volume down point by point until by the end I was playing by pad rumble alone.
Because of HER I fucked up the achievement I was going for.
@Naughton: The Turok comment made me laugh out loud by the way.
Your playing of E4 makes you some orders of magnitude more awesome
I live next door to a girl who occasionally has her current beau around for hanky-panky, which we can then hear every single moment of.
I would rather listen to Bruce FUCKING Springsteen than be subjected to her squeaking like a wounded puppy.