Alert Fatigue

The desensitisation to warning sounds caused by overuse or poor calibration, leading players to stop reacting to alerts entirely, including the ones that genuinely matter.

In games, this means

A low-health warning that fires at 60% health rather than 15% trains players to ignore it. After enough false urgency, the sound is mentally reclassified as background noise, and the player dies in a genuinely critical moment without registering the warning at all. Alert fatigue is one of the most consequential audio UX failures because it directly undermines the feedback loop the sound was designed to support. The fix: reserve alert sounds for genuinely critical states, keep them distinct from ambient audio, and never fire them until they are actually warranted.