Audio Fatigue

The perceptual dulling that occurs after prolonged exposure to game audio, causing players to stop consciously registering sounds they originally noticed, including functional cues.

In games, this means

A UI confirmation sound that feels satisfying in session one becomes inaudible to conscious awareness by session ten, the brain has categorised it as background noise and filtered it out. This is why games need audio variety, dynamic mixing, and randomised pitch and timing on repeated sounds. Audio fatigue affects both aesthetic sounds (music, ambience) and functional ones (alerts, feedback cues), but the UX consequences are most severe when functional cues stop being heard.