Voice Communication & Gaming Etiquette

Goldberg's Pants writes "The BBC have an interesting article on XBox Live, regarding the voice communication used in the game. Some interesting insight into the culture, and politics of the players."

Comments

insults

[poil11]

it is quite funny when you play couter strike and most of the comments that come out of voice comm are you suck you nub. but that is mainly in pubs only. voice comm is key in team play, much like it is in real life. but in counter strike you can ignore, which is also a very key feature.

Re:insults

[AlexMax2742]

The problem is that voice chat isn't widespread enough in CS to make it feasable as a means of communication. Which means only a few people got it, and half of them do it to piss you off.

When it's standard, like in SOCOM, guess what, it actually gets used, and used well.

Reputation systems

[GeorgeH]

I suspect that reputation systems like http://www.gamertagdatabase.com/ will go a long way to keeping the service clean (at least as clean as eBay :) ), but that depends on them being integrated with the gamer matching system.

Re:Reputation systems

[GeorgeH]

Doesn't have to be as centralized as moderation, it could be a friend-of-a-friend system, where the fewer friends between you and another person the higher the person's score.

It could also be a percentage based system, where if I rated you as 80% cool and you rated Alice as 50% cool, she would show up in your list as 50% cool but in my list as 40% cool.

Instead of establishing baseline scores for people, you would be creating gaming social networks.

Free(?) advertising

[gdeacon]

It's a shame that this seems to be blatant advertising for Xbox Live - 8 counts in the article. Online gaming and voice communication has been around for quite a while now!

The Game often dictates the behavior

[WaysideWeasle]

I've played on Xbox Live since it went Beta. The options of available games during Beta lended itself to trash talking at worst. Most of the players were pretty civil, and I rarely had a game where someone had to be booted. There would be the occassional biker on Moto GP that would race backwards to piss people off, but for the most part I liked the voice communication aspect of Xbox Live. Then came November 15th. Unreal, Ghost Recon, and Mech Assualt went Live. Immediately I noticed the difference in player communication between games. Courtesy seemed to be non-existant in Unreal and Mech Assault. However, I found it rare to run into someone who was rude or childish on Ghost Recon. My theory is that this game involves more strategy, thought, and patience to play. In most scenarios, you don't see instant action, and you can often wander a map for 3 minutes before seeing anyone. Communication is key to victory so people spend more time calling out strategy or locations of the enemy than they do chatting or trash talking. This also seems to be the same in pretty much any gaming environment, whether it be console or PC.

From experience: it's cool

[frumiousbar]

The quality of the voice chat you get in these games is directly related to the kind of people you play. After a few nights of playing xbox live, you'll start to see the same gamertags and you'll learn who the "good people" are, where "good people" = skilled AND nice. Playing these people with voice enabled can be amazingly fun. For example, if you want to ratchet the fun level up on Ghost Recon, play with a bunch of people who cover and call out targets to each other.

Communities of "good people" have sprung up around particular types of games such as Not It! in MechAssault, which is a favorite of mine. This makes finding fun opponents much easier.

I personally don't mind the noobs because you can turn them into "good people" if you lead by example. There is a small group of idiots that can ruin any game, but at least in some circles the community has come up with ways of dealing with them, such as "regulating" Not It! offenders in MechAssault.