MUD Co-Creator Bartle On Voice Chat in MMOGs

Fusty writes "In 1979, Richard Bartle co-created a MUD, the first system for players to share adventures online. Aside from veteran game coding skills, Bartle has strong opinions about game design. He recently examined the idea of voice chat in massively-multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPGs). His opinion? Not Yet You Fools! - on Game Girl Advance."

Comments

problems

[Tirel]

Not only would voice destroy the ROLE PLAYING element (as he nicely puts it: "Hey, this elf babe is from England!". Hello reality."), but they present a number of technical problems. Just how would you log these chats for abuse? What about bandwidth and processing power? Even MUD servers never seem to have enough bandwidth, in graphical MMO's lag is always a huge problem, but instead of fixing those problems they go and intruduce a whole new dimension based on the presumption that it's going to "attract newbies". Well guess what? It's going to turn away long.time players.

Re:problems

[harlows_monkeys]

Not only would voice destroy the ROLE PLAYING element

What role playing element? In all successful MMORPGs so far, role playing dies for most players around level 5 or so, except as an occasional thing.

Take a look at group chat in a game like EQ or DAoC during an idle moment between fights. If the players are chatting about game stuff, they most likely will be chatting as human game players, not as citizens of Norrath or Camelot. If not chatting about game-specific stuff, they'll be talking about movies, TV, sports, politics, and everything else people talk about on, say, AOL or MSN.

Re:problems

[Alan Cox]

I'd disagree here. Granted all current MMORPGs suck, but then its a fairly new art anyway. Richard doesn't seperate communication and immersion nearly enough in my experiences as a game designer. Lets face it when was the last time your fantasy figures were squggles on a monitor. What heroic character controlled his own movements with a joystick ?

None of course, but the player doesn't care. No more than the player will care about voice commands to the game or beeps notifying them of events. If you look at a lot of these games players can also do a lot of "impossible" things like talk to one another wherever they are in the game, if you remove that you'll annoy the players just like any paper RPG game master will annoy players who can't chit-chat out of character just because their character is currently next door.

Tolkien summed up the key to believable fantasy long before MMORPG - it is consistency rather than simulation. The online world has no value to the people who crave the physical experience - thats what the SCA is for. Instead its about story telling - which means that evil guys behave in a believable fashion, swords work the same way all the time, books can all be read and so on.

Another great example is distance. It takes eight hours to make some journey, now try inflicting that on players with live reality simulated eight hour horse rides.

As to "I can tell Foo the Elf is English", I already can - Foo the Elf can spell colour 8),

Abuse btw isnt a problem - the technology for scanning voice data is well understood for things like voice mailboxes, "chat line" services and of course on a large scale by the security services 8).

Alan

think hes forgotten about a certain games origins.

[Tennguin]

I think Richard Bartle has lost touch with what role playing's origins. If we apply his logic to pen and paper games we see how flawed his argument really is. Afterall how many of us sat around the table throwing dice passing written notes back and forth explaining what our chacters were doing/saying? I think "voice communication" was as acceptable then as it remains now. I think people are becomming a little TOO immersed in the digital world and forgeting that there are analog analogies to some of these problems. Think people. I doubt that most people in these games are concernied about character development anyway... its all about the amount of "stuff" you can gather. Those geeks that are into playing out their bvirtual cahracters arent going to be disuaded by the fact that voice has been introduced into the game. I wasn't when I role played my Theif in 1988...

Re:role playing...

[Gorelab]

Personally, I think the problem goes both ways, the hardcore roleplayers often want too much from the people who are playing and just want to have some fun, and those people often just go too far out in having really idiotic names, and running about with leetspeak and everything. Personally I think it's best when you have a compromise. Make them have decent names, and not blantently go about with OOC stuff in more public places, but don't penatlize them for not having a 6 page essay on their charecters motivations and such and let them have their fun killing the denizens and getting loot. In the end it'd probally make both side much happier.